VacationSelector

Jakarta or Manila?

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 nature & day trips and value for money with your weighting.

Manila
✓ Best match
60
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.

The verdict

Choose Jakarta if the trip is built around leaving the city: day trips, nature, and beaches and theme parks within reach. June to October is its drier, better half of the year.

Choose Manila for museums, sightseeing on foot and things to do with children, with the sea only 2km from the centre and a dependable dry window at the turn of the year.

Scoreboard

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

JakartaManila
Beaches & swimming. Manila leads by 15 points.15
JakartaManila
Score6176
Swim season months1212
Beaches 10 km53
Coast distance8 km2 km
Water distance8 km2 km
Places to eat. Manila leads by 2 points.2
JakartaManila
Score5658
Restaurants within 2 km of centre9081,015
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1617
Museums & heritage. Manila leads by 22 points.22
JakartaManila
Score2850
Museums within 10 km2677
Museums within 2 km of centre1023
Share of museums within 2 km %3830
Unesco sites within 50 km01
Nightlife. Manila leads by 4 points.4
JakartaManila
Score5761
Drinking venues within 4 km1,0461,082
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre372374
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %3635
Nightclubs within 4 km1036
Nature & day trips. Jakarta leads by 25 points.25
JakartaManila
Score5429
Protected land share 50 km %—4
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %7278
Park area within 2 km56 hectares54 hectares
Good for families. Manila leads by 27 points.27
JakartaManila
Score3360
Tourist attractions within 2 km237
Park area within 2 km56 hectares54 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km53
Sights concentration. Manila leads by 5 points.5
JakartaManila
Score4752
Notable places within 2 km5879
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Jakarta leads by 3 points.3
JakartaManila
Score9390
Price level global29.933.7
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Jakarta and Manila are level on 61.
JakartaManila
Score6161
Monthly daytime high30.5 °C to 33.3 °C30.5 °C to 34.6 °C
Monthly rainfall39 mm to 360 mm24 mm to 564 mm
Dry months14
0255075100

Where they differ

Jakarta is the better base for getting out of town: it leads on day trips and nature, and has 5 theme parks within reach against Manila's 3, plus 5 nearby beaches against 3. Its museums are fewer but sit tightly around the centre.

Manila is stronger for families and heritage: many times as many tourist attractions near the centre, about three times as many museums, and a UNESCO-listed place within day-trip reach. It also has about three times as many nightclubs.

Where they are alike

Weather is where the two are hardest to separate. Both are hot right through the year, Jakarta at 31-33°C and Manila at 31-35°C, and both have 12 months of sea at 21°C or more.

They also match on eating and going out: similar numbers of restaurants near the centre, a similar range of kitchens, and about as many places to drink, roughly half of them central. Both centres are walkable for sights, Manila a little more so.

Which traveller are you?

Travelling with children: Manila, comfortably. It has many times as many tourist attractions close to the centre, and the sea is 2km away rather than 8km. Jakarta answers with 5 theme parks against 3.

Museum-minded travellers: Manila again, with about three times as many museums and a UNESCO-listed place within day-trip reach. Jakarta's smaller collection is at least clustered tightly around the centre, which suits a short stay.

Anyone keen to leave the city often: Jakarta. It is the stronger side for day trips and nature, with more beaches within reach, while park space near either centre is much the same.

What the numbers don't tell you

No daily cost figure exists for either city in this data, so the two cannot be compared on price at all. The value rating rests on a different measure that both cities do have, and it says nothing about what a day on the ground will cost you.

Sunshine hours are recorded for Jakarta but missing for Manila, so that side of the weather comparison is unmeasured rather than poor: Manila's monthly ratings rest on temperature, rainfall and sea temperature alone. And a sea that sits 2km from the centre counts for less in August, when rainfall passes 560mm.

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
Manila
31
31
33
35
34
33
32
31
31
32
31
31
Sea temperature, °C
Jakarta
29
29
29
30
30
30
29
29
29
29
30
29
Manila
27
27
28
29
30
30
29
29
29
29
28
28
Rainfall, mm
Jakarta
355
360
197
160
102
70
85
39
56
99
128
210
Manila
26
24
40
36
220
314
487
564
509
297
152
109
Daylight, hours per day
Jakarta
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
13
Manila
11
12
12
13
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
Manila
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Jakarta: 1991-2020 normals, Jakarta / Observatory (1.1 km from centre). Manila: 1991-2020 normals, Science Garden (6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Jakarta's better half of the year runs June to October. August is its driest month at 39mm, highs hold at 32-33°C, and the sea stays warm throughout. Rain around the turn of the year climbs past 200mm a month, which is when the city is least appealing.

Manila reverses that pattern. December to March is its dry window, with 24-40mm a month and comfortable heat, while August is the wettest month by far, above 560mm, and rain stays heavy either side of it.

Getting there

Flying fromJakartaManila
Kuala LumpurKUL, SZB
2 h 0 m
€120-134
CGK · 20 km
3 h 35 m
€159-184
1 stop
MNL · 11 km
TokyoHND, NRT
7 h 30 m
no fares
CGK · 20 km
4 h 10 m
€304-317
MNL · 11 km
Denpasar (Bali)DPS
1 h 50 m
€129-136
CGK · 20 km
3 h 50 m
€345-396
MNL · 11 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
1 h 40 m
no fares
CGK · 20 km
3 h 30 m
€154-174
MNL · 11 km
SeoulICN, GMP
6 h 50 m
€227-241
CGK · 20 km
3 h 45 m
€191-223
MNL · 11 km
BangkokBKK, DMK
3 h 20 m
€217-232
1 stop
CGK · 20 km
3 h 15 m
€205-213
MNL · 11 km
HanoiHAN
4 h 15 m
no fares
CGK · 20 km
2 h 45 m
€182-214
1 stop
MNL · 11 km
Hong KongHKG
4 h 30 m
no fares
CGK · 20 km
2 h 0 m
€128-135
MNL · 11 km
RiyadhRUH
9 h 20 m
no fares
CGK · 20 km
9 h 50 m
€435-460
1 stop
MNL · 11 km
AmsterdamAMS
14 h 0 m
€508-593
1 stop
CGK · 20 km
12 h 55 m
no fares
MNL · 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 2026-09 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

MeasureJakartaManila
Official languageIndonesianEnglish, Filipino, Taglish
CurrencyRupiah (IDR)Philippine Peso (PHP)
SocketsCF50 HzABC220 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+7UTC+8
Emergency number112911
Elevation91 m9 m
Main airportSoekarno-Hatta International Airport (CGK)20 km from centre90 non-stop destinationsNinoy Aquino International Airport (MNL)11 km from centre88 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year8 days18 days

By the numbers

MeasureJakartaManila
City population11,135,1911,902,590
People per km²16,82176,104
Museums within 10 km4427
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km01
Distinct cuisines in the centre3539
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 Manila 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.