VacationSelector

Oslo or Ottawa?

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

Your match

Oslo
✓ Best match
56
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nature & day trips with your weighting.

Ottawa
43
match

Wins on year-round weather 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.

OsloOttawa
Beaches & swimming. Oslo leads by 60 points.60
OsloOttawa
Score600
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km1639
Coast distance1 km423 km
Water distance1 km
Places to eat. Oslo leads by 3 points.3
OsloOttawa
Score6764
Restaurants within 2 km of centre853684
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3434
Museums & heritage. Oslo leads by 16 points.16
OsloOttawa
Score4832
Museums within 10 km7015
Museums within 2 km of centre378
Share of museums within 2 km %5353
Unesco sites within 50 km01
Nightlife. Oslo leads by 9 points.9
OsloOttawa
Score5344
Drinking venues within 4 km695432
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre562303
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8170
Nightclubs within 4 km4135
Nature & day trips. Oslo leads by 20 points.20
OsloOttawa
Score6141
Protected land share 50 km %228
Landscape blanket share 50 km %10
Land share of disc %94100
Park area within 2 km88 hectares122 hectares
Good for families. Oslo leads by 2 points.2
OsloOttawa
Score4846
Tourist attractions within 2 km1311
Park area within 2 km88 hectares122 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km21
Sights concentration. Oslo leads by 19 points.19
OsloOttawa
Score6950
Notable places within 2 km20771
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Oslo and Ottawa are level on 54.
OsloOttawa
Score5454
Price level global85.184
Daily budget€203
Year-round weather. Ottawa leads by 5 points.5
OsloOttawa
Score4853
Monthly daytime high0.1 °C to 22.7 °C-4.9 °C to 27 °C
Monthly rainfall40 mm to 104 mm53 mm to 94 mm
Dry months00
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
Oslo
0
1
5
11
17
20
23
21
16
10
4
1
Ottawa
-5
-3
3
11
19
24
27
26
22
14
6
-2
Sea temperature, °C
Oslo
4
3
3
6
11
15
18
18
15
12
9
6
Ottawa
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Oslo
58
46
40
48
60
80
86
104
81
94
84
54
Ottawa
60
53
56
74
66
87
82
89
78
94
59
80
Daylight, hours per day
Oslo
7
9
12
15
17
19
18
16
13
10
8
6
Ottawa
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Oslo
2
3
5
6
8
8
8
7
5
3
2
1
Ottawa
No sunshine record

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Oslo: 1991-2020 normals, Oslo-Blindern (4.3 km from centre). Ottawa: 1991-2020 normals, Ottawa CDA RCS (5.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromOsloOttawa
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 5 m
€46-96
OSL · 37 km
6 h 55 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
2 h 15 m
€145-204
1 stop
OSL · 37 km
7 h 20 m
no fares
YOW · 12 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
7 h 40 m
no fares
OSL · 37 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
YOW · 12 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

MeasureOsloOttawa
Official languageNorwegian, Nynorsk, Bokmål, SámiFrench, English
CurrencyNorwegian Krone (NOK)Canadian Dollar (CAD)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency numberPolice 112, ambulance 113, fire 110911
Elevation23 m70 m
Main airportOslo-Gardermoen International Airport (OSL)37 km from centre58 non-stop destinationsOttawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport (YOW)12 km from centre46 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureOsloOttawa
City population717,7101,017,449
People per km²366
Museums within 10 km6020
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km01
Distinct cuisines in the centre7562
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Oslo or Ottawa 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). Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.