VacationSelector

Jakarta or Shanghai?

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

Your match

Too close to call, level with your weighting

Jakarta
54
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and value for money with your weighting.

Shanghai
54
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.

Scoreboard

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

JakartaShanghai
Beaches & swimming. Jakarta leads by 44 points.44
JakartaShanghai
Score6117
Swim season months125
Beaches 10 km50
Coast distance8 km18 km
Water distance8 km18 km
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Museums & heritage. Shanghai leads by 17 points.17
JakartaShanghai
Score2845
Museums within 10 km26108
Museums within 2 km of centre1028
Share of museums within 2 km %3826
Unesco sites within 50 km00
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Nature & day trips. Jakarta leads by 12 points.12
JakartaShanghai
Score5442
Protected land share 50 km %9
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %7282
Park area within 2 km56 hectares83 hectares
Good for families. Shanghai leads by 48 points.48
JakartaShanghai
Score3381
Tourist attractions within 2 km286
Park area within 2 km56 hectares83 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km510
Sights concentration. Shanghai leads by 4 points.4
JakartaShanghai
Score4751
Notable places within 2 km5873
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Jakarta leads by 14 points.14
JakartaShanghai
Score9379
Price level global29.949
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Shanghai leads by 4 points.4
JakartaShanghai
Score6165
Monthly daytime high30.5 °C to 33.3 °C8.5 °C to 33.2 °C
Monthly rainfall39 mm to 360 mm43 mm to 216 mm
Dry months10
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
Jakarta
31
31
32
33
33
32
32
33
33
33
33
32
Shanghai
9
11
15
21
26
28
33
33
29
23
18
12
Sea temperature, °C
Jakarta
29
29
29
30
30
30
29
29
29
29
30
29
Shanghai
8
7
10
14
19
22
26
28
26
21
17
12
Rainfall, mm
Jakarta
355
360
197
160
102
70
85
39
56
99
128
210
Shanghai
69
65
88
72
84
192
151
216
97
64
53
43
Daylight, hours per day
Jakarta
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
13
Shanghai
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
11
10
Sunshine, hours per day
Jakarta
3
3
4
5
5
4
5
6
6
6
4
3
Shanghai
4
4
5
5
6
4
6
6
5
5
4
4

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Jakarta: 1991-2020 normals, Jakarta / Observatory (1.1 km from centre). Shanghai: 1991-2020 normals, Shanghai / Hongqiao (8.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromJakartaShanghai
TokyoHND, NRT
7 h 30 m
no fares
CGK · 20 km
2 h 45 m
€326-382
PVG · 33 km
Kuala LumpurKUL, SZB
2 h 0 m
€120-134
CGK · 20 km
5 h 10 m
€161-231
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
ChengduTFU, CTU
5 h 25 m
no fares
CGK · 20 km
2 h 35 m
€216-247
PVG · 33 km
Denpasar (Bali)DPS
1 h 50 m
€129-136
CGK · 20 km
5 h 55 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
GuangzhouCAN
4 h 35 m
€208-270
1 stop
CGK · 20 km
2 h 5 m
€127-144
PVG · 33 km
ChongqingCKG, CQW
5 h 20 m
no fares
CGK · 20 km
2 h 25 m
€175-196
PVG · 33 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
1 h 40 m
no fares
CGK · 20 km
5 h 10 m
€274-364
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
HaikouHAK
4 h 5 m
no fares
CGK · 20 km
2 h 40 m
€187-195
PVG · 33 km
AmsterdamAMS
14 h 0 m
€508-593
1 stop
CGK · 20 km
11 h 10 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
8 h 20 m
no fares
CGK · 20 km
8 h 15 m
€508-557
1 stop
PVG · 33 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

MeasureJakartaShanghai
Official languageIndonesianPutonghua
CurrencyRupiah (IDR)Yuan Renminbi (CNY)
SocketsCF50 HzACI220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC+7UTC+8
Emergency number112Police 110, ambulance 120, fire 119
Elevation91 m4 m
Main airportSoekarno-Hatta International Airport (CGK)20 km from centre90 non-stop destinationsShanghai Pudong International Airport (PVG)33 km from centre200 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year8 days6 days

By the numbers

MeasureJakartaShanghai
City population11,135,19124,870,895
People per km²16,8213,922
Museums within 10 km4444
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre3564
Swim season, months above 21 °C12 months5 months

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Jakarta or Shanghai 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 2026-08-31. Typical prices can be up to 7 days old. Daily budgets are estimates from country price levels.