VacationSelector

Boston or Portland?

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

Your match

Boston
✓ Best match
55
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and sights concentration with your weighting.

Portland
42
match

Wins on year-round weather and places to eat 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.

BostonPortland
Beaches & swimming. Boston leads by 60 points.60
BostonPortland
Score600
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km6827
Coast distance1 km69 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Portland leads by 1 points.1
BostonPortland
Score7374
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,4521,011
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3244
Museums & heritage. Boston leads by 8 points.8
BostonPortland
Score4335
Museums within 10 km7923
Museums within 2 km of centre2715
Share of museums within 2 km %3465
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Boston and Portland are level on 58.
BostonPortland
Score5858
Drinking venues within 4 km886942
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre513518
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5855
Nightclubs within 4 km4332
Nature & day trips. Boston leads by 18 points.18
BostonPortland
Score5335
Protected land share 50 km %1213
Landscape blanket share 50 km %03
Land share of disc %77100
Park area within 2 km116 hectares37 hectares
Good for families. Boston leads by 19 points.19
BostonPortland
Score5334
Tourist attractions within 2 km288
Park area within 2 km116 hectares37 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km02
Sights concentration. Boston leads by 23 points.23
BostonPortland
Score5835
Notable places within 2 km11129
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Boston and Portland are level on 43.
BostonPortland
Score4343
Price level global100100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Portland leads by 9 points.9
BostonPortland
Score5665
Monthly daytime high2.9 °C to 28 °C7.9 °C to 27.7 °C
Monthly rainfall79 mm to 107 mm13 mm to 145 mm
Dry months03
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
Boston
3
4
8
14
19
25
28
27
23
17
11
6
Portland
8
11
13
16
20
23
27
28
25
18
12
8
Sea temperature, °C
Boston
5
3
4
6
10
15
18
19
17
14
10
8
Portland
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Boston
84
79
105
91
83
99
82
80
90
101
93
107
Portland
128
94
101
75
65
41
13
14
39
87
138
145
Daylight, hours per day
Boston
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Portland
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Boston
5
5
6
7
8
8
9
9
7
5
5
4
Portland
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Boston: 1991-2020 normals, Boston Logan International (3.5 km from centre). Portland: 1991-2020 normals, Portland International Airport (9.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBostonPortland
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
1 h 0 m
€192-203
BOS · 4 km
5 h 20 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
5 h 35 m
€289-344
1 stop
BOS · 4 km
2 h 15 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
2 h 20 m
€176-196
BOS · 4 km
3 h 55 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
PhoenixPHX, AZA
5 h 0 m
€364-450
1 stop
BOS · 4 km
2 h 35 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
DenverDEN, APA
4 h 0 m
no fares
BOS · 4 km
2 h 30 m
€167-182
PDX · 10 km
SeattleSEA, BFI
5 h 25 m
no fares
BOS · 4 km
55 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
1 h 25 m
€175-234
1 stop
BOS · 4 km
5 h 5 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
San FranciscoSFO
5 h 45 m
€341-440
1 stop
BOS · 4 km
1 h 45 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
3 h 35 m
€341-355
1 stop
BOS · 4 km
3 h 45 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
6 h 50 m
€536-548
1 stop
BOS · 4 km
9 h 55 m
no fares
PDX · 10 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

MeasureBostonPortland
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5, UTC-4 in summerUTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number911911
Elevation43 m152 m
Main airportBoston Logan International Airport (BOS)4 km from centre144 non-stop destinationsPortland International Airport (PDX)10 km from centre87 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureBostonPortland
City population675,647652,503
People per km²2,9101,736
Museums within 10 km5117
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre7482
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Boston or Portland 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). 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. 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.