VacationSelector

Cape Town or San Francisco?

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

Your match

Cape Town
57
match

Wins on value for money and museums & heritage with your weighting.

San Francisco
✓ Best match
62
match

Wins on nature & day trips 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.

Scoreboard

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

Cape TownSan Francisco
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town and San Francisco are level on 60.
Cape TownSan Francisco
Score6060
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km2944
Coast distance1 km2 km
Water distance1 km2 km
Places to eat. San Francisco leads by 16 points.16
Cape TownSan Francisco
Score6783
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6502,359
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4239
Museums & heritage. Cape Town leads by 10 points.10
Cape TownSan Francisco
Score5444
Museums within 10 km2557
Museums within 2 km of centre2029
Share of museums within 2 km %8051
Unesco sites within 50 km30
Nightlife. San Francisco leads by 21 points.21
Cape TownSan Francisco
Score4768
Drinking venues within 4 km4831,434
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389928
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8165
Nightclubs within 4 km4797
Nature & day trips. San Francisco leads by 24 points.24
Cape TownSan Francisco
Score3660
Protected land share 50 km %617
Landscape blanket share 50 km %04
Land share of disc %4257
Park area within 2 km27 hectares45 hectares
Good for families. San Francisco leads by 21 points.21
Cape TownSan Francisco
Score3657
Tourist attractions within 2 km1948
Park area within 2 km27 hectares45 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km01
Sights concentration. San Francisco leads by 18 points.18
Cape TownSan Francisco
Score4563
Notable places within 2 km51147
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 42 points.42
Cape TownSan Francisco
Score8543
Price level global40.5100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 8 points.8
Cape TownSan Francisco
Score8678
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C14 °C to 23.2 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm0 mm to 105 mm
Dry months67
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
Cape Town
27
28
26
24
21
18
18
18
20
22
24
26
San Francisco
14
16
18
20
20
22
22
23
23
22
18
14
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
San Francisco
12
12
12
12
12
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
San Francisco
105
87
91
26
16
5
0
1
7
27
72
87
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
San Francisco
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11
San Francisco
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Cape Town: 1991-2020 normals, Cape Town Airport (17.5 km from centre). San Francisco: 1981-2010 normals, Alameda Naval Air Station (9.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownSan Francisco
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
10 h 50 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
5 h 35 m
€286-328
1 stop
SFO · 18 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
11 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
16 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
4 h 40 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
11 h 15 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
15 h 40 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
5 h 15 m
€252-262
1 stop
SFO · 18 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
11 h 45 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
9 h 40 m
€611-615
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
16 h 0 m
€1,005-1027
1 stop
SFO · 18 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
12 h 0 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
16 h 40 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
ZurichZRH
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
11 h 40 m
no fares
SFO · 18 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

MeasureCape TownSan Francisco
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign Language
CurrencyRand (ZAR)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+2UTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number112911
Elevation5 m16 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsSan Francisco International Airport (SFO)18 km from centre142 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownSan Francisco
City population3,776,313873,965
People per km²1,5381,455
Museums within 10 km2250
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km30
Distinct cuisines in the centre65108
Swim season, months above 21 °CNoneNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Cape Town or San Francisco 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.