VacationSelector

San Jose or Sydney?

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.

Sydney
✓ Best match
64
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.

Scoreboard

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

San JoseSydney
Beaches & swimming. Sydney leads by 52 points.52
San JoseSydney
Score860
Swim season months06
Beaches 10 km1160
Coast distance14 km7 km
Water distance14 km7 km
Places to eat. Sydney leads by 37 points.37
San JoseSydney
Score4178
Restaurants within 2 km of centre3132,205
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km1631
Museums & heritage. Sydney leads by 25 points.25
San JoseSydney
Score2651
Museums within 10 km2044
Museums within 2 km of centre920
Share of museums within 2 km %4545
Unesco sites within 50 km02
Nightlife. Sydney leads by 44 points.44
San JoseSydney
Score3175
Drinking venues within 4 km2312,050
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre881,405
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %3869
Nightclubs within 4 km16120
Nature & day trips. San Jose leads by 12 points.12
San JoseSydney
Score7058
Protected land share 50 km %2610
Landscape blanket share 50 km %20
Land share of disc %9152
Park area within 2 km101 hectares115 hectares
Good for families. Sydney leads by 31 points.31
San JoseSydney
Score3364
Tourist attractions within 2 km237
Park area within 2 km101 hectares115 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km22
Sights concentration. Sydney leads by 46 points.46
San JoseSydney
Score1460
Notable places within 2 km9123
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Sydney leads by 7 points.7
San JoseSydney
Score4350
Price level global10090.2
Daily budget——
Year-round weather. San Jose leads by 4 points.4
San JoseSydney
Score8581
Monthly daytime high15.4 °C to 26.8 °C17.7 °C to 27.7 °C
Monthly rainfall0 mm to 78 mm55 mm to 121 mm
Dry months80
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 Jose
15
17
19
21
23
26
27
27
27
24
19
17
Sydney
28
27
26
23
21
18
18
19
22
24
25
26
Sea temperature, °C
San Jose
12
12
12
12
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
13
Sydney
23
23
23
22
21
20
19
18
18
19
20
21
Rainfall, mm
San Jose
50
78
51
25
9
2
0
0
2
15
33
62
Sydney
80
116
90
95
89
121
70
63
57
55
71
68
Daylight, hours per day
San Jose
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
10
Sydney
14
13
12
11
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
14
Sunshine, hours per day
San Jose
No sunshine record
Sydney
8
6
7
7
7
6
7
8
8
8
7
8

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). Sydney: 1991-2020 normals, Sydney Airport (3.7 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromSan JoseSydney
TokyoHND, NRT
10 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
9 h 50 m
€671
SYD · 9 km
SeoulICN, GMP
11 h 20 m
€662-735
SFO · 57 km
10 h 30 m
€548-574
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
VancouverYVR, YDT
2 h 10 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
15 h 20 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
Los AngelesLAX, BUR, SNA, VNY
1 h 15 m
no fares
SJC · 8 km
14 h 50 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
5 h 35 m
€286-328
1 stop
SFO · 57 km
19 h 30 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
10 h 50 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
20 h 40 m
€931-1073
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
DallasDFW, DAL, AFW
3 h 25 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
16 h 55 m
no fares
SYD · 9 km
SingaporeSIN, XSP
16 h 40 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
8 h 5 m
€498-549
1 stop
SYD · 9 km
MelbourneAVV, MEL, MEB
15 h 35 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
1 h 35 m
€125-169
SYD · 9 km
DohaDOH
15 h 55 m
no fares
SFO · 57 km
15 h 15 m
€997-1100
SYD · 9 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 JoseSydney
Official language–English
CurrencyUS Dollar (USD)Australian Dollar (AUD)
SocketsAB120 V, 60 HzI230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC-8, UTC-7 in summerUTC+10, UTC+11 in summer
Emergency number911000
Elevation25 m6 m
Main airportMineta San Jose International Airport (SJC)8 km from centre17 non-stop destinationsSydney Kingsford Smith International Airport (SYD)9 km from centre94 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year13 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureSan JoseSydney
City population1,013,2405,450,496
People per km²2,167449
Museums within 10 km1938
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km02
Distinct cuisines in the centre3079
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone6 months

Where else could you go?

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