VacationSelector

Budapest or Ottawa?

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

Your match

Budapest
✓ Best match
60
match

Wins on museums & heritage and nightlife with your weighting.

Ottawa
43
match

Wins on 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.

BudapestOttawa
Beaches & swimming. Budapest and Ottawa are level on 0.
BudapestOttawa
Score00
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km69
Coast distance10,000 km423 km
Water distance
Places to eat. Budapest leads by 13 points.13
BudapestOttawa
Score7764
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,699684
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3534
Museums & heritage. Budapest leads by 32 points.32
BudapestOttawa
Score6432
Museums within 10 km14415
Museums within 2 km of centre648
Share of museums within 2 km %4453
Unesco sites within 50 km11
Nightlife. Budapest leads by 28 points.28
BudapestOttawa
Score7244
Drinking venues within 4 km1,765432
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,168303
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6670
Nightclubs within 4 km9735
Nature & day trips. Ottawa leads by 1 points.1
BudapestOttawa
Score4041
Protected land share 50 km %88
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %100100
Park area within 2 km111 hectares122 hectares
Good for families. Budapest leads by 25 points.25
BudapestOttawa
Score7146
Tourist attractions within 2 km7511
Park area within 2 km111 hectares122 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km11
Sights concentration. Budapest leads by 19 points.19
BudapestOttawa
Score6950
Notable places within 2 km20671
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Budapest leads by 26 points.26
BudapestOttawa
Score8054
Price level global4884
Daily budget€104
Year-round weather. Budapest leads by 11 points.11
BudapestOttawa
Score6453
Monthly daytime high3.6 °C to 27.9 °C-4.9 °C to 27 °C
Monthly rainfall27 mm to 75 mm53 mm to 94 mm
Dry months50
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
Budapest
4
7
11
17
22
26
27
28
22
16
9
4
Ottawa
-5
-3
3
11
19
24
27
26
22
14
6
-2
Rainfall, mm
Budapest
29
27
30
37
67
67
75
60
48
41
48
39
Ottawa
60
53
56
74
66
87
82
89
78
94
59
80
Daylight, hours per day
Budapest
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
9
Ottawa
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Budapest
2
4
5
7
9
9
10
9
7
5
3
2
Ottawa
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). Ottawa: 1991-2020 normals, Ottawa CDA RCS (5.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBudapestOttawa
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 25 m
€63-91
BUD · 18 km
6 h 55 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
9 h 5 m
no fares
BUD · 18 km
1 h 5 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 10 m
€97-114
BUD · 18 km
7 h 20 m
no fares
YOW · 12 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

MeasureBudapestOttawa
Official languageHungarianFrench, English
CurrencyForint (HUF)Canadian Dollar (CAD)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation117 m70 m
Main airportBudapest Liszt Ferenc International Airport (BUD)18 km from centre155 non-stop destinationsOttawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport (YOW)12 km from centre46 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureBudapestOttawa
City population1,685,2091,017,449
People per km²3,209366
Museums within 10 km8120
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km11
Distinct cuisines in the centre8662

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Budapest or Ottawa 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.