VacationSelector

Budapest or Krakow?

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

Your match

Too close to call, 2 points apart

Budapest
60
match

Wins on nightlife and places to eat with your weighting.

Krakow
58
match

Wins on museums & heritage 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.

The verdict

Choose Budapest if the evenings matter: more bars and clubs than Krakow, roughly double the restaurants near the centre, and a warmer year, 4-28°C against Krakow's 2-25°C.

Choose Krakow if history and days out of the city come first: museums packed tightly around the centre, 4 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach, and more of the surrounding land protected.

Scoreboard

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

BudapestKrakow
Beaches & swimming. Budapest and Krakow are level on 0.
BudapestKrakow
Score00
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km69
Coast distance10,000 km456 km
Water distance——
Places to eat. Budapest leads by 9 points.9
BudapestKrakow
Score7768
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,6991,032
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3530
Museums & heritage. Krakow leads by 11 points.11
BudapestKrakow
Score6475
Museums within 10 km14484
Museums within 2 km of centre6469
Share of museums within 2 km %4482
Unesco sites within 50 km14
Nightlife. Budapest leads by 15 points.15
BudapestKrakow
Score7257
Drinking venues within 4 km1,765836
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,168697
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6683
Nightclubs within 4 km9754
Nature & day trips. Krakow leads by 6 points.6
BudapestKrakow
Score4046
Protected land share 50 km %814
Landscape blanket share 50 km %01
Land share of disc %100100
Park area within 2 km111 hectares79 hectares
Good for families. Krakow leads by 3 points.3
BudapestKrakow
Score7174
Tourist attractions within 2 km7577
Park area within 2 km111 hectares79 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km14
Sights concentration. Budapest leads by 1 points.1
BudapestKrakow
Score6968
Notable places within 2 km206198
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Budapest leads by 1 points.1
BudapestKrakow
Score8079
Price level global4849
Daily budget€104€133
Year-round weather. Budapest leads by 6 points.6
BudapestKrakow
Score6458
Monthly daytime high3.6 °C to 27.9 °C1.5 °C to 25.3 °C
Monthly rainfall27 mm to 75 mm31 mm to 100 mm
Dry months54
0255075100

Where they differ

Budapest is the stronger evening city, with about twice as many places to drink and about twice as many nightclubs as Krakow, most of them near the centre in both. It also has about twice as many restaurants near the centre, a wider range of kitchens, and about twice as many museums.

Krakow's heritage is arranged differently: its museums sit more tightly around the centre, and it has 4 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach against Budapest's 1. More of the land around it is protected, 14% against 8%.

Where they are alike

Neither is a place to swim. Both have a handful of beaches within reach, 6 around Budapest and 9 around Krakow, but neither gets a month of sea warm enough to matter.

Both put much the same number of notable places within walking distance of the centre, and similar counts of attractions near the centre for families. Their national price estimates, €104 for Hungary and €133 for Poland, sit in the same broad bracket.

Which traveller are you?

A traveller who plans the evening first should take Budapest: roughly twice as many bars and twice as many nightclubs as Krakow, most of them near the centre, and about twice as many restaurants near the centre.

Anyone building the trip around history is better served by Krakow, where the museums sit tightly around the centre and 4 UNESCO-listed places lie within day-trip reach, with 14% of the surrounding land protected for days out.

Families can go either way. Krakow has 4 theme parks within reach against Budapest's 1; Budapest has more park space near the centre and warmer summers, up to 28°C in August against 25°C.

What the numbers don't tell you

The daily budget figures, €104 for Hungary and €133 for Poland, are national price levels for restaurants and hotels rather than measurements of Budapest or Krakow. A capital or a heavily visited city can sit further from its own country's average than these national estimates sit from each other, so the gap says nothing about which city costs more on the ground.

No weather station near Krakow records sunshine hours, so that figure is missing rather than low, and its monthly picture rests on temperature and rainfall alone. Note too that the warmest months are also the wettest, 100mm in July in Krakow and 75mm in Budapest.

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
Budapest
4
7
11
17
22
26
27
28
22
16
9
4
Krakow
2
4
8
15
20
23
25
25
19
14
8
3
Rainfall, mm
Budapest
29
27
30
37
67
67
75
60
48
41
48
39
Krakow
38
31
38
47
79
77
100
75
67
51
41
35
Daylight, hours per day
Budapest
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
9
Krakow
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
15
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Budapest
2
4
5
7
9
9
10
9
7
5
3
2
Krakow
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Budapest: 1991-2020 normals, Budapest Met Center (2.1 km from centre). Krakow: 1991-2020 normals, Krakow (10.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Budapest's window runs May to September, with highs of 22-28°C and shoulders that still work: April reaches 17°C on 37mm and October 16°C on 41mm.

Krakow peaks in August at 25°C, its drier high-summer month at 75mm; July is no warmer and is the wettest month of its year at 100mm, while May sits at 20°C with 79mm, so Krakow is at its best in late summer rather than midsummer. Winters are colder than Budapest's, 2-4°C in January and February against 4-7°C.

Getting there

Flying fromBudapestKrakow
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 25 m
€63-91
BUD · 18 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
KRK · 11 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
1 h 40 m
€42-56
BUD · 18 km
1 h 50 m
no fares
KRK · 11 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 40 m
€123-153
1 stop
BUD · 18 km
1 h 35 m
no fares
KRK · 11 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 10 m
€97-114
BUD · 18 km
2 h 10 m
no fares
KRK · 11 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 40 m
€52-62
BUD · 18 km
1 h 55 m
no fares
KRK · 11 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 5 m
€175-230
1 stop
BUD · 18 km
1 h 55 m
no fares
KRK · 11 km
WarsawWAW, WMI
1 h 20 m
€43-56
BUD · 18 km
55 m
no fares
KRK · 11 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
1 h 50 m
€87-214
BUD · 18 km
2 h 5 m
no fares
KRK · 11 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 25 m
€93-118
1 stop
BUD · 18 km
2 h 40 m
no fares
KRK · 11 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
5 h 25 m
€276-394
2 stops
BUD · 18 km
5 h 30 m
no fares
KRK · 11 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 2026-09 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

MeasureBudapestKrakow
Official languageHungarianPolish
CurrencyForint (HUF)Zloty (PLN)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCE50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation117 m219 m
Main airportBudapest Liszt Ferenc International Airport (BUD)18 km from centre155 non-stop destinationsKraków John Paul II International Airport (KRK)11 km from centre133 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureBudapestKrakow
City population1,685,209804,237
People per km²3,2092,459
Museums within 10 km81114
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km14
Distinct cuisines in the centre8668

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Budapest or Krakow 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). Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.