City Map CompareShanghai
6,341 km²
Tokyo
2,194 km²
vs
vs
5 km
City Map Compare lets you put two cities side by side on synchronized maps so you can see, at a glance, exactly how their footprints compare. Most online maps only show one city at a time, and statistics like "2,194 km²" or "468 mi²" rarely give you a real sense of scale. By locking both maps to the same zoom level, this tool turns abstract numbers into something you can actually see — Tokyo's sprawling metro overlaid against New York's tighter grid, or Paris tucked neatly inside Greater London.
The tool currently covers 97 major cities across six continents, with data on administrative area, metropolitan extent, population, density, climate, elevation, and major transit systems. Every city page is built from the same dataset that powers the side-by-side comparisons, so you can move fluidly between exploring a single city and putting it next to another. There is no signup, no paywall, and no app to install — everything runs in your browser on OpenStreetMap data, so it works on any device with a modern web browser.
Whether you are a traveler trying to gauge how walkable a destination really is, a student writing a paper on urban density, a designer referencing real-world scale, or just someone curious whether your hometown is bigger than you thought — the side-by-side view gives you an honest visual answer in seconds. Pick two cities from the selectors above to begin, or jump straight into one of the popular comparisons listed further down this page.
Use the search selectors at the top of each map to choose any two of our 97 cities, or browse the popular pairings below.
Both maps stay at the exact same zoom level. Pan or zoom one map and the other follows automatically — guaranteeing a fair, scale-accurate comparison.
Drop pins to measure straight-line distances, capture a screenshot with the share button, or open a live session to compare locations with a friend in real time.
General-purpose mapping apps are optimized for finding places, not comparing them. Switching between two tabs always loses the scale, and screenshots can never be compared honestly because the zoom levels drift apart. City Map Compare solves a single, narrow problem: it shows two places at the same scale, on the same screen, with the same projection, so the visual comparison is genuinely accurate. Every feature on the page — the city selectors, the synchronized zoom, the marker tool, the screenshot capture, the live shared sessions — exists to make that one comparison faster and more useful.
Browse all 97 cities — area, population, and size facts for every city in our database.
Some cities are larger than whole countries, at least on paper: their administrative boundaries take in suburbs, farmland and mountains.
City limits, metro areas and built-up areas give three different answers to "how big is this city?", and web maps draw Helsinki at four times its true area. What skews city comparisons, with a checklist for fair ones.
Houston's 1,725 km² city limits hold more land than Athens, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Paris, Dublin, Brussels, Stockholm, Helsinki, Amsterdam and Vienna put together. How annexation, no zoning and cheap land built it, and what the comparison leaves out.
The 10 largest, 10 smallest, densest and most spread-out cities in our 97-city database — plus what 'city area' actually measures and the comparisons that still surprise people.
Both maps are kept at the same ground scale: a kilometer covers the same number of pixels on the left map as on the right, and zooming one zooms the other. Most web maps use the Web Mercator projection, which stretches distances away from the equator (by about 2× at 60° latitude), so two maps at the same zoom level would make the city nearer a pole look too big. City Map Compare zooms the second map in or out by exactly that latitude factor, and the scale bar applies to both maps.
Area and population figures come from Wikidata and Wikipedia, which cite each city's official statistics office or most recent census. The administrative area and the wider metropolitan extent are tracked separately, since the two can differ dramatically — Tokyo's 23 special wards cover 627 km², the Tokyo Metropolis about 2,194 km², and the Greater Tokyo Area more than 13,500 km².
You can search any two of the 97 cities in our database, which span all six inhabited continents. The map itself works anywhere: search for a place that isn't in the list and the tool drops it on the map at the same scale, and looks up its area and population when public data exists.
Official city limits are political lines, not urban footprints. Some cities draw their boundary tightly around the historic core (Paris covers 105 km²), others take in suburbs, farmland or forest (Houston covers 1,725 km²). Compare the administrative area with the metro area on each city page before drawing conclusions.
Yes. City Map Compare is free, needs no signup and runs entirely in your browser. Map data is © OpenStreetMap contributors and the map tiles are served by CARTO; the site is supported by advertising.
Yes — the layout adapts to phone and tablet screens, with the two maps stacking vertically on narrow viewports while still keeping their zoom levels synchronized. For the most detailed comparisons a laptop or desktop screen is more comfortable, but any modern mobile browser works.