Miami or New York?

This is Miami's home ground. One unbroken strip of sand runs from South Beach to Surfside, Key Biscayne adds calmer, shallower water, and the sea stays warm enough to swim in all year. Sargassum and summer storms are the only real drawbacks.

New York's beaches are real but seasonal. Coney Island, Brighton Beach and the surfers' Rockaways are a subway ride away and make a fun day out in July or August, but the water is cold for most of the year and summer weekends are packed.

Miami has a clear identity: Cuban coffee and pastelitos from ventanita windows, Calle Ocho, stone crab and grouper sandwiches, with Venezuelan, Peruvian and Haitian cooking across the city. It is excellent for lunch counters and seafood, though less so for markets or wine.

New York goes much further. Whole neighbourhoods cook their own cuisines, from Flushing to Jackson Heights to Arthur Avenue, a deep fine-dining tier sits above them, and the slices, bagels, deli pastrami and Greenmarket give you plenty to eat between meals.

Miami's culture comes down to a few strong things: the 1930s pastel hotels of the Art Deco district, Vizcaya on Biscayne Bay, Wynwood's murals and Little Havana's exile history. A few days covers them.

New York could fill weeks. The Met, MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Natural History museum and the Cloisters would each headline another city, and the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, Brooklyn Bridge and the brownstone and cast-iron streets carry a much richer story of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Both are serious late-night cities, but Miami's nights are narrower and glossier. They centre on big South Beach and downtown clubs with DJs, dress codes and bottle tables, plus Wynwood's warehouse bars and salsa on Calle Ocho, and they reward a big budget.

New York has more range and more spontaneity. Dive bars and speakeasies in the East Village, wine bars in the West Village, rooftops over Midtown and warehouse dance floors in Bushwick are all linked by trains that run all night.

Miami has the more distinctive wild country close by. The Everglades, with alligators along the Anhinga Trail, start on the city's western edge, and there are mangroves and reefs in Biscayne National Park and Key Largo, along with paddling and kitesurfing on the bay. It is flat, though, and summer makes it hard going.

New York's nature is mainly its designed parks, Central Park, Prospect Park and the High Line, but a train up the Hudson brings real rocky hiking at Breakneck Ridge, and October colour is something Miami never has.

New York has much better day trips. Philadelphia's colonial old town, Princeton, Yale in New Haven, the Hudson Valley estates, Dia Beacon and Storm King are all reachable by train.

From Miami the choices are thinner: Fort Lauderdale's canals, the mansions of Palm Beach, and seafood stops in Key Largo and Islamorada. Key West is too far for one day, so most spare days go to the beach or the Everglades instead.

New York has a slight edge, though the two are fairly close and the trip feels very different with children in each. Miami offers calm, warm water at Key Biscayne and North Beach, pool-centred hotels, Zoo Miami and airboat rides, but you will need a car for almost everything.

New York has more to see, including the dinosaur halls, the Bronx Zoo, the Intrepid and the Central Park carousel, plus the free Staten Island Ferry. Its problems are subway stairs with a pushchair, small hotel rooms and Midtown crowds.

This is one of the widest gaps between the two. In New York you never need a car: Manhattan's grid is easy to walk, the subway runs day and night across four boroughs, and ferries and Citi Bikes fill the gaps.

Miami is mostly a car city. South Beach is walkable and the free Metromover links downtown with Brickell, but the Metrorail does not reach the beach, so Wynwood or Little Havana means ride-hailing, and the Everglades or the Keys mean hiring a car.

Miami is strong on luxury and malls: Design District flagships, Bal Harbour, the huge Aventura Mall and outlets on the western edge, with Lincoln Road for mainstream brands. Beyond guayaberas and cigars in Little Havana, it has little local character.

New York covers every level. You get Fifth and Madison Avenue, the great department stores, SoHo's brands and the independent boutiques of Nolita and the Lower East Side, plus vintage and records in Williamsburg, rare books and weekend flea markets.

Neither city is cheap, but Miami is the easier on the wallet. Its beaches cost nothing, Cuban bakeries and lunch counters are filling and cheap, and summer room rates drop, though hotel resort fees, club drinks and a hire car push the bill up.

New York is among the costliest cities anywhere, with small, expensive Manhattan rooms all year and steep theatre and museum tickets. Slices, food carts, Queens restaurants, the flat-fare subway and free parks and ferries help, as does staying in Brooklyn or Queens.

Miami has a respectable stage: opera and touring shows at the Arsht Center, a well-regarded ballet company, the New World Symphony, and Latin music in Little Havana that New York cannot quite match for local flavour. Most of it happens in winter.

New York is in another league altogether. Broadway and Off-Broadway, the Met Opera, the Philharmonic and City Ballet at Lincoln Center, and Carnegie Hall are joined by Village and Harlem jazz clubs, Brooklyn venues, gospel and summer Shakespeare in the parks.

Both cities are about equally poor places to unwind, and each has a long-standing Russian and Turkish bathhouse. Beyond that, Miami's version of rest is the resort spa and sunrise yoga on the sand, with Key Biscayne and Surfside as the quiet retreats.

New York's calm is more urban. There are banyas in Brighton Beach, Korean-style jjimjilbang spas in Queens and New Jersey, and slow mornings in the Cloisters gardens or the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.