VacationSelector

Chicago or Edinburgh?

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

Your match

Too close to call, 2 points apart

Chicago
56
match

Wins on places to eat and sights concentration with your weighting.

Edinburgh
58
match

Wins on good for families and museums & heritage 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.

ChicagoEdinburgh
Beaches & swimming. Edinburgh leads by 2 points.2
ChicagoEdinburgh
Score5355
Swim season months10
Beaches 10 km1220
Coast distance10,000 km3 km
Water distance1 km3 km
Places to eat. Chicago leads by 11 points.11
ChicagoEdinburgh
Score8170
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,1471,023
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3735
Museums & heritage. Edinburgh leads by 11 points.11
ChicagoEdinburgh
Score4657
Museums within 10 km4530
Museums within 2 km of centre2022
Share of museums within 2 km %4473
Unesco sites within 50 km13
Nightlife. Edinburgh leads by 2 points.2
ChicagoEdinburgh
Score6264
Drinking venues within 4 km1,1231,193
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre728884
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6574
Nightclubs within 4 km5165
Nature & day trips. Chicago leads by 3 points.3
ChicagoEdinburgh
Score3835
Protected land share 50 km %62
Landscape blanket share 50 km %01
Land share of disc %10085
Park area within 2 km118 hectares166 hectares
Good for families. Edinburgh leads by 17 points.17
ChicagoEdinburgh
Score5572
Tourist attractions within 2 km1887
Park area within 2 km118 hectares166 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km20
Sights concentration. Chicago leads by 10 points.10
ChicagoEdinburgh
Score7060
Notable places within 2 km217126
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Edinburgh leads by 11 points.11
ChicagoEdinburgh
Score4354
Price level global10084.9
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Chicago leads by 6 points.6
ChicagoEdinburgh
Score5751
Monthly daytime high0.2 °C to 29.4 °C6.6 °C to 18.8 °C
Monthly rainfall54 mm to 121 mm43 mm to 80 mm
Dry months00
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
Edinburgh
7
7
9
12
14
17
19
19
17
13
9
7
Sea temperature, °C
Chicago
3
2
2
4
7
14
21
23
20
15
9
6
Edinburgh
7
6
6
7
10
12
14
14
13
12
10
8
Rainfall, mm
Chicago
58
54
68
105
121
115
102
104
85
98
69
59
Edinburgh
62
47
47
43
49
63
65
69
55
80
68
63
Daylight, hours per day
Chicago
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Edinburgh
8
10
12
14
16
18
17
15
13
11
8
7
Sunshine, hours per day
Chicago
No sunshine record
Edinburgh
2
3
4
5
6
5
5
5
4
3
3
2

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). Edinburgh: 1991-2020 normals, Edinburgh Airport (10 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromChicagoEdinburgh
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
2 h 5 m
€201-231
ORD · 25 km
6 h 50 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
8 h 10 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 20 m
€41-45
EDI · 11 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
8 h 30 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 40 m
€78-108
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
1 h 50 m
€141-200
ORD · 25 km
8 h 15 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
9 h 10 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
2 h 20 m
€75-101
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
1 h 30 m
€189-423
ORD · 25 km
6 h 55 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
BostonBOS, PSM
2 h 20 m
€220-252
ORD · 25 km
6 h 30 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
CancunCUN
3 h 25 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
9 h 40 m
no fares
GLA · 78 km
ViennaVIE
9 h 35 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
2 h 35 m
€150-240
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
BarcelonaBCN
9 h 0 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
2 h 40 m
€58-103
1 stop
EDI · 11 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

MeasureChicagoEdinburgh
Official languageEnglish
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC-6, UTC-5 in summerUTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number911112 or 999
Elevation179 m47 m
Main airportChicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD)25 km from centre272 non-stop destinationsEdinburgh Airport (EDI)11 km from centre158 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days10 days

By the numbers

MeasureChicagoEdinburgh
City population2,746,388488,050
People per km²4,5291,884
Museums within 10 km4332
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km13
Distinct cuisines in the centre8778
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 Edinburgh 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.