VacationSelector

San Jose or Seattle?

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

Your match

San Jose
39
match

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

Seattle
✓ Best match
52
match

Wins on beaches & swimming 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.

The verdict

Choose Seattle if you want the sea close to the centre, at 1km, a walkable core dense with things to see, and a much wider choice of restaurants and bars.

Choose San Jose if weather and open country matter more: warmer through the year, dry from May to October, and far more protected land around it for days out.

Scoreboard

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

San JoseSeattle
Beaches & swimming. Seattle leads by 52 points.52
San JoseSeattle
Score860
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km1100
Coast distance14 km1 km
Water distance14 km1 km
Places to eat. Seattle leads by 34 points.34
San JoseSeattle
Score4175
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3131,460
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1635
Museums & heritage. Seattle leads by 10 points.10
San JoseSeattle
Score2636
Museums within 10 km2028
Museums within 2 km of centre917
Share of museums within 2 km %4561
Unesco sites within 50 km00
Nightlife. Seattle leads by 26 points.26
San JoseSeattle
Score3157
Drinking venues within 4 km231873
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre88696
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %3880
Nightclubs within 4 km1634
Nature & day trips. San Jose leads by 30 points.30
San JoseSeattle
Score7040
Protected land share 50 km %269
Landscape blanket share 50 km %20
Land share of disc %9180
Park area within 2 km101 hectares63 hectares
Good for families. Seattle leads by 13 points.13
San JoseSeattle
Score3346
Tourist attractions within 2 km217
Park area within 2 km101 hectares63 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km21
Sights concentration. Seattle leads by 38 points.38
San JoseSeattle
Score1452
Notable places within 2 km976
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. San Jose and Seattle are level on 43.
San JoseSeattle
Score4343
Price level global100100
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. San Jose leads by 24 points.24
San JoseSeattle
Score8561
Monthly daytime high15.4 °C to 26.8 °C7.8 °C to 24.9 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 78 mm15 mm to 160 mm
Dry months83
0255075100

Where they differ

San Jose is the warmer city year round, with daytime highs of 15-27°C against Seattle's 8-25°C, and it has the stronger case for getting out of town: 26% of the land around it is protected against 9% around Seattle.

Seattle puts the water 1km from its centre against 14km in San Jose, and counts 100 beaches nearby to San Jose's 1. Its core packs far more notable places within walking distance, and many times as many restaurants, across a wider range of kitchens.

Where they are alike

Museums are where the two sit closest. Neither is a heritage destination: Seattle has somewhat more museums, held tightly around its centre, but the offering is limited on both sides, and neither has a UNESCO-listed place within day-trip reach.

Family travel and nights out are close too. Both have theme parks within reach, 2 near San Jose and 1 near Seattle, and both carry enough bars and clubs for an evening out, though Seattle concentrates them near the centre.

Which traveller are you?

City-break walkers should take Seattle. Its centre holds many times as many notable places within walking distance, along with far more restaurants across a wider range of kitchens and a much larger number of bars and clubs.

Walkers and day-trippers should take San Jose. 26% of the surrounding land is protected against 9% around Seattle, there is more park space near the centre, and highs of 15-27°C keep winter outings realistic.

Families could go either way. Seattle has many more tourist attractions near the centre and the sea 1km away; San Jose answers with more park space and 2 theme parks within reach against Seattle's 1.

What the numbers don't tell you

Both cities are in the same country, so the value figure is a national price level, identical for the two by construction. It carries no information about which of these trips costs less. The dataset holds no daily budget for either city, so no cost comparison between them is possible at all.

No weather station near either city records sunshine hours, so that side of the weather comparison is unmeasured rather than poor; the monthly picture rests on temperature, rainfall and sea temperature alone. And close water is not swimming water: the sea peaks at 15°C in San Jose and 12°C in Seattle.

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 Jose
15
17
19
21
23
26
27
27
27
24
19
17
Seattle
8
10
12
15
19
21
25
25
22
15
11
8
Sea temperature, °C
San Jose
12
12
12
12
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
13
Seattle
8
8
8
9
10
11
12
12
11
10
9
9
Rainfall, mm
San Jose
50
78
51
25
9
2
0
0
2
15
33
62
Seattle
147
96
106
81
48
37
15
25
41
99
160
147
Daylight, hours per day
San Jose
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Seattle
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
9

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. San Jose: 1991-2020 normals, San Jose / Santa Clara Trailer Village (8.2 km from centre). Seattle: 1991-2020 normals, Seattle-Tacoma Airport (17.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

San Jose holds its best run from May to October, with highs of 23-27°C and no more than 15mm of rain in any of those months; the shoulder months either side stay usable, while winter is cooler and wetter.

Seattle's good window is narrower: July and August, at 25°C with 15-25mm. Either side of that the rain climbs quickly, and in winter highs sit near 8°C with over 140mm a month, which rules out a lot of outdoor time.

Getting there

Flying fromSan JoseSeattle
TokyoHND, NRT
10 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
9 h 45 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
5 h 35 m
€286-328
1 stop
SFO · 57 km
5 h 15 m
€300-424
SEA · 18 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
1 h 15 m
no fares
SJC · 8 km
2 h 30 m
€111-203
SEA · 18 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
3 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
3 h 50 m
€204-286
1 stop
SEA · 18 km
SeoulICN, GMP
11 h 20 m
€662-735
SFO · 57 km
10 h 30 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
WashingtonIAD, DCA
5 h 15 m
€252-262
1 stop
SFO · 57 km
5 h 0 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
VancouverYVR, YDT
2 h 10 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
55 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 50 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
9 h 45 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
GuadalajaraGDL
3 h 45 m
no fares
SJC · 8 km
4 h 45 m
no fares
SEA · 18 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
16 h 0 m
€1,005-1027
1 stop
SFO · 57 km
14 h 40 m
€1,006-1077
2 stops
SEA · 18 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 JoseSeattle
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC-8, UTC-7 in summerUTC-8, UTC-7 in summer
Emergency number911911
Elevation25 m40 m
Main airportMineta San Jose International Airport (SJC)8 km from centre17 non-stop destinationsSeattle–Tacoma International Airport (SEA)18 km from centre135 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureSan JoseSeattle
City population1,013,240737,015
People per km²2,1671,996
Museums within 10 km1927
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km00
Distinct cuisines in the centre3078
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 Jose or Seattle 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.