VacationSelector

Amsterdam or Ghent?

Two destinations compared on nine measures of openly sourced data. Weight what matters to you and the verdict follows.

Your match

Amsterdam
✓ Best match
65
match

Wins on nature & day trips and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Ghent
50
match

Wins on value for money with your weighting.

What matters to you?

Pick a travel style or drag the sliders. The match scores above update as you do.

The verdict

Choose Amsterdam if you want museums, bars and clubs, and a walkable core dense with things to see, with protected countryside and beaches reachable on a day out.

Choose Ghent if you want a smaller city, more park space near the centre and more sunshine over the year, and you are content with a shorter list of sights and quieter evenings.

Scoreboard

Each measure scored 0 to 100. Open a row for the figures behind the score.

AmsterdamGhent
Beaches & swimming. Amsterdam leads by 14 points.14
AmsterdamGhent
Score4026
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km338
Coast distance24 km32 km
Water distance24 km32 km
Places to eat. Amsterdam leads by 13 points.13
AmsterdamGhent
Score8370
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,957764
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4449
Museums & heritage. Amsterdam leads by 22 points.22
AmsterdamGhent
Score8058
Museums within 10 km9824
Museums within 2 km of centre6920
Share of museums within 2 km %7083
Unesco sites within 50 km55
Nightlife. Amsterdam leads by 21 points.21
AmsterdamGhent
Score7049
Drinking venues within 4 km1,543570
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,078446
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7078
Nightclubs within 4 km11426
Nature & day trips. Amsterdam leads by 26 points.26
AmsterdamGhent
Score6034
Protected land share 50 km %217
Landscape blanket share 50 km %04
Land share of disc %8287
Park area within 2 km49 hectares84 hectares
Good for families. Amsterdam leads by 18 points.18
AmsterdamGhent
Score6850
Tourist attractions within 2 km7419
Park area within 2 km49 hectares84 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km31
Sights concentration. Amsterdam leads by 22 points.22
AmsterdamGhent
Score6846
Notable places within 2 km19655
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Ghent leads by 2 points.2
AmsterdamGhent
Score5860
Price level global79.276.2
Daily budget€181€180
Year-round weather. Amsterdam leads by 1 points.1
AmsterdamGhent
Score5756
Monthly daytime high6.1 °C to 23.1 °C6.4 °C to 22 °C
Monthly rainfall42 mm to 85 mm35 mm to 79 mm
Dry months01
0255075100

Where they differ

Amsterdam has many times as many museums as Ghent and about three times as many notable places within walking distance of the centre. Nightlife is wider too, with more bars and many more clubs. Its surroundings are greener at a distance: 21% of the land around it is protected against 7% around Ghent, with 33 beaches nearby to Ghent's 8.

Ghent has about twice as much park space near the centre and more sunshine across the year, 1900 hours against 1693.

Where they are alike

Year-round they behave alike: winter highs of 6°C in both, summers topping out at 23°C in Amsterdam and 22°C in Ghent, and rain in every month.

On price, the national estimates behind them sit around €180 a day, the same planning assumption either way. Both cover a similar range of kitchens, even if Amsterdam has more restaurants near the centre, and in neither does the sea warm past 19°C.

Which traveller are you?

Museum-minded visitors are better served in Amsterdam, which has many times as many museums and a denser walking core; both cities sit within day-trip reach of 5 UNESCO-listed places, so the difference is in daily volume.

Families lean the same way, with about three times as many attractions near the centre and more theme parks within reach. Ghent's counter is park space, roughly twice as much of it near the centre.

Anyone chasing water should temper expectations. Amsterdam sits 24km from the sea against Ghent's 32km and has 33 beaches nearby to Ghent's 8, but neither sea passes 19°C.

What the numbers don't tell you

The daily budget is a single national estimate per country, the price level for restaurants and hotels, not a measurement of either city. The two national figures are nearly identical, and a capital or a heavily visited city can differ from its own country average by more than that gap, so it settles nothing about which trip costs more.

Beach counts also flatter Amsterdam: 33 beaches nearby still means a trip of 24km from the centre, and the sea peaks at 19°C. The warmest months are also the wettest in both cities, near 85mm in Amsterdam in July.

When should you go?

The figures behind each month. Each row is shaded against that destination's own year, so the deepest cell is its best month for that measure and the palest its weakest. Shades are not comparable between the two rows.

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D
Daytime high, °C
Amsterdam
6
7
11
15
18
21
23
23
20
15
10
7
Ghent
6
7
10
13
17
20
22
22
19
15
10
7
Sea temperature, °C
Amsterdam
6
5
6
8
12
15
17
19
17
15
11
8
Ghent
6
6
6
9
12
16
18
19
18
15
11
8
Rainfall, mm
Amsterdam
71
63
58
42
59
71
85
84
78
81
80
84
Ghent
59
52
44
35
51
64
74
79
72
76
78
74
Daylight, hours per day
Amsterdam
8
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Ghent
9
10
12
14
16
17
16
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Amsterdam
2
3
5
6
7
7
7
6
5
4
2
2
Ghent
3
3
5
7
8
8
8
7
6
4
3
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Amsterdam: 1991-2020 normals, De Bilt (35.3 km from centre). Ghent: 1991-2020 normals, Vlissingen (44.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Amsterdam's best run is June to August, with highs of 21-23°C. Those are also its wettest weeks, at 84-85mm in July and August.

Ghent peaks in the same weeks at 20-22°C and stays drier through them, 74-79mm. Its clearer advantage is spring: April brings 35mm against Amsterdam's 42mm, with highs of 13°C against 15°C, so the trade is a drier day for a cooler one. Winter is close in both, and wet in both.

Getting there

Flying fromAmsterdamGhent
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 5 m
€93-112
AMS · 12 km
1 h 5 m
€98-165
1 stop
BRU · 56 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 10 m
€130-171
AMS · 12 km
1 h 55 m
€47-116
BRU · 56 km
MadridMAD
2 h 25 m
€160-183
AMS · 12 km
2 h 15 m
€98-170
BRU · 56 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
3 h 15 m
€166-175
AMS · 12 km
3 h 10 m
€161-193
BRU · 56 km
DublinDUB
1 h 35 m
€69-96
AMS · 12 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 35 m
€512-556
1 stop
AMS · 12 km
7 h 35 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
1 h 35 m
€106-155
AMS · 12 km
1 h 25 m
€36-101
BRU · 56 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
6 h 45 m
€318-346
1 stop
AMS · 12 km
6 h 45 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
9 h 55 m
no fares
AMS · 12 km
10 h 0 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km
Sao PauloGRU, VCP, CGH, RTE
12 h 10 m
no fares
AMS · 12 km
12 h 0 m
no fares
BRU · 56 km

The busiest departure cities for these two, with a place kept for each other part of the world. Busiest means arriving passengers where an official count exists, and where none does, the number of non-stop services flown: official route statistics are published by the European reporting countries and by nobody else, so a table ranked on them alone would offer a reader in New York or Tokyo ten European cities. Flying times are estimated from the distance between airports, and every row is a city flown non-stop to both. Where the typical offer connects anyway, the stops are shown. Under each figure is the airport the flight lands at and how far that is from the centre, because the nearest airport is not always the one a route is flown to. Where both columns name the same airport it is one flight, and the difference between the two is the distance printed beside it. Typical return fares for 2026-08 to 2026-10, cached market data up to 7 days old. The figure is the middle half of the offers found, so a single price means they agreed and a range means they did not; for a typical route that middle half spans about a quarter of the median, and for the least settled routes rather more than the median itself.

Before you go

MeasureAmsterdamGhent
Official languageDutchFrench, German, Dutch
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCE230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112 or 911112
Elevation-2 m12 m
Main airportAmsterdam Airport Schiphol (AMS)12 km from centre287 non-stop destinationsBrussels Airport (BRU)56 km from centre191 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureAmsterdamGhent
City population921,468272,657
People per km²4,2081,728
Museums within 10 km10130
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km55
Distinct cuisines in the centre9883
Swim season, months above 21 °CNoneNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Amsterdam or Ghent somewhere new.

Browse every destination we have measured

Sources

© OpenStreetMap contributors, data available under the Open Database Licence. Place counts include data from Overture Maps Foundation (CDLA Permissive 2.0), assembled from Meta, Microsoft, Foursquare and other providers. Notable-place counts from Wikidata (CC0), weighted by Wikipedia language editions. Structured data from Wikidata (CC0). Weather data by Meteostat. Meteorological data provided by NOAA, DWD and others. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. Airport data from OurAirports (public domain). Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). Non-stop route lists from the "Airlines and destinations" tables on English Wikipedia airport articles, by Wikipedia contributors, reused under CC BY-SA 4.0. Currency from the ISO 4217 register maintained by SIX, cross-checked against country data from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0). Price level from World Bank open data (PPP conversion factor for private consumption and official exchange rate), CC BY 4.0. Time zones from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0); clock offsets computed from the IANA time zone database. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. Daylight hours computed from each destination's latitude using the NOAA solar position algorithm. Typical fares from Travelpayouts (Aviasales data). Route-level air passenger statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates.

Scores follow rubric v2; snapshot generated 2026-08-31. Typical prices can be up to 7 days old. Daily budgets are estimates from country price levels.