VacationSelector

Glasgow or Edinburgh?

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

Your match

Glasgow
48
match

Wins on nature & day trips with your weighting.

Edinburgh
✓ Best match
58
match

Wins on good for families and beaches & swimming with your weighting.

What matters to you?

Pick a travel style or drag the sliders. The match scores above update as you do.

The verdict

Choose Edinburgh if you want the compact trip: more to see on foot, museums close together, far more to do with children, and 20 beaches within reach.

Choose Glasgow if open country matters more than city sights: 16% of the surrounding land is protected against 2% around Edinburgh, and there is a theme park nearby, though its winters are far wetter.

Scoreboard

Each measure scored 0 to 100. Open a row for the figures behind the score.

GlasgowEdinburgh
Beaches & swimming. Edinburgh leads by 19 points.19
GlasgowEdinburgh
Score3655
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km320
Coast distance3 km3 km
Water distance3 km3 km
Places to eat. Edinburgh leads by 7 points.7
GlasgowEdinburgh
Score6370
Restaurants within 2 km of centre7401,023
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km2935
Museums & heritage. Edinburgh leads by 12 points.12
GlasgowEdinburgh
Score4557
Museums within 10 km3230
Museums within 2 km of centre1322
Share of museums within 2 km %4173
Unesco sites within 50 km23
Nightlife. Edinburgh leads by 1 points.1
GlasgowEdinburgh
Score6364
Drinking venues within 4 km1,0781,193
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre654884
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6174
Nightclubs within 4 km7365
Nature & day trips. Glasgow leads by 3 points.3
GlasgowEdinburgh
Score3835
Protected land share 50 km %162
Landscape blanket share 50 km %121
Land share of disc %9185
Park area within 2 km56 hectares166 hectares
Good for families. Edinburgh leads by 31 points.31
GlasgowEdinburgh
Score4172
Tourist attractions within 2 km1387
Park area within 2 km56 hectares166 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km10
Sights concentration. Edinburgh leads by 7 points.7
GlasgowEdinburgh
Score5360
Notable places within 2 km80126
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Glasgow and Edinburgh are level on 54.
GlasgowEdinburgh
Score5454
Price level global84.984.9
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Edinburgh leads by 8 points.8
GlasgowEdinburgh
Score4351
Monthly daytime high6.6 °C to 18.9 °C6.6 °C to 18.8 °C
Monthly rainfall102 mm to 207 mm43 mm to 80 mm
Dry months00
0255075100

Where they differ

Edinburgh has many times as many tourist attractions near the centre as Glasgow, which is most of the gap on families. It also has twice as many notable places within walking distance of the centre, museums sitting more tightly around it, 3 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach against Glasgow's 2, and 20 beaches nearby against Glasgow's 3.

Glasgow is the better base for getting out: 16% of the surrounding land is protected against 2% around Edinburgh, and it has a theme park within reach.

Where they are alike

The two are hardest to separate after dark. Each has a comparable number of places to drink and of nightclubs, and in both they sit near the centre.

Beyond that, both put a similar range of eating within reach of the centre, both sit 3km from the sea with no month of sea warm enough for easy swimming, and both hold daytime highs of about 7-19°C across the year, with neither getting a genuinely dry month.

Which traveller are you?

A family with children should choose Edinburgh. It has many times as many tourist attractions near the centre and about three times as much park space as Glasgow, so days fill without long journeys. Glasgow's counter is a theme park.

Anyone wanting museums and monuments on foot is better served in Edinburgh, with twice as many notable places within walking distance of the centre, museums grouped tightly around it, and more UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach.

Walkers and day-trippers do better from Glasgow, where 16% of the surrounding land is protected against 2% around Edinburgh, though rain runs 102-207mm in every month of the year.

What the numbers don't tell you

The value figures for these two are identical by construction: they come from a national price level, not from anything either city does. This dataset carries no daily budget for either, so no cost comparison between them is possible, and nothing here says one is dearer than the other.

Edinburgh's beach advantage is a count, not a swimming season: 20 beaches, but the sea peaks at 14°C in August and never reaches 21°C. No month in either city is dry, so a warm month is not a settled one: Edinburgh's summer still runs 63-69mm from June to August.

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
Glasgow
7
7
9
12
15
18
19
19
16
13
9
7
Edinburgh
7
7
9
12
14
17
19
19
17
13
9
7
Sea temperature, °C
Glasgow
8
7
7
8
10
13
15
15
14
12
11
9
Edinburgh
7
6
6
7
10
12
14
14
13
12
10
8
Rainfall, mm
Glasgow
207
170
147
102
103
111
129
145
132
185
190
205
Edinburgh
62
47
47
43
49
63
65
69
55
80
68
63
Daylight, hours per day
Glasgow
8
10
12
14
16
18
17
15
13
11
8
7
Edinburgh
8
10
12
14
16
18
17
15
13
11
8
7
Sunshine, hours per day
Glasgow
1
2
3
4
5
4
4
4
3
2
2
1
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. Glasgow: 1991-2020 normals, Glasgow Airport (11.5 km from centre). Edinburgh: 1991-2020 normals, Edinburgh Airport (10 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Edinburgh's window runs May to September, with highs of 14-19°C and rainfall of 43-69mm; May is the driest. October is the wettest at 80mm, and January tops out at 7°C.

Glasgow reaches the same 19°C in July and August, but rain runs 129-145mm then; April and May, near 102mm, are its driest. Winter is the divider: 205-207mm in December and January against 62-63mm in Edinburgh. Both peak in the same summer months, so the choice there is about rain, not warmth.

Getting there

Flying fromGlasgowEdinburgh
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 20 m
€38-45
GLA · 11 km
1 h 20 m
€41-45
EDI · 11 km
PalmaPMI
2 h 55 m
no fares
GLA · 11 km
2 h 55 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
MalagaAGP
3 h 10 m
no fares
GLA · 11 km
3 h 10 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
AlicanteALC
3 h 0 m
no fares
GLA · 11 km
3 h 0 m
€106
EDI · 11 km
TenerifeTFS, TFN
4 h 30 m
no fares
GLA · 11 km
4 h 30 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
AntalyaAYT
4 h 40 m
€171-239
1 stop
GLA · 11 km
4 h 35 m
€195-238
2 stops
EDI · 11 km
Las PalmasLPA
4 h 30 m
no fares
GLA · 11 km
4 h 30 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
MarrakechRAK
3 h 50 m
no fares
GLA · 11 km
3 h 55 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
6 h 45 m
no fares
GLA · 11 km
6 h 50 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
CancunCUN
9 h 40 m
no fares
GLA · 11 km
9 h 40 m
no fares
GLA · 78 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

MeasureGlasgowEdinburgh
Official languageEnglishEnglish
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)Pound Sterling (GBP)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftLeft
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC, UTC+1 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999112 or 999
Elevation21 m47 m
Main airportGlasgow Airport (GLA)11 km from centre95 non-stop destinationsEdinburgh Airport (EDI)11 km from centre158 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year10 days10 days

By the numbers

MeasureGlasgowEdinburgh
City population626,410488,050
People per km²1901,884
Museums within 10 km2932
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km23
Distinct cuisines in the centre5478
Swim season, months above 21 °CNoneNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Glasgow 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. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. 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 2026-09-01. Typical prices can be up to 7 days old. Daily budgets are estimates from country price levels.