VacationSelector

San Francisco or West Palm Beach?

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 sights concentration and nightlife with your weighting.

West Palm Beach
42
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.

Scoreboard

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

San FranciscoWest Palm Beach
Beaches & swimming. West Palm Beach leads by 28 points.28
San FranciscoWest Palm Beach
Score6088
Swim season months012
Beaches 10 km4410
Coast distance2 km0 km
Water distance2 km0 km
Places to eat. San Francisco leads by 46 points.46
San FranciscoWest Palm Beach
Score8337
Restaurants within 2 km of centre2,359262
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3914
Museums & heritage. San Francisco leads by 27 points.27
San FranciscoWest Palm Beach
Score4417
Museums within 10 km575
Museums within 2 km of centre293
Share of museums within 2 km %5160
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. San Francisco leads by 48 points.48
San FranciscoWest Palm Beach
Score6820
Drinking venues within 4 km1,434132
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre92890
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %6568
Nightclubs within 4 km9710
Nature & day trips. West Palm Beach leads by 9 points.9
San FranciscoWest Palm Beach
Score6069
Protected land share 50 km %1715
Landscape blanket share 50 km %40
Land share of disc %5745
Park area within 2 km45 hectares34 hectares
Good for families. San Francisco leads by 36 points.36
San FranciscoWest Palm Beach
Score5721
Tourist attractions within 2 km483
Park area within 2 km45 hectares34 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km11
Sights concentration. San Francisco leads by 51 points.51
San FranciscoWest Palm Beach
Score6312
Notable places within 2 km1478
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. San Francisco and West Palm Beach are level on 43.
San FranciscoWest Palm Beach
Score4343
Price level global100100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. San Francisco leads by 3 points.3
San FranciscoWest Palm Beach
Score7875
Monthly daytime high14 °C to 23.2 °C24 °C to 32.5 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 105 mm67 mm to 217 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
West Palm Beach
24
25
26
28
30
32
32
33
31
30
27
25
Sea temperature, °C
San Francisco
12
12
12
12
12
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
West Palm Beach
25
25
25
26
27
28
29
30
29
28
27
26
Rainfall, mm
San Francisco
105
87
91
26
16
5
0
1
7
27
72
87
West Palm Beach
86
67
84
92
126
214
145
217
199
147
88
78
Daylight, hours per day
San Francisco
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
West Palm Beach
11
11
12
13
13
14
14
13
12
12
11
11

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). West Palm Beach: 1991-2020 normals, Palm Beach International (5.8 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromSan FranciscoWest Palm Beach
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
5 h 35 m
€286-328
1 stop
SFO · 18 km
2 h 35 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
5 h 15 m
€252-262
1 stop
SFO · 18 km
2 h 20 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
4 h 55 m
€339-541
1 stop
SFO · 18 km
2 h 55 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
4 h 40 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
1 h 40 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
BostonBOS, PSM
5 h 45 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
2 h 55 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
4 h 10 m
€196-293
1 stop
SFO · 18 km
2 h 50 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
3 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
2 h 45 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
MinneapolisMSP, STP
3 h 40 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
3 h 25 m
no fares
DJT · 6 km
MadridMAD
11 h 40 m
no fares
SFO · 18 km
9 h 0 m
€522-631
1 stop
MIA · 105 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
16 h 0 m
€1,005-1027
1 stop
SFO · 18 km
15 h 30 m
€891-1074
2 stops
MIA · 105 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 FranciscoWest Palm Beach
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-8, UTC-7 in summerUTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency number911911
Elevation16 m6 m
Main airportSan Francisco International Airport (SFO)18 km from centre142 non-stop destinationsPresident Donald J. Trump International Airport (DJT)6 km from centre37 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureSan FranciscoWest Palm Beach
City population873,965117,415
People per km²1,455786
Museums within 10 km504
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre10818
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone12 months

Where else could you go?

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