VacationSelector

Budapest or Rio de Janeiro?

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

Your match

Budapest
60
match

Wins on places to eat and nightlife with your weighting.

Rio de Janeiro
✓ Best match
69
match

Wins on beaches & swimming 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.

BudapestRio de Janeiro
Beaches & swimming. Rio de Janeiro leads by 100 points.100
BudapestRio de Janeiro
Score0100
Swim season months012
Beaches 10 km661
Coast distance10,000 km1 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Budapest leads by 23 points.23
BudapestRio de Janeiro
Score7754
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,699804
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3516
Museums & heritage. Rio de Janeiro leads by 5 points.5
BudapestRio de Janeiro
Score6469
Museums within 10 km144110
Museums within 2 km of centre6451
Share of museums within 2 km %4446
Unesco sites within 50 km13
Nightlife. Budapest leads by 15 points.15
BudapestRio de Janeiro
Score7257
Drinking venues within 4 km1,765818
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,168509
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6662
Nightclubs within 4 km9750
Nature & day trips. Rio de Janeiro leads by 22 points.22
BudapestRio de Janeiro
Score4062
Protected land share 50 km %821
Landscape blanket share 50 km %017
Land share of disc %10057
Park area within 2 km111 hectares113 hectares
Good for families. Budapest leads by 12 points.12
BudapestRio de Janeiro
Score7159
Tourist attractions within 2 km7530
Park area within 2 km111 hectares113 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km11
Sights concentration. Budapest leads by 13 points.13
BudapestRio de Janeiro
Score6956
Notable places within 2 km20698
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Rio de Janeiro leads by 1 points.1
BudapestRio de Janeiro
Score8081
Price level global4846.1
Daily budget€104
Year-round weather. Rio de Janeiro leads by 21 points.21
BudapestRio de Janeiro
Score6485
Monthly daytime high3.6 °C to 27.9 °C24 °C to 28.4 °C
Monthly rainfall27 mm to 75 mm42 mm to 232 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
Rio de Janeiro
28
28
28
27
25
24
24
25
25
26
26
27
Sea temperature, °C
Budapest
No coastline within reach
Rio de Janeiro
25
25
25
25
24
23
22
21
21
22
23
24
Rainfall, mm
Budapest
29
27
30
37
67
67
75
60
48
41
48
39
Rio de Janeiro
208
151
173
101
71
49
45
42
69
108
220
232
Daylight, hours per day
Budapest
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
9
Rio de Janeiro
13
13
12
12
11
11
11
11
12
13
13
14
Sunshine, hours per day
Budapest
2
4
5
7
9
9
10
9
7
5
3
2
Rio de Janeiro
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). Rio de Janeiro: 2001-2020 normals, NASA POWER reanalysis grid, no weather station within 90 km.

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromBudapestRio de Janeiro
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 25 m
€63-91
BUD · 18 km
11 h 35 m
€996-1109
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 10 m
€97-114
BUD · 18 km
11 h 30 m
€957-1014
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 40 m
€52-62
BUD · 18 km
11 h 25 m
€897-908
GIG · 12 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 40 m
€123-153
1 stop
BUD · 18 km
11 h 55 m
€915-1205
2 stops
GIG · 12 km
AmsterdamAMS
2 h 5 m
€175-230
1 stop
BUD · 18 km
11 h 55 m
€900-974
1 stop
GIG · 12 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
5 h 25 m
€276-394
2 stops
BUD · 18 km
14 h 40 m
€1,154-1306
GIG · 12 km
MadridMAD
3 h 0 m
€84-154
1 stop
BUD · 18 km
10 h 15 m
€910-925
1 stop
GIG · 12 km
LisbonLIS
3 h 35 m
€159-167
BUD · 18 km
9 h 45 m
€821-922
GIG · 12 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
9 h 5 m
no fares
BUD · 18 km
10 h 25 m
no fares
GIG · 12 km
PortoOPO
3 h 25 m
no fares
BUD · 18 km
10 h 0 m
€827-915
1 stop
GIG · 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

MeasureBudapestRio de Janeiro
Official languageHungarianPortuguese
CurrencyForint (HUF)Brazilian Real (BRL)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCN60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-3
Emergency number112Police 190, ambulance 192, fire 193
Elevation117 m31 m
Main airportBudapest Liszt Ferenc International Airport (BUD)18 km from centre155 non-stop destinationsRio de Janeiro Galeão – Tom Jobim International Airport (GIG)12 km from centre59 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureBudapestRio de Janeiro
City population1,685,2096,211,223
People per km²3,2094,930
Museums within 10 km8170
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km13
Distinct cuisines in the centre8627
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Budapest or Rio de Janeiro 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. Temperature and rainfall for destinations with no weather station are from the NASA POWER 2001-2020 climatology, derived from MERRA-2. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. 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.