VacationSelector

San Francisco or Shanghai?

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 nature & day trips with your weighting.

Shanghai
54
match

Wins on value for money and good for families 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 FranciscoShanghai
Beaches & swimming. San Francisco leads by 43 points.43
San FranciscoShanghai
Score6017
Swim season months05
Beaches 10 km440
Coast distance2 km18 km
Water distance2 km18 km
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Museums & heritage. Shanghai leads by 1 points.1
San FranciscoShanghai
Score4445
Museums within 10 km57108
Museums within 2 km of centre2928
Share of museums within 2 km %5126
Unesco sites within 50 km00
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Nature & day trips. San Francisco leads by 18 points.18
San FranciscoShanghai
Score6042
Protected land share 50 km %179
Landscape blanket share 50 km %40
Land share of disc %5782
Park area within 2 km45 hectares83 hectares
Good for families. Shanghai leads by 24 points.24
San FranciscoShanghai
Score5781
Tourist attractions within 2 km4886
Park area within 2 km45 hectares83 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km110
Sights concentration. San Francisco leads by 12 points.12
San FranciscoShanghai
Score6351
Notable places within 2 km14773
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Shanghai leads by 36 points.36
San FranciscoShanghai
Score4379
Price level global10049
Daily budget
Year-round weather. San Francisco leads by 13 points.13
San FranciscoShanghai
Score7865
Monthly daytime high14 °C to 23.2 °C8.5 °C to 33.2 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 105 mm43 mm to 216 mm
Dry months70
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
Shanghai
9
11
15
21
26
28
33
33
29
23
18
12
Sea temperature, °C
San Francisco
12
12
12
12
12
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
Shanghai
8
7
10
14
19
22
26
28
26
21
17
12
Rainfall, mm
San Francisco
105
87
91
26
16
5
0
1
7
27
72
87
Shanghai
69
65
88
72
84
192
151
216
97
64
53
43
Daylight, hours per day
San Francisco
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Shanghai
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
11
10
Sunshine, hours per day
San Francisco
No sunshine record
Shanghai
4
4
5
5
6
4
6
6
5
5
4
4

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). Shanghai: 1991-2020 normals, Shanghai / Hongqiao (8.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromSan FranciscoShanghai
TokyoHND, NRT
10 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
2 h 45 m
€326-382
PVG · 33 km
SeoulICN, GMP
11 h 20 m
€662-735
SFO · 18 km
1 h 40 m
€173-183
PVG · 33 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
5 h 35 m
€286-328
1 stop
SFO · 18 km
14 h 40 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
11 h 50 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
2 h 0 m
€150-154
PVG · 33 km
GuangzhouCAN
13 h 40 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
2 h 5 m
€127-144
PVG · 33 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 50 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
11 h 30 m
€528-630
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
3 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
14 h 35 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
VancouverYVR, YDT
2 h 10 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
11 h 15 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
11 h 5 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
16 h 0 m
€1,005-1027
1 stop
SFO · 18 km
8 h 15 m
€508-557
1 stop
PVG · 33 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

MeasureSan FranciscoShanghai
Official languagePutonghua
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Yuan Renminbi (CNY)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzACI220 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-8, UTC-7 in summerUTC+8
Emergency number911Police 110, ambulance 120, fire 119
Elevation16 m4 m
Main airportSan Francisco International Airport (SFO)18 km from centre142 non-stop destinationsShanghai Pudong International Airport (PVG)33 km from centre200 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days6 days

By the numbers

MeasureSan FranciscoShanghai
City population873,96524,870,895
People per km²1,4553,922
Museums within 10 km5044
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre10864
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone5 months

Where else could you go?

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