VacationSelector

San Francisco or Stockholm?

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, level with your weighting

San Francisco
62
match

Wins on year-round weather and nature & day trips with your weighting.

Stockholm
62
match

Wins on museums & heritage and sights concentration 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 FranciscoStockholm
Beaches & swimming. San Francisco and Stockholm are level on 60.
San FranciscoStockholm
Score6060
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km4473
Coast distance2 km0 km
Water distance2 km0 km
Places to eat. San Francisco leads by 7 points.7
San FranciscoStockholm
Score8376
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,3591,558
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3936
Museums & heritage. Stockholm leads by 25 points.25
San FranciscoStockholm
Score4469
Museums within 10 km5774
Museums within 2 km of centre2947
Share of museums within 2 km %5164
Unesco sites within 50 km03
Nightlife. San Francisco leads by 4 points.4
San FranciscoStockholm
Score6864
Drinking venues within 4 km1,4341,090
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre928689
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6563
Nightclubs within 4 km97106
Nature & day trips. San Francisco leads by 19 points.19
San FranciscoStockholm
Score6041
Protected land share 50 km %177
Landscape blanket share 50 km %40
Land share of disc %5777
Park area within 2 km45 hectares104 hectares
Good for families. San Francisco and Stockholm are level on 57.
San FranciscoStockholm
Score5757
Tourist attractions within 2 km4823
Park area within 2 km45 hectares104 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km12
Sights concentration. Stockholm leads by 16 points.16
San FranciscoStockholm
Score6379
Notable places within 2 km147357
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Stockholm leads by 14 points.14
San FranciscoStockholm
Score4357
Price level global10080.3
Daily budget€169
Year-round weather. San Francisco leads by 25 points.25
San FranciscoStockholm
Score7853
Monthly daytime high14 °C to 23.2 °C1 °C to 23.6 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 105 mm27 mm to 66 mm
Dry months75
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
Stockholm
1
1
5
11
17
21
24
22
17
10
5
3
Sea temperature, °C
San Francisco
12
12
12
12
12
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
Stockholm
3
2
2
3
7
12
16
17
14
10
7
5
Rainfall, mm
San Francisco
105
87
91
26
16
5
0
1
7
27
72
87
Stockholm
37
29
27
29
34
61
60
66
53
51
47
47
Daylight, hours per day
San Francisco
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Stockholm
7
9
12
15
17
19
18
16
13
10
8
6
Sunshine, hours per day
San Francisco
No sunshine record
Stockholm
1
2
5
7
9
9
9
8
6
3
1
1

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). Stockholm: 1991-2020 normals, Stockholm Observatoriet (26.4 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromSan FranciscoStockholm
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 50 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
2 h 25 m
€89-139
ARN · 36 km
CopenhagenCPH
11 h 0 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
1 h 20 m
€84-99
ARN · 36 km
TokyoHND, NRT
10 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
10 h 15 m
no fares
ARN · 36 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
11 h 15 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
2 h 30 m
€91-121
ARN · 36 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
5 h 35 m
€286-328
1 stop
SFO · 18 km
8 h 5 m
no fares
ARN · 36 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
11 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
2 h 5 m
€152-213
1 stop
ARN · 36 km
AmsterdamAMS
11 h 0 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
2 h 0 m
€153-185
ARN · 36 km
MunichMUC
11 h 45 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
2 h 15 m
€202-238
1 stop
ARN · 36 km
BarcelonaBCN
11 h 55 m
€653-1326
1 stop
SFO · 18 km
3 h 25 m
€90-234
ARN · 36 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
16 h 0 m
€1,005-1027
1 stop
SFO · 18 km
6 h 20 m
€330-429
1 stop
ARN · 36 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 FranciscoStockholm
Official languageSwedish
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Swedish Krona (SEK)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-8, UTC-7 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number911112
Elevation16 m22 m
Main airportSan Francisco International Airport (SFO)18 km from centre142 non-stop destinationsStockholm-Arlanda Airport (ARN)36 km from centre172 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days16 days

By the numbers

MeasureSan FranciscoStockholm
City population873,965984,748
People per km²1,4555,260
Museums within 10 km50266
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km03
Distinct cuisines in the centre10881
Swim season, months above 21 °CNoneNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow San Francisco or Stockholm 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. Ground elevations sampled from the Mapzen terrain tiles via OpenTopoData, merging SRTM, ASTER, NED, EU-DEM and national sources. Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. 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.