VacationSelector

San Francisco or Sao Paulo?

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

Your match

San Francisco
✓ Best match
62
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and sights concentration with your weighting.

Sao Paulo
56
match

Wins on value for money and 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.

San FranciscoSao Paulo
Beaches & swimming. San Francisco leads by 60 points.60
San FranciscoSao Paulo
Score600
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km440
Coast distance2 km51 km
Water distance2 km
Places to eat. San Francisco leads by 10 points.10
San FranciscoSao Paulo
Score8373
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,3591,735
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3927
Museums & heritage. San Francisco leads by 1 points.1
San FranciscoSao Paulo
Score4443
Museums within 10 km5782
Museums within 2 km of centre2926
Share of museums within 2 km %5132
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Sao Paulo leads by 4 points.4
San FranciscoSao Paulo
Score6872
Drinking venues within 4 km1,4341,747
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre928896
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6551
Nightclubs within 4 km97118
Nature & day trips. San Francisco leads by 9 points.9
San FranciscoSao Paulo
Score6051
Protected land share 50 km %1726
Landscape blanket share 50 km %415
Land share of disc %5795
Park area within 2 km45 hectares52 hectares
Good for families. San Francisco leads by 2 points.2
San FranciscoSao Paulo
Score5755
Tourist attractions within 2 km4838
Park area within 2 km45 hectares52 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km11
Sights concentration. San Francisco leads by 13 points.13
San FranciscoSao Paulo
Score6350
Notable places within 2 km14768
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Sao Paulo leads by 38 points.38
San FranciscoSao Paulo
Score4381
Price level global10046.1
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Sao Paulo leads by 5 points.5
San FranciscoSao Paulo
Score7883
Monthly daytime high14 °C to 23.2 °C22.8 °C to 29.2 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 105 mm26 mm to 297 mm
Dry months71
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
San Francisco
14
16
18
20
20
22
22
23
23
22
18
14
Sao Paulo
28
29
28
27
24
23
23
25
25
27
27
28
Sea temperature, °C
San Francisco
12
12
12
12
12
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
Sao Paulo
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
San Francisco
105
87
91
26
16
5
0
1
7
27
72
87
Sao Paulo
297
259
206
89
64
55
53
26
82
128
146
234
Daylight, hours per day
San Francisco
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sao Paulo
13
13
12
12
11
11
11
11
12
13
13
14
Sunshine, hours per day
San Francisco
No sunshine record
Sao Paulo
4
6
6
5
5
5
6
6
5
6
5
5

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. San Francisco: 1981-2010 normals, Alameda Naval Air Station (9.1 km from centre). Sao Paulo: 1991-2020 normals, Sao Paulo (5.9 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromSan FranciscoSao Paulo
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
5 h 35 m
€286-328
1 stop
SFO · 18 km
9 h 40 m
€576-611
GRU · 21 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
3 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
10 h 20 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
12 h 10 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 15 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
11 h 45 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 50 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
11 h 50 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
4 h 55 m
€339-541
1 stop
SFO · 18 km
10 h 20 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
4 h 40 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
9 h 30 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
BostonBOS, PSM
5 h 45 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
9 h 45 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
16 h 0 m
€1,005-1027
1 stop
SFO · 18 km
15 h 0 m
no fares
GRU · 21 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
11 h 50 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
21 h 20 m
€1,139-1567
2 stops
GRU · 21 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

MeasureSan FranciscoSao Paulo
Official languagePortuguese
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Brazilian Real (BRL)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzCN60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-8, UTC-7 in summerUTC-3
Emergency number911Police 190, ambulance 192, fire 193
Elevation16 m760 m
Main airportSan Francisco International Airport (SFO)18 km from centre142 non-stop destinationsSão Paulo/Guarulhos–Governor André Franco Montoro International Airport (GRU)21 km from centre102 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days15 days

By the numbers

MeasureSan FranciscoSao Paulo
City population873,96511,451,999
People per km²1,4557,519
Museums within 10 km5090
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre10859
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow San Francisco or Sao Paulo 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.