VacationSelector

Cape Town or Stockholm?

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 year-round weather and value for money with your weighting.

Stockholm
✓ Best match
62
match

Wins on sights concentration and good for families 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 TownStockholm
Beaches & swimming. Cape Town and Stockholm are level on 60.
Cape TownStockholm
Score6060
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km2973
Coast distance1 km0 km
Water distance1 km0 km
Places to eat. Stockholm leads by 9 points.9
Cape TownStockholm
Score6776
Restaurants within 2 km of centre6501,558
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4236
Museums & heritage. Stockholm leads by 15 points.15
Cape TownStockholm
Score5469
Museums within 10 km2574
Museums within 2 km of centre2047
Share of museums within 2 km %8064
Unesco sites within 50 km33
Nightlife. Stockholm leads by 17 points.17
Cape TownStockholm
Score4764
Drinking venues within 4 km4831,090
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre389689
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8163
Nightclubs within 4 km47106
Nature & day trips. Stockholm leads by 5 points.5
Cape TownStockholm
Score3641
Protected land share 50 km %67
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %4277
Park area within 2 km27 hectares104 hectares
Good for families. Stockholm leads by 21 points.21
Cape TownStockholm
Score3657
Tourist attractions within 2 km1923
Park area within 2 km27 hectares104 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km02
Sights concentration. Stockholm leads by 34 points.34
Cape TownStockholm
Score4579
Notable places within 2 km51357
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Cape Town leads by 28 points.28
Cape TownStockholm
Score8557
Price level global40.580.3
Daily budget—€169
Year-round weather. Cape Town leads by 33 points.33
Cape TownStockholm
Score8653
Monthly daytime high18 °C to 27.5 °C1 °C to 23.6 °C
Monthly rainfall10 mm to 97 mm27 mm to 66 mm
Dry months65
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
Stockholm
1
1
5
11
17
21
24
22
17
10
5
3
Sea temperature, °C
Cape Town
18
18
17
16
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
Stockholm
3
2
2
3
7
12
16
17
14
10
7
5
Rainfall, mm
Cape Town
10
11
13
42
65
97
89
76
47
32
27
13
Stockholm
37
29
27
29
34
61
60
66
53
51
47
47
Daylight, hours per day
Cape Town
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Stockholm
7
9
12
15
17
19
18
16
13
10
8
6
Sunshine, hours per day
Cape Town
12
10
9
8
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11
Stockholm
1
2
5
7
9
9
9
8
6
3
1
1

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). Stockholm: 1991-2020 normals, Stockholm Observatoriet (26.4 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromCape TownStockholm
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
12 h 5 m
€634-815
CPT · 18 km
2 h 25 m
€89-139
ARN · 36 km
AmsterdamAMS
12 h 5 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
2 h 0 m
€153-185
ARN · 36 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 45 m
€632-724
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
2 h 5 m
€152-213
1 stop
ARN · 36 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 40 m
€742-801
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
2 h 30 m
€91-121
ARN · 36 km
MunichMUC
11 h 30 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
2 h 15 m
€202-238
1 stop
ARN · 36 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
10 h 35 m
€717-799
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
3 h 15 m
€138-141
ARN · 36 km
ZurichZRH
11 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
2 h 25 m
€172-250
1 stop
ARN · 36 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
9 h 40 m
€611-615
1 stop
CPT · 18 km
6 h 20 m
€330-429
1 stop
ARN · 36 km
DohaDOH
9 h 25 m
€850-932
2 stops
CPT · 18 km
6 h 5 m
no fares
ARN · 36 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
15 h 25 m
no fares
CPT · 18 km
8 h 5 m
no fares
ARN · 36 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 TownStockholm
Official languageEnglish, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Venda, Northern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Tsonga, Sesotho, Southern Ndebele, South African Sign LanguageSwedish
CurrencyRand (ZAR)Swedish Krona (SEK)
SocketsCMN230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+2UTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation5 m22 m
Main airportCape Town International Airport (CPT)18 km from centre44 non-stop destinationsStockholm-Arlanda Airport (ARN)36 km from centre172 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days16 days

By the numbers

MeasureCape TownStockholm
City population3,776,313984,748
People per km²1,5385,260
Museums within 10 km22266
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km33
Distinct cuisines in the centre6581
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 Stockholm 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. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.