VacationSelector

Vienna or Budapest?

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, 1 point apart

Vienna
59
match

Wins on museums & heritage and sights concentration with your weighting.

Budapest
60
match

Wins on value for money 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.

The verdict

Choose Budapest if you want attractions, parks and nightlife packed close to the centre, with slightly warmer and drier weather and highs reaching 28°C in August.

Choose Vienna if museums and heritage are the point of the trip: more of them, more UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach, and more notable buildings within walking distance of the centre.

Scoreboard

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

ViennaBudapest
Beaches & swimming. Vienna and Budapest are level on 0.
ViennaBudapest
Score00
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km226
Coast distance10,000 km10,000 km
Water distance——
Places to eat. Vienna and Budapest are level on 77.
ViennaBudapest
Score7777
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,6171,699
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3735
Museums & heritage. Vienna leads by 17 points.17
ViennaBudapest
Score8164
Museums within 10 km192144
Museums within 2 km of centre11064
Share of museums within 2 km %5744
Unesco sites within 50 km31
Nightlife. Vienna leads by 2 points.2
ViennaBudapest
Score7472
Drinking venues within 4 km1,9481,765
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre1,0891,168
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %5666
Nightclubs within 4 km10897
Nature & day trips. Budapest leads by 8 points.8
ViennaBudapest
Score3240
Protected land share 50 km %48
Landscape blanket share 50 km %00
Land share of disc %100100
Park area within 2 km93 hectares111 hectares
Good for families. Budapest leads by 2 points.2
ViennaBudapest
Score6971
Tourist attractions within 2 km4675
Park area within 2 km93 hectares111 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km41
Sights concentration. Vienna leads by 6 points.6
ViennaBudapest
Score7569
Notable places within 2 km287206
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Budapest leads by 21 points.21
ViennaBudapest
Score5980
Price level global76.948
Daily budget€160€104
Year-round weather. Budapest leads by 3 points.3
ViennaBudapest
Score6164
Monthly daytime high3.3 °C to 26.8 °C3.6 °C to 27.9 °C
Monthly rainfall38 mm to 80 mm27 mm to 75 mm
Dry months15
0255075100

Where they differ

Budapest packs more into the centre: about twice as many tourist attractions as Vienna, more park space, and most of its bars and clubs close in, against about half in Vienna. More of the surrounding land is protected, 8% against 4%.

Vienna has somewhat more museums, three UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach against Budapest's one, and more notable buildings within walking distance of the centre. The estimated daily budget is €104 for Hungary and €160 for Austria, country figures rather than city ones.

Where they are alike

Eating out is where the two are hardest to separate: a similar number of restaurants near the centre in each, and a similar range of kitchens.

Nightlife is close as well, with comparable numbers of bars and clubs, and both are much alike for families and for year-round weather, with highs of 4-28°C in Budapest and 3-27°C in Vienna. Neither is a swimming destination.

Which traveller are you?

If museums and heritage decide your trips, Vienna is the stronger choice: more museums than Budapest, three UNESCO-listed places within day-trip reach, and more notable buildings within walking distance of the centre.

Families are split. Budapest has about twice as many tourist attractions near the centre and more park space, so days need less planning; Vienna has 4 theme parks within reach against Budapest's one.

For a trip built around evenings out, Budapest edges it. Both have similar numbers of bars and clubs, but in Budapest most sit near the centre, while in Vienna about half are further out.

What the numbers don't tell you

The daily budget figures are national estimates for Hungary and Austria, price levels for restaurants and hotels, not measurements of either city. A capital can sit far from its country's average, by more than the gap between the two figures, so treat them as background rather than as what your trip will cost.

The beach figure is easy to misread: the beaches counted near Vienna are inland bathing places, and neither city has a month with sea at 21°C or more, so swimming is no reason to pick either. The warmest months are also the wettest, July heaviest for rain in both.

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
Vienna
3
6
11
17
21
25
27
27
21
15
9
4
Budapest
4
7
11
17
22
26
27
28
22
16
9
4
Rainfall, mm
Vienna
42
38
52
42
80
70
78
71
64
47
46
46
Budapest
29
27
30
37
67
67
75
60
48
41
48
39
Daylight, hours per day
Vienna
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
8
Budapest
9
10
12
14
15
16
16
14
13
11
9
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Vienna
2
4
5
7
8
8
9
9
6
4
2
2
Budapest
2
4
5
7
9
9
10
9
7
5
3
2

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Vienna: 1991-2020 normals, Wien / Hohe Warte (4.7 km from centre). Budapest: 1991-2020 normals, Budapest Met Center (2.1 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Budapest is the better bet from May to September, with highs of 22-28°C, and it stays drier in the shoulder months: 37mm in April against Vienna's 42mm, and less rain again in early autumn, so outdoor days are the safer bet.

Vienna's warm stretch is narrower and wetter, July and August at 27°C with 78mm falling in July. Winter suits neither, with highs near 3-4°C at the low point, and Vienna's cold months carry more rain.

Getting there

Flying fromViennaBudapest
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
2 h 10 m
€105-189
1 stop
VIE · 18 km
2 h 25 m
€63-91
BUD · 18 km
IstanbulIST, SAW
2 h 5 m
€121-285
VIE · 18 km
1 h 50 m
€87-214
BUD · 18 km
FrankfurtFRA, HHN
1 h 25 m
€143-152
VIE · 18 km
1 h 40 m
€123-153
1 stop
BUD · 18 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
1 h 25 m
€49-71
VIE · 18 km
1 h 40 m
€42-56
BUD · 18 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 55 m
€112-162
VIE · 18 km
2 h 10 m
€97-114
BUD · 18 km
BarcelonaBCN
2 h 15 m
€117-169
VIE · 18 km
2 h 25 m
€93-118
1 stop
BUD · 18 km
AmsterdamAMS
1 h 50 m
€180-245
1 stop
VIE · 18 km
2 h 5 m
€175-230
1 stop
BUD · 18 km
DubaiDXB, DWC
5 h 40 m
€292-307
VIE · 18 km
5 h 25 m
€276-394
2 stops
BUD · 18 km
SeoulICN, GMP
10 h 20 m
no fares
VIE · 18 km
10 h 15 m
no fares
BUD · 18 km
TorontoYYZ, YHM, YTZ
8 h 50 m
no fares
VIE · 18 km
9 h 5 m
no fares
BUD · 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 2026-08 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

MeasureViennaBudapest
Official languageGerman, Austrian Sign LanguageHungarian
CurrencyEuro (EUR)Forint (HUF)
SocketsCF230 V, 50 HzCF230 V, 50 Hz
Driving sideRightRight
Time zoneUTC+1, UTC+2 in summerUTC+1, UTC+2 in summer
Emergency number112112
Elevation151 m117 m
Main airportVienna International Airport (VIE)18 km from centre204 non-stop destinationsBudapest Liszt Ferenc International Airport (BUD)18 km from centre155 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year16 days13 days

By the numbers

MeasureViennaBudapest
City population2,028,2891,685,209
People per km²4,8903,209
Museums within 10 km15281
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km31
Distinct cuisines in the centre11386

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Vienna or Budapest 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. Airport data from OurAirports (public domain). Tourism statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0. Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). 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. Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. 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 2026-09-01. Typical prices can be up to 7 days old. Daily budgets are estimates from country price levels.