VacationSelector

Jakarta or Bangkok?

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

Your match

Jakarta
54
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and year-round weather with your weighting.

Bangkok
✓ Best match
62
match

Wins on places to eat and nightlife 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 Bangkok if you want the eating and the going out: many times as many restaurants near the centre, a much wider range of kitchens, and far more places to drink and dance.

Choose Jakarta if the water matters more than the menu: the sea is 8km from the centre against 23km in Bangkok, and there are 5 beaches nearby where Bangkok has none.

Scoreboard

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

JakartaBangkok
Beaches & swimming. Jakarta leads by 21 points.21
JakartaBangkok
Score6140
Swim season months1212
Beaches 10 km50
Coast distance8 km23 km
Water distance8 km23 km
Places to eat. Bangkok leads by 27 points.27
JakartaBangkok
Score5683
Restaurants within 2 km of centre9083,957
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1626
Museums & heritage. Bangkok leads by 18 points.18
JakartaBangkok
Score2846
Museums within 10 km26103
Museums within 2 km of centre1030
Share of museums within 2 km %3829
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Bangkok leads by 26 points.26
JakartaBangkok
Score5783
Drinking venues within 4 km1,0463,383
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre3721,396
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %3641
Nightclubs within 4 km1072
Nature & day trips. Jakarta leads by 3 points.3
JakartaBangkok
Score5451
Protected land share 50 km %——
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %7283
Park area within 2 km56 hectares42 hectares
Good for families. Bangkok leads by 24 points.24
JakartaBangkok
Score3357
Tourist attractions within 2 km231
Park area within 2 km56 hectares42 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km54
Sights concentration. Bangkok leads by 1 points.1
JakartaBangkok
Score4748
Notable places within 2 km5862
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Jakarta and Bangkok are level on 93.
JakartaBangkok
Score9393
Price level global29.929.7
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Jakarta leads by 5 points.5
JakartaBangkok
Score6156
Monthly daytime high30.5 °C to 33.3 °C32.4 °C to 35.8 °C
Monthly rainfall39 mm to 360 mm7 mm to 331 mm
Dry months13
0255075100

Where they differ

Bangkok has many times as many restaurants near the centre and a much wider range of kitchens. It also has about three times as many places to drink and many times as many nightclubs, and many times as many tourist attractions near the centre for a family day out, plus about three times as many museums.

Jakarta has the coast: the sea is 8km from its centre against 23km in Bangkok, and 5 beaches nearby where Bangkok has none. It also has more park space near the centre.

Where they are alike

Both put a similar number of notable places within walking distance of the centre, so a day spent on foot returns about as much in either.

They are close, too, on what a day trip out of the city offers, and on the year as a whole: neither has a cool season, and both keep sea temperatures at 21°C or more in all 12 months, so swimming is never off the table.

Which traveller are you?

If you travel to eat and to stay out late, Bangkok. It has many times as many restaurants near the centre, a wider spread of kitchens and far more bars and clubs, about half of them close to the middle.

If swimming is the point, Jakarta. The sea is 8km from the centre against 23km, with 5 beaches nearby and none at Bangkok, plus more park space close in for slower days.

Travelling with children, Bangkok has many times as many tourist attractions near the centre and about three times as many museums, though Jakarta's sit more tightly together and are easier to combine.

What the numbers don't tell you

Neither city carries a daily budget figure here, so no comparison of what a day costs is possible between them. The value readings are built from a different measure and say nothing about prices, so do not read either city as the cheaper trip.

Jakarta's edge at the coast is a year-round fact, but the year around it is not: only one month falls to 40mm of rain or less, where Bangkok has three, and Jakarta gets far fewer hours of sun. Bangkok's hottest weather, at 36°C, arrives as the rain is already building.

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
Jakarta
31
31
32
33
33
32
32
33
33
33
33
32
Bangkok
33
34
35
36
35
34
34
33
33
33
33
32
Sea temperature, °C
Jakarta
29
29
29
30
30
30
29
29
29
29
30
29
Bangkok
27
28
29
30
31
30
30
30
29
29
29
28
Rainfall, mm
Jakarta
355
360
197
160
102
70
85
39
56
99
128
210
Bangkok
18
22
43
92
221
187
184
227
331
276
42
7
Daylight, hours per day
Jakarta
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
13
Bangkok
11
12
12
12
13
13
13
13
12
12
12
11
Sunshine, hours per day
Jakarta
3
3
4
5
5
4
5
6
6
6
4
3
Bangkok
8
8
8
8
7
5
5
4
4
5
7
8

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Jakarta: 1991-2020 normals, Jakarta / Observatory (1.1 km from centre). Bangkok: 1991-2020 normals, Bangkok (5.7 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Bangkok is at its best from December to February, when rain drops to 7-22mm a month, the driest run either city manages, and daytime highs sit at 32-34°C. Its wettest stretch runs through September and October, when heavy rain shapes the day.

Jakarta is the better pick from June to September, with rain falling as low as 39mm and highs of 32-33°C, close to its warmest. Rain builds again around the turn of the year, reaching 355-360mm, when Bangkok is dry.

Getting there

Flying fromJakartaBangkok
Kuala LumpurKUL, SZB
2 h 0 m
€120-134
CGK · 20 km
2 h 10 m
€161-171
DMK · 21 km
Denpasar (Bali)DPS
1 h 50 m
€129-136
CGK · 20 km
4 h 10 m
€265-290
DMK · 21 km
TokyoHND, NRT
7 h 30 m
no fares
CGK · 20 km
6 h 5 m
€318-365
BKK · 26 km
SeoulICN, GMP
6 h 50 m
€227-241
CGK · 20 km
5 h 0 m
€175-251
BKK · 26 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
1 h 40 m
no fares
CGK · 20 km
2 h 20 m
€163-194
BKK · 26 km
GuangzhouCAN
4 h 35 m
€208-270
1 stop
CGK · 20 km
2 h 40 m
€144-163
BKK · 26 km
Hong KongHKG
4 h 30 m
no fares
CGK · 20 km
2 h 40 m
€175-181
BKK · 26 km
SurabayaSUB
1 h 30 m
no fares
CGK · 20 km
3 h 50 m
no fares
DMK · 21 km
JeddahJED
10 h 5 m
€493-631
CGK · 20 km
8 h 20 m
no fares
BKK · 26 km
AmsterdamAMS
14 h 0 m
€508-593
1 stop
CGK · 20 km
11 h 30 m
no fares
BKK · 26 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

MeasureJakartaBangkok
Official languageIndonesianThai
CurrencyRupiah (IDR)Baht (THB)
SocketsCF50 HzABCF220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftLeft
Time zoneUTC+7UTC+7
Emergency number112Police 191, ambulance 1669, fire 199
Elevation91 m2 m
Main airportSoekarno-Hatta International Airport (CGK)20 km from centre90 non-stop destinationsSuvarnabhumi Airport (BKK)26 km from centre142 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year8 days–

By the numbers

MeasureJakartaBangkok
City population11,135,1915,676,648
People per km²16,8213,619
Museums within 10 km4459
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre3591
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months12 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Jakarta or Bangkok 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 2026-09-01. Typical prices can be up to 7 days old. Daily budgets are estimates from country price levels.