VacationSelector

Fort Lauderdale or Sofia?

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

Your match

Fort Lauderdale
45
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nature & day trips with your weighting.

Sofia
✓ Best match
56
match

Wins on sights concentration 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.

Fort LauderdaleSofia
Beaches & swimming. Fort Lauderdale leads by 84 points.84
Fort LauderdaleSofia
Score840
Swim season months120
Beaches 10 km70
Coast distance0 km214 km
Water distance0 km
Places to eat. Sofia leads by 19 points.19
Fort LauderdaleSofia
Score4564
Restaurants within 2 km of centre371845
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1828
Museums & heritage. Sofia leads by 37 points.37
Fort LauderdaleSofia
Score2057
Museums within 10 km1451
Museums within 2 km of centre640
Share of museums within 2 km %4378
Unesco sites within 50 km01
Nightlife. Sofia leads by 27 points.27
Fort LauderdaleSofia
Score3461
Drinking venues within 4 km259958
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre144608
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5663
Nightclubs within 4 km18102
Nature & day trips. Fort Lauderdale leads by 30 points.30
Fort LauderdaleSofia
Score8151
Protected land share 50 km %2012
Landscape blanket share 50 km %04
Land share of disc %51100
Park area within 2 km45 hectares229 hectares
Good for families. Sofia leads by 36 points.36
Fort LauderdaleSofia
Score1955
Tourist attractions within 2 km220
Park area within 2 km45 hectares229 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km00
Sights concentration. Sofia leads by 57 points.57
Fort LauderdaleSofia
Score057
Notable places within 2 km2104
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Sofia leads by 56 points.56
Fort LauderdaleSofia
Score4399
Price level global10021.4
Daily budget€77
Year-round weather. Fort Lauderdale leads by 12 points.12
Fort LauderdaleSofia
Score7664
Monthly daytime high24.2 °C to 32.3 °C3.5 °C to 28.4 °C
Monthly rainfall55 mm to 219 mm36 mm to 78 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
Fort Lauderdale
24
26
27
29
30
31
32
32
31
30
27
26
Sofia
4
7
11
17
21
25
28
28
23
18
11
5
Sea temperature, °C
Fort Lauderdale
25
25
25
26
27
28
29
30
29
28
27
26
Sofia
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Fort Lauderdale
55
59
57
72
159
219
166
198
202
144
91
73
Sofia
36
36
45
52
73
78
64
56
54
56
38
41
Daylight, hours per day
Fort Lauderdale
11
11
12
13
13
14
14
13
12
12
11
11
Sofia
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Fort Lauderdale
No sunshine record
Sofia
3
4
6
6
8
9
10
10
7
5
3
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Fort Lauderdale: 1991-2020 normals, Fort Lauderdale (7.1 km from centre). Sofia: 1991-2020 normals, Sofia Observ. (7.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromFort LauderdaleSofia
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
9 h 0 m
€550-628
1 stop
MIA · 41 km
3 h 5 m
€70-85
1 stop
SOF · 8 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
9 h 50 m
no fares
MIA · 41 km
2 h 20 m
€130-210
1 stop
SOF · 8 km
MadridMAD
9 h 0 m
€522-631
1 stop
MIA · 41 km
3 h 20 m
€114-128
SOF · 8 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
10 h 0 m
no fares
MIA · 41 km
2 h 5 m
€56-159
SOF · 8 km
MunichMUC
10 h 10 m
no fares
MIA · 41 km
2 h 0 m
no fares
SOF · 8 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
11 h 55 m
no fares
MIA · 41 km
1 h 15 m
€116-123
SOF · 8 km
RomeFCO, CIA
10 h 30 m
no fares
MIA · 41 km
1 h 45 m
€55-68
SOF · 8 km
BarcelonaBCN
9 h 35 m
no fares
MIA · 41 km
2 h 45 m
€88-145
1 stop
SOF · 8 km
Tel Aviv YafoTLV
13 h 10 m
no fares
MIA · 41 km
2 h 30 m
€154-198
SOF · 8 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
9 h 20 m
no fares
MIA · 41 km
2 h 45 m
€99-135
1 stop
SOF · 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 2026-09 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

MeasureFort LauderdaleSofia
Official languageBulgarian
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Euro (EUR)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-5, UTC-4 in summerUTC+2, UTC+3 in summer
Emergency number911112
Elevation11 m560 m
Main airportFort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport (FLL)7 km from centre125 non-stop destinationsSofia Airport (SOF)8 km from centre94 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year11 days15 days

By the numbers

MeasureFort LauderdaleSofia
City population182,7601,213,134
People per km²1,8292,466
Museums within 10 km642
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km01
Distinct cuisines in the centre2551
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Fort Lauderdale or Sofia 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.