VacationSelector

Shanghai or Singapore?

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

Your match

Shanghai
54
match

Wins on good for families and value for money with your weighting.

Singapore
✓ Best match
68
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.

ShanghaiSingapore
Beaches & swimming. Singapore leads by 83 points.83
ShanghaiSingapore
Score17100
Swim season months512
Beaches 10 km042
Coast distance18 km2 km
Water distance18 km2 km
Places to eatWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Museums & heritage. Singapore leads by 5 points.5
ShanghaiSingapore
Score4550
Museums within 10 km10857
Museums within 2 km of centre2826
Share of museums within 2 km %2646
Unesco sites within 50 km01
NightlifeWe cannot measure this for Shanghai.
Nature & day trips. Shanghai leads by 8 points.8
ShanghaiSingapore
Score4234
Protected land share 50 km %91
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %8253
Park area within 2 km83 hectares156 hectares
Good for families. Shanghai leads by 13 points.13
ShanghaiSingapore
Score8168
Tourist attractions within 2 km8628
Park area within 2 km83 hectares156 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km105
Sights concentration. Singapore leads by 15 points.15
ShanghaiSingapore
Score5166
Notable places within 2 km73172
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Shanghai leads by 9 points.9
ShanghaiSingapore
Score7970
Price level global4962
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Shanghai leads by 3 points.3
ShanghaiSingapore
Score6562
Monthly daytime high8.5 °C to 33.2 °C30.6 °C to 32.4 °C
Monthly rainfall43 mm to 216 mm109 mm to 329 mm
Dry months00
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
Shanghai
9
11
15
21
26
28
33
33
29
23
18
12
Singapore
31
31
32
32
32
32
31
31
32
32
31
31
Sea temperature, °C
Shanghai
8
7
10
14
19
22
26
28
26
21
17
12
Singapore
28
28
29
30
30
30
30
29
29
29
29
29
Rainfall, mm
Shanghai
69
65
88
72
84
192
151
216
97
64
53
43
Singapore
227
109
151
165
163
139
145
149
124
167
253
329
Daylight, hours per day
Shanghai
10
11
12
13
14
14
14
13
12
11
11
10
Singapore
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
Sunshine, hours per day
Shanghai
4
4
5
5
6
4
6
6
5
5
4
4
Singapore
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
5
5
4
4

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Shanghai: 1991-2020 normals, Shanghai / Hongqiao (8.1 km from centre). Singapore: 1991-2020 normals, Singapore / Changi Airport (17 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromShanghaiSingapore
TokyoHND, NRT
2 h 45 m
€326-382
PVG · 33 km
6 h 55 m
€310-338
SIN · 17 km
Kuala LumpurKUL, SZB
5 h 10 m
€161-231
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
1 h 0 m
€85-88
SIN · 17 km
ChengduTFU, CTU
2 h 35 m
€216-247
PVG · 33 km
4 h 25 m
€244-390
1 stop
SIN · 17 km
ChongqingCKG, CQW
2 h 25 m
€175-196
PVG · 33 km
4 h 25 m
no fares
SIN · 17 km
BeijingPEK, PKX
2 h 0 m
€150-154
PVG · 33 km
5 h 55 m
€242-270
1 stop
SIN · 17 km
GuangzhouCAN
2 h 5 m
€127-144
PVG · 33 km
3 h 45 m
€226-254
1 stop
SIN · 17 km
SeoulICN, GMP
1 h 40 m
€173-183
PVG · 33 km
6 h 5 m
€240-286
1 stop
SIN · 17 km
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
11 h 30 m
€528-630
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
13 h 30 m
€463-619
1 stop
SIN · 17 km
New YorkJFK, EWR, LGA
14 h 40 m
no fares
PVG · 33 km
18 h 45 m
€835
SIN · 17 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
8 h 15 m
€508-557
1 stop
PVG · 33 km
7 h 35 m
no fares
SIN · 17 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

MeasureShanghaiSingapore
Official languagePutonghuaEnglish, Tamil, Malay, Standard Chinese
CurrencyYuan Renminbi (CNY)Singapore Dollar (SGD)
SocketsACI220 V, 50 HzG230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightLeft
Time zoneUTC+8UTC+8
Emergency numberPolice 110, ambulance 120, fire 119Police 999, ambulance 995, fire 995
Elevation4 m21 m
Main airportShanghai Pudong International Airport (PVG)33 km from centre200 non-stop destinationsSingapore Changi Airport (SIN)17 km from centre165 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year6 days11 days

By the numbers

MeasureShanghaiSingapore
City population24,870,8955,866,139
People per km²3,9228,158
Museums within 10 km4440
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km01
Distinct cuisines in the centre64107
Swim season, months above 21 °C5 months12 months

Where else could you go?

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