VacationSelector

Chicago or Stockholm?

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.

Stockholm
✓ Best match
62
match

Wins on museums & heritage and value for money 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.

ChicagoStockholm
Beaches & swimming. Stockholm leads by 7 points.7
ChicagoStockholm
Score5360
Swim season months10
Beaches 10 km1273
Coast distance10,000 km0 km
Water distance1 km0 km
Places to eat. Chicago leads by 5 points.5
ChicagoStockholm
Score8176
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,1471,558
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3736
Museums & heritage. Stockholm leads by 23 points.23
ChicagoStockholm
Score4669
Museums within 10 km4574
Museums within 2 km of centre2047
Share of museums within 2 km %4464
Unesco sites within 50 km13
Nightlife. Stockholm leads by 2 points.2
ChicagoStockholm
Score6264
Drinking venues within 4 km1,1231,090
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre728689
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6563
Nightclubs within 4 km51106
Nature & day trips. Stockholm leads by 3 points.3
ChicagoStockholm
Score3841
Protected land share 50 km %67
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %10077
Park area within 2 km118 hectares104 hectares
Good for families. Stockholm leads by 2 points.2
ChicagoStockholm
Score5557
Tourist attractions within 2 km1823
Park area within 2 km118 hectares104 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km22
Sights concentration. Stockholm leads by 9 points.9
ChicagoStockholm
Score7079
Notable places within 2 km217357
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Stockholm leads by 14 points.14
ChicagoStockholm
Score4357
Price level global10080.3
Daily budget€169
Year-round weather. Chicago leads by 4 points.4
ChicagoStockholm
Score5753
Monthly daytime high0.2 °C to 29.4 °C1 °C to 23.6 °C
Monthly rainfall54 mm to 121 mm27 mm to 66 mm
Dry months05
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
Stockholm
1
1
5
11
17
21
24
22
17
10
5
3
Sea temperature, °C
Chicago
3
2
2
4
7
14
21
23
20
15
9
6
Stockholm
3
2
2
3
7
12
16
17
14
10
7
5
Rainfall, mm
Chicago
58
54
68
105
121
115
102
104
85
98
69
59
Stockholm
37
29
27
29
34
61
60
66
53
51
47
47
Daylight, hours per day
Chicago
10
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Stockholm
7
9
12
15
17
19
18
16
13
10
8
6
Sunshine, hours per day
Chicago
No sunshine record
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. Chicago: 1991-2020 normals, Chicago Midway Airport (14.5 km from centre). Stockholm: 1991-2020 normals, Stockholm Observatoriet (26.4 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromChicagoStockholm
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
8 h 10 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
2 h 25 m
€89-139
ARN · 36 km
CopenhagenCPH
8 h 45 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 20 m
€84-99
ARN · 36 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
2 h 5 m
€201-231
ORD · 25 km
8 h 5 m
no fares
ARN · 36 km
HelsinkiHEL
9 h 5 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
1 h 10 m
€66-74
ARN · 36 km
AmsterdamAMS
8 h 25 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
2 h 0 m
€153-185
ARN · 36 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
8 h 30 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
2 h 30 m
€91-121
ARN · 36 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
1 h 30 m
€189-423
ORD · 25 km
8 h 5 m
no fares
ARN · 36 km
Punta CanaPUJ
4 h 25 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
10 h 5 m
no fares
ARN · 36 km
TokyoHND, NRT
12 h 35 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
10 h 15 m
no fares
ARN · 36 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
14 h 20 m
no fares
ORD · 25 km
6 h 20 m
€330-429
1 stop
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 2026-08 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

MeasureChicagoStockholm
Official languageSwedish
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Swedish Krona (SEK)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-6, UTC-5 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number911112
Elevation179 m22 m
Main airportChicago O'Hare International Airport (ORD)25 km from centre272 non-stop destinationsStockholm-Arlanda Airport (ARN)36 km from centre172 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days16 days

By the numbers

MeasureChicagoStockholm
City population2,746,388984,748
People per km²4,5295,260
Museums within 10 km43266
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km13
Distinct cuisines in the centre8781
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 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.