VacationSelector

Chicago or Copenhagen?

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

Your match

Chicago
56
match

Wins on places to eat and year-round weather with your weighting.

Copenhagen
✓ Best match
63
match

Wins on museums & heritage 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.

ChicagoCopenhagen
Beaches & swimming. Copenhagen leads by 1 points.1
ChicagoCopenhagen
Score5354
Swim season months10
Beaches 10 km1217
Coast distance10,000 km1 km
Water distance1 km1 km
Places to eat. Chicago leads by 8 points.8
ChicagoCopenhagen
Score8173
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,1471,183
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3737
Museums & heritage. Copenhagen leads by 29 points.29
ChicagoCopenhagen
Score4675
Museums within 10 km4583
Museums within 2 km of centre2051
Share of museums within 2 km %4461
Unesco sites within 50 km15
Nightlife. Copenhagen leads by 5 points.5
ChicagoCopenhagen
Score6267
Drinking venues within 4 km1,1231,384
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre728806
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6558
Nightclubs within 4 km5164
Nature & day trips. Copenhagen leads by 12 points.12
ChicagoCopenhagen
Score3850
Protected land share 50 km %65
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %10039
Park area within 2 km118 hectares138 hectares
Good for families. Copenhagen leads by 16 points.16
ChicagoCopenhagen
Score5571
Tourist attractions within 2 km1854
Park area within 2 km118 hectares138 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km22
Sights concentration. Copenhagen leads by 4 points.4
ChicagoCopenhagen
Score7074
Notable places within 2 km217273
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Copenhagen leads by 9 points.9
ChicagoCopenhagen
Score4352
Price level global10087.8
Daily budget€214
Year-round weather. Chicago leads by 2 points.2
ChicagoCopenhagen
Score5755
Monthly daytime high0.2 °C to 29.4 °C3.6 °C to 22.7 °C
Monthly rainfall54 mm to 121 mm28 mm to 74 mm
Dry months03
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
Chicago
0
3
9
15
22
27
29
28
25
17
10
3
Copenhagen
4
4
7
12
17
20
23
22
18
13
8
5
Sea temperature, °C
Chicago
3
2
2
4
7
14
21
23
20
15
9
6
Copenhagen
3
2
3
6
10
14
17
18
15
12
9
5
Rainfall, mm
Chicago
58
54
68
105
121
115
102
104
85
98
69
59
Copenhagen
44
32
30
28
47
60
59
74
59
61
49
47
Daylight, hours per day
Chicago
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Copenhagen
8
10
12
14
16
17
17
15
13
11
8
7

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Chicago: 1991-2020 normals, Chicago Midway Airport (14.5 km from centre). Copenhagen: 1991-2020 normals, Koebenhavn / Landbohoejskolen (2.4 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromChicagoCopenhagen
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
8 h 10 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 50 m
€55-95
CPH · 8 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
2 h 5 m
€201-231
ORD · 25 km
7 h 55 m
€460-501
1 stop
CPH · 8 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
8 h 30 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 50 m
€70-135
CPH · 8 km
AmsterdamAMS
8 h 25 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 25 m
€167-221
CPH · 8 km
MinneapolisMSP, STP
1 h 20 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
8 h 45 m
no fares
CPH · 8 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
1 h 50 m
€141-200
ORD · 25 km
9 h 20 m
no fares
CPH · 8 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
11 h 0 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
3 h 0 m
€195-237
CPH · 8 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
1 h 30 m
€189-423
ORD · 25 km
8 h 5 m
no fares
CPH · 8 km
TokyoHND, NRT
12 h 35 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
10 h 55 m
no fares
CPH · 8 km
DohaDOH
14 h 10 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
6 h 5 m
no fares
CPH · 8 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

MeasureChicagoCopenhagen
Official languageDanish
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Danish Krone (DKK)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzCEFK230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-6, UTC-5 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number911112
Elevation179 m14 m
Main airportChicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD)25 km from centre272 non-stop destinationsCopenhagen Kastrup Airport (CPH)8 km from centre144 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasureChicagoCopenhagen
City population2,746,388667,099
People per km²4,5297,339
Museums within 10 km4372
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km15
Distinct cuisines in the centre8782
Swim season, months above 21 °C1 monthNone

Where else could you go?

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