VacationSelector

Beijing or Sofia?

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

Your match

Beijing
53
match

Wins on good for families and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Sofia
✓ Best match
56
match

Wins on value for money and nature & day trips with your weighting.

What matters to you?

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

Scoreboard

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

BeijingSofia
Beaches & swimming. Beijing and Sofia are level on 0.
BeijingSofia
Score00
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km00
Coast distance145 km214 km
Water distance
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Beijing.
Museums & heritage. Beijing leads by 6 points.6
BeijingSofia
Score6357
Museums within 10 km9551
Museums within 2 km of centre1540
Share of museums within 2 km %1678
Unesco sites within 50 km61
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Beijing.
Nature & day trips. Sofia leads by 16 points.16
BeijingSofia
Score3551
Protected land share 50 km %312
Landscape blanket share 50 km %04
Land share of disc %100100
Park area within 2 km143 hectares229 hectares
Good for families. Beijing leads by 22 points.22
BeijingSofia
Score7755
Tourist attractions within 2 km4120
Park area within 2 km143 hectares229 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km120
Sights concentration. Sofia leads by 7 points.7
BeijingSofia
Score5057
Notable places within 2 km69104
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Sofia leads by 20 points.20
BeijingSofia
Score7999
Price level global4921.4
Daily budget€77
Year-round weather. Beijing leads by 2 points.2
BeijingSofia
Score6664
Monthly daytime high2.2 °C to 31.8 °C3.5 °C to 28.4 °C
Monthly rainfall3 mm to 163 mm36 mm to 78 mm
Dry months83
0255075100

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
Beijing
2
6
13
21
27
31
32
31
27
19
10
4
Sofia
4
7
11
17
21
25
28
28
23
18
11
5
Rainfall, mm
Beijing
3
6
9
23
38
74
163
112
56
27
14
3
Sofia
36
36
45
52
73
78
64
56
54
56
38
41
Daylight, hours per day
Beijing
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sofia
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Beijing
6
6
7
8
9
7
6
7
7
7
6
6
Sofia
3
4
6
6
8
9
10
10
7
5
3
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Beijing: 1991-2020 normals, Beijing (11.1 km from centre). Sofia: 1991-2020 normals, Sofia Observ. (7.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBeijingSofia
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 15 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
3 h 5 m
€70-85
1 stop
SOF · 8 km
ViennaVIE
9 h 25 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
1 h 35 m
€74-99
SOF · 8 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
9 h 50 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
2 h 20 m
€130-210
1 stop
SOF · 8 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
9 h 0 m
€475-645
PEK · 25 km
1 h 15 m
€116-123
SOF · 8 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
10 h 10 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
2 h 5 m
€56-159
SOF · 8 km
MunichMUC
9 h 45 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
2 h 0 m
no fares
SOF · 8 km
RomeFCO, CIA
10 h 15 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
1 h 45 m
€55-68
SOF · 8 km
BarcelonaBCN
11 h 0 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
2 h 45 m
€88-145
1 stop
SOF · 8 km
Tel Aviv YafoTLV
9 h 5 m
no fares
PEK · 25 km
2 h 30 m
€154-198
SOF · 8 km
BangkokBKK, DMK
4 h 30 m
€173-234
1 stop
PKX · 45 km
10 h 0 m
€614-660
2 stops
SOF · 8 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

MeasureBeijingSofia
Official languagePutonghuaBulgarian
CurrencyYuan Renminbi (CNY)Euro (EUR)
SocketsACI220 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+8UTC+2, UTC+3 in summer
Emergency numberPolice 110, ambulance 120, fire 119112
Elevation43 m560 m
Main airportBeijing Capital International Airport (PEK)25 km from centre88 non-stop destinationsSofia Airport (SOF)8 km from centre94 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year6 days15 days

By the numbers

MeasureBeijingSofia
City population21,893,0951,213,134
People per km²1,3342,466
Museums within 10 km8342
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km61
Distinct cuisines in the centre2951

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Beijing or Sofia 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. Airport data from OurAirports (public domain). Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. 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. Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.

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.