VacationSelector

Portland or Vancouver?

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

Your match

Portland
42
match

Wins on year-round weather and museums & heritage with your weighting.

Vancouver
✓ Best match
57
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and nature & day trips 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 Portland if you want the warmer, drier summer: highs near 28°C in August with very little rain, and the wider spread of kitchens to work through in the evenings.

Choose Vancouver if the trip is about being outdoors and on foot: many more beaches within reach, more protected land around the city, more park space near the centre, and more to see once you arrive.

Scoreboard

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

PortlandVancouver
Beaches & swimming. Vancouver leads by 60 points.60
PortlandVancouver
Score060
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km27109
Coast distance69 km1 km
Water distance—1 km
Places to eat. Portland and Vancouver are level on 74.
PortlandVancouver
Score7474
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,0111,330
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km4435
Museums & heritage. Portland leads by 1 points.1
PortlandVancouver
Score3534
Museums within 10 km2327
Museums within 2 km of centre1515
Share of museums within 2 km %6556
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Portland leads by 1 points.1
PortlandVancouver
Score5857
Drinking venues within 4 km942848
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre518602
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5571
Nightclubs within 4 km3244
Nature & day trips. Vancouver leads by 42 points.42
PortlandVancouver
Score3577
Protected land share 50 km %1319
Landscape blanket share 50 km %30
Land share of disc %10060
Park area within 2 km37 hectares103 hectares
Good for families. Vancouver leads by 19 points.19
PortlandVancouver
Score3453
Tourist attractions within 2 km815
Park area within 2 km37 hectares103 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km23
Sights concentration. Vancouver leads by 13 points.13
PortlandVancouver
Score3548
Notable places within 2 km2963
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Vancouver leads by 11 points.11
PortlandVancouver
Score4354
Price level global10084
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. Portland leads by 12 points.12
PortlandVancouver
Score6553
Monthly daytime high7.9 °C to 27.7 °C7.3 °C to 23 °C
Monthly rainfall13 mm to 145 mm42 mm to 245 mm
Dry months30
0255075100

Where they differ

Portland runs the warmer year, with daytime highs of 8-28°C against Vancouver's 7-23°C, and it has three months at 40mm of rain or less where Vancouver has none. Its restaurants cover a wider range of kitchens.

Vancouver has 109 beaches nearby against Portland's 27, and more of the land around it is protected. Park space near the centre runs to about three times Portland's, with roughly twice as many attractions for families and twice as many notable places within walking distance of the centre.

Where they are alike

Eating out is where the two land in the same place. Vancouver has somewhat more restaurants near the centre and Portland a somewhat wider range of kitchens, so either way you can eat well without building the trip around it.

Museums and nightlife are close as well. Neither city carries much heritage weight, and neither has a UNESCO-listed place within day-trip reach. Both have a similar number of places to drink, though Vancouver's clubs sit more centrally.

Which traveller are you?

If you are chasing warmth, take Portland: August highs of 28°C with almost no rain, and evenings supported by a range of kitchens that Vancouver matches in number rather than in variety.

If the point is water and open country, take Vancouver: 109 beaches within reach, a larger protected hinterland and far more park space near the centre, though the sea only peaks at 16°C.

Families and anyone on a short stay do better in Vancouver too: about twice as many attractions near the centre, one more theme park within reach, and twice as many notable places reachable on foot.

What the numbers don't tell you

The beach count flatters Vancouver. 109 beaches sound like a swimming holiday, but the water peaks at 16°C and never reaches 21°C, so most of that coast is for walking rather than bathing. Note too that no daily cost figure exists here for either city, so the two cannot be compared on price at all.

Portland's weather advantage is narrow rather than general: the dry summer sits beside winter months above 128mm. And no sunshine hours are recorded for Portland, so that side of the weather comparison is unmeasured rather than poor.

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
Portland
8
11
13
16
20
23
27
28
25
18
12
8
Vancouver
7
8
11
14
18
20
23
23
19
14
10
7
Sea temperature, °C
Portland
No coastline within reach
Vancouver
7
7
8
10
12
14
16
16
14
11
9
8
Rainfall, mm
Portland
128
94
101
75
65
41
13
14
39
87
138
145
Vancouver
237
121
164
114
73
65
42
49
71
155
245
196
Daylight, hours per day
Portland
9
10
12
14
15
16
15
14
13
11
10
9
Vancouver
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
8
Sunshine, hours per day
Portland
No sunshine record
Vancouver
2
3
4
6
8
7
10
9
7
4
2
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Portland: 1991-2020 normals, Portland International Airport (9.8 km from centre). Vancouver: 1991-2020 normals, Vancouver Harbour CS (4.4 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Portland's window is July and August, with highs of 27-28°C and only 13-14mm of rain, the driest weeks either city sees. September still reaches 25°C, which makes early autumn a fair second choice.

Vancouver's best stretch is the same one but milder, near 23°C, with the sea at its warmest at 16°C in late summer. Even its driest month brings 42mm, and by November rainfall reaches 245mm, so it works as a summer pick and little else.

Getting there

Flying fromPortlandVancouver
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
2 h 15 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
2 h 45 m
€147-217
1 stop
YVR · 9 km
PhoenixPHX, AZA
2 h 35 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
3 h 0 m
no fares
YVR · 9 km
San FranciscoSFO
1 h 45 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
2 h 10 m
no fares
YVR · 9 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
5 h 20 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
5 h 15 m
€353-356
YVR · 9 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
3 h 55 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
4 h 0 m
no fares
YVR · 9 km
SeattleSEA, BFI
55 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
55 m
no fares
YVR · 9 km
Las VegasLAS
2 h 5 m
€173-370
PDX · 10 km
2 h 35 m
no fares
YVR · 9 km
DenverDEN, APA
2 h 30 m
€167-182
PDX · 10 km
2 h 45 m
no fares
YVR · 9 km
CancunCUN
5 h 40 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
5 h 55 m
no fares
YVR · 9 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
10 h 30 m
no fares
PDX · 10 km
10 h 10 m
€743-810
1 stop
YVR · 9 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 2026-09, 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

MeasurePortlandVancouver
Official language–French, English
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Canadian Dollar (CAD)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-8, UTC-7 in summerUTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number911911
Elevation152 m2 m
Main airportPortland International Airport (PDX)10 km from centre87 non-stop destinationsVancouver International Airport (YVR)9 km from centre99 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year12 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasurePortlandVancouver
City population652,503662,248
People per km²1,7365,759
Museums within 10 km1726
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre8285
Swim season, months above 21 °C–None

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Portland or Vancouver 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. 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. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. 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.