VacationSelector

Cannes or Marseille?

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

Your match

Cannes
49
match

Wins on beaches & swimming with your weighting.

Marseille
✓ Best match
57
match

Wins on places to eat and nightlife 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 Cannes if swimming is the point of the trip: the sea holds 21°C or more for twice as many months as in Marseille, and there are slightly more beaches to choose from.

Choose Marseille if you want a working city rather than a resort town, with roughly three times the restaurant choice near the centre, considerably more nightlife and more to keep children occupied.

Scoreboard

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

CannesMarseille
Beaches & swimming. Cannes leads by 6 points.6
CannesMarseille
Score7367
Swim season months42
Beaches 10 km6864
Coast distance1 km0 km
Water distance1 km0 km
Places to eat. Marseille leads by 25 points.25
CannesMarseille
Score5075
Restaurants within 2 km of centre4731,320
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1939
Museums & heritage. Marseille leads by 14 points.14
CannesMarseille
Score3650
Museums within 10 km3133
Museums within 2 km of centre523
Share of museums within 2 km %1670
Unesco sites within 50 km21
Nightlife. Marseille leads by 20 points.20
CannesMarseille
Score2848
Drinking venues within 4 km188544
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre164454
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8783
Nightclubs within 4 km1930
Nature & day trips. Marseille leads by 4 points.4
CannesMarseille
Score3337
Protected land share 50 km %1715
Landscape blanket share 50 km %1613
Land share of disc %5356
Park area within 2 km13 hectares25 hectares
Good for families. Marseille leads by 19 points.19
CannesMarseille
Score2544
Tourist attractions within 2 km717
Park area within 2 km13 hectares25 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km34
Sights concentration. Marseille leads by 2 points.2
CannesMarseille
Score5658
Notable places within 2 km95111
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cannes and Marseille are level on 62.
CannesMarseille
Score6262
Price level global73.773.7
Daily budget€160€160
Year-round weather. Marseille leads by 1 points.1
CannesMarseille
Score7475
Monthly daytime high13.3 °C to 27.9 °C11.8 °C to 30.7 °C
Monthly rainfall13 mm to 138 mm11 mm to 82 mm
Dry months36
0255075100

Where they differ

Cannes is the better swimming base: its sea holds 21°C or more for four months against Marseille's two and peaks at 25°C, and it has slightly more beaches. Two UNESCO-listed places lie within day-trip reach rather than one.

Marseille is the fuller city: about three times as many restaurants near the centre and a wider range of kitchens, three times as many places to drink, twice as many nightclubs, and for families, twice as much park space and attraction choice, plus an extra theme park within reach.

Where they are alike

The two share a climate more than anything else. Winters are mild, with January highs of 13°C in Cannes and 12°C in Marseille; summers are hot in both, and each gets well over 2700 hours of sun a year.

They are also alike in how much sits within walking distance of the centre, both compact enough to cover on foot, and in what lies around them: similar shares of protected land, and the sea within 1km of either centre.

Which traveller are you?

Anyone whose holiday is built around swimming should take Cannes. Its sea passes 21°C for four months rather than two and stays warm into the early autumn, with a slightly wider choice of beaches.

Travellers who plan their days around eating and going out belong in Marseille: roughly three times as many restaurants near the centre, a much wider range of kitchens, three times as many bars and twice as many nightclubs.

Families will find more to do in Marseille, with about twice as many attractions and twice as much park space near the centre, and four theme parks within reach against Cannes's three.

What the numbers don't tell you

The value comparison between these two carries no information: it reflects a national price level, identical for both by construction, and the €160 daily budget beside it is a country-wide estimate rather than a measurement of either city. Neither is the cheaper trip on this evidence.

Warm-weather strengths also hide their timing. Cannes's swimming edge lands squarely in high summer, in a town of 74,400 that fills up then, and its warmest sea months arrive alongside heavy autumn rain. Marseille's hotter air, up to 31°C, does not carry into its water, which stays cooler than Cannes's all summer.

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
Cannes
13
14
15
17
21
25
28
28
25
21
17
14
Marseille
12
13
16
19
24
28
31
30
26
21
16
12
Sea temperature, °C
Cannes
14
13
14
15
18
21
24
25
23
20
18
16
Marseille
13
13
13
14
16
19
21
22
21
19
17
15
Rainfall, mm
Cannes
74
53
51
69
42
34
13
18
84
124
138
91
Marseille
47
30
29
51
38
28
11
26
82
72
76
41
Daylight, hours per day
Cannes
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Marseille
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Cannes
5
6
7
7
9
10
11
11
8
6
5
5
Marseille
5
6
8
8
10
11
12
11
9
6
5
4

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Cannes: 1991-2020 normals, Nice (18 km from centre). Marseille: 1991-2020 normals, Marseille / Marignane (20.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Cannes is at its best in August, when the sea reaches 25°C, after a July that brings just 13mm of rain. Its autumn is the wetter of the two, with October and November both above 120mm.

Marseille comes into its own earlier, in May and June, with highs of 24-28°C and rain under 40mm; spring there is drier and warmer than in Cannes, though the sea is still cool for swimming.

Getting there

Flying fromCannesMarseille
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 30 m
€78-111
NCE · 20 km
1 h 25 m
€110-119
MRS · 21 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 55 m
€76-223
NCE · 20 km
1 h 50 m
€65-134
1 stop
MRS · 21 km
NantesNTE
1 h 35 m
€129-163
NCE · 20 km
1 h 30 m
€72-162
MRS · 21 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 50 m
€170-248
NCE · 20 km
1 h 50 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
BrusselsBRU, CRL
1 h 40 m
€155-228
1 stop
NCE · 20 km
1 h 40 m
€86-123
1 stop
MRS · 21 km
BordeauxBOD
1 h 25 m
no fares
NCE · 20 km
1 h 15 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
RomeFCO, CIA
1 h 10 m
€69-133
NCE · 20 km
1 h 25 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
2 h 45 m
€202-329
NCE · 20 km
2 h 55 m
€219-245
1 stop
MRS · 21 km
MontrealYUL, YHU, YMX
7 h 55 m
no fares
NCE · 20 km
7 h 45 m
no fares
MRS · 21 km
SeoulICN, GMP
11 h 35 m
no fares
MRS · 146 km
11 h 35 m
no fares
MRS · 21 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

MeasureCannesMarseille
Official languageFrenchFrench
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCE230 V, 50 HzCE230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation0 m0 m
Main airportNice-Côte d'Azur Airport (NCE)20 km from centre129 non-stop destinationsMarseille Provence Airport (MRS)21 km from centre125 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureCannesMarseille
City population74,350886,040
People per km²3,7933,683
Museums within 10 km1627
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km21
Distinct cuisines in the centre3893
Swim season, months above 21 °C4 months2 months

Where else could you go?

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

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.