VacationSelector

Pisa or Zagreb?

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, 2 points apart

Pisa
45
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and good for families with your weighting.

Zagreb
47
match

Wins on nightlife and places to eat 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 Pisa if you want the sea in the trip and a base that works with children: swimming from June to September, more attractions close to the centre, theme parks within reach, and UNESCO-listed sites for day trips.

Choose Zagreb if the evening decides it: far more bars and clubs, a wider spread of kitchens, and about twice as much to see on foot near the centre.

Scoreboard

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

PisaZagreb
Beaches & swimming. Pisa leads by 21 points.21
PisaZagreb
Score210
Swim season months40
Beaches 10 km18
Coast distance10 km117 km
Water distance10 km—
Places to eat. Zagreb leads by 18 points.18
PisaZagreb
Score3452
Restaurants within 2 km of centre379374
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km927
Museums & heritage. Pisa leads by 10 points.10
PisaZagreb
Score5545
Museums within 10 km2741
Museums within 2 km of centre2240
Share of museums within 2 km %8198
Unesco sites within 50 km30
Nightlife. Zagreb leads by 33 points.33
PisaZagreb
Score2861
Drinking venues within 4 km2321,009
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre203571
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %8857
Nightclubs within 4 km363
Nature & day trips. Pisa leads by 5 points.5
PisaZagreb
Score3934
Protected land share 50 km %99
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %65100
Park area within 2 km40 hectares52 hectares
Good for families. Pisa leads by 19 points.19
PisaZagreb
Score4728
Tourist attractions within 2 km207
Park area within 2 km40 hectares52 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km20
Sights concentration. Zagreb leads by 13 points.13
PisaZagreb
Score4760
Notable places within 2 km58122
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Zagreb leads by 12 points.12
PisaZagreb
Score6880
Price level global64.948.5
Daily budget€155€138
Year-round weather. Pisa leads by 8 points.8
PisaZagreb
Score7062
Monthly daytime high11.4 °C to 30.3 °C5.4 °C to 28.5 °C
Monthly rainfall32 mm to 132 mm47 mm to 104 mm
Dry months20
0255075100

Where they differ

Pisa gives you the sea: four months with the water at 21°C or more, where Zagreb has none despite 8 beaches nearby. It is also easier with children: more tourist attractions near the centre and 2 theme parks within reach.

Zagreb is the stronger evening city, with many times as many bars and nightclubs, though only about half sit near the centre. It also spans a much wider range of kitchens on a similar count of central restaurants, and packs about twice as many notable places into walking distance.

Where they are alike

Both sit in regions where 9% of the surrounding land is protected, and both have park space near the centre, a little more of it in Zagreb. Day trips are a supporting part of either trip rather than the reason to come.

Summer peaks land in the same place, 29-30°C, and January is the coolest month in both. Both also carry real museum weight: Zagreb about twice as many, Pisa fewer but with 3 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach.

Which traveller are you?

Travelling with children, take Pisa: more tourist attractions near the centre, 2 theme parks within reach, and sea warm enough to swim from June to September, which Zagreb cannot offer at all.

If evenings decide the trip, take Zagreb: many times as many bars and nightclubs, and a much wider range of kitchens. Expect to move around, since only about half the nightlife sits near the centre.

For heritage it splits. Zagreb has roughly double the museums and a denser core of notable places within walking distance. Pisa answers with 3 UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach, so the best of it lies outside the city.

What the numbers don't tell you

The daily budget figures, €155 for Italy and €138 for Croatia, are national price levels for restaurants and hotels, not measurements of either city. A capital and a heavily visited city can each sit well off their own country's average, by more than the gap between the two figures, so this says nothing about which trip costs more.

Pisa's weather advantage is a summer one. The driest months are also the hottest, at 30°C, and that is the same window when the coast and the central attractions are busiest. Outside it, 102-132mm of autumn rain changes the picture.

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
Pisa
11
13
16
18
23
27
30
30
26
21
16
12
Zagreb
5
8
13
18
23
27
29
28
22
17
11
6
Sea temperature, °C
Pisa
14
13
14
15
18
22
24
25
23
20
18
16
Zagreb
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Pisa
68
58
59
65
63
41
32
35
102
125
132
95
Zagreb
47
48
49
63
76
90
87
85
104
91
88
63
Daylight, hours per day
Pisa
9
11
12
13
15
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Zagreb
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Pisa
4
4
6
6
8
9
11
10
7
5
4
3
Zagreb
2
4
5
6
8
9
9
9
6
4
2
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Pisa: 1991-2020 normals, Pisa / S. Giusto (3.9 km from centre). Zagreb: 1991-2020 normals, Zagreb / Gric (0.6 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Pisa's season runs May to September; July and August are the driest of the year at 32-35mm, with the sea at 24-25°C. Autumn is the catch, with 102-132mm falling from September through November.

Zagreb's best stretch is May to August, warm enough at the peak, but summer rain runs 76-90mm and autumn is heavier still. Winter separates the two hardest: January highs of 5°C against Pisa's 11°C, so a cold-month city break tilts to Pisa.

Getting there

Flying fromPisaZagreb
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 5 m
€48-62
PSA · 4 km
2 h 15 m
no fares
ZAG · 11 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
no fares
PSA · 4 km
1 h 55 m
no fares
ZAG · 11 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 30 m
no fares
PSA · 4 km
1 h 30 m
no fares
ZAG · 11 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 55 m
€210-262
1 stop
PSA · 4 km
2 h 0 m
no fares
ZAG · 11 km
BrusselsBRU, CRL
1 h 45 m
no fares
PSA · 4 km
1 h 55 m
no fares
ZAG · 11 km
RomeFCO, CIA
55 m
€136-139
1 stop
FLR · 65 km
1 h 20 m
no fares
ZAG · 11 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
2 h 25 m
€154-191
1 stop
BLQ · 115 km
2 h 0 m
€153-254
ZAG · 11 km
PalermoPMO
1 h 25 m
no fares
PSA · 4 km
1 h 40 m
no fares
ZAG · 11 km
MunichMUC
1 h 15 m
no fares
FLR · 65 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
ZAG · 11 km
DublinDUB
2 h 35 m
no fares
PSA · 4 km
2 h 50 m
no fares
ZAG · 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 2026-09, 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

MeasurePisaZagreb
Official languageItalianCroatian
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Euro (EUR)
SocketsCFL230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation4 m127 m
Main airportPisa International Airport (PSA)4 km from centre81 non-stop destinationsZagreb Franjo Tuđman International Airport (ZAG)11 km from centre60 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days14 days

By the numbers

MeasurePisaZagreb
City population88,737767,131
People per km²479–
Museums within 10 km2727
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km30
Distinct cuisines in the centre2942
Swim season, months above 21 °C4 months–

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Pisa or Zagreb 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). 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. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates.

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.