About Side By City

Side By City helps you answer a simple but surprisingly hard question: how do two places actually compare? Whether you're weighing a job offer in another state, planning a move, or just curious how your hometown stacks up, we put the numbers that matter on cost of living, crime, schools, weather, housing, and demographics next to each other so you can see the differences at a glance.

Why we built it

Most of this information already exists in public government datasets, but it's scattered across different agencies, formats, and reports. Comparing two cities usually means opening a dozen tabs and doing the math yourself. We pull those sources together into a single, consistent head-to-head view — free, with no account required.

Where the data comes from

Every figure on the site comes from official, publicly available sources, refreshed periodically:

• U.S. Census Bureau (American Community Survey) — population, income, home values, rent, education, commute, and demographics.
• FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program — violent and property crime rates.
• National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) — school districts and student-teacher ratios.
• Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) — regional price parities behind the cost-of-living index.
• NOAA — 30-year climate normals for temperature and precipitation.

How our indexes work

To make different cities comparable, several metrics are expressed as an index where 100 equals the U.S. national average — below 100 is below average, above 100 is above average. This applies to the cost-of-living index and to our crime indexes (violent crime is benchmarked to roughly 380 incidents per 100,000 residents, property crime to roughly 2,100). It lets you compare a "hundreds" metric and a "thousands" metric on the same footing.

How to use it

Search for any city, or use the compare box to put two cities head to head. You can compare any two U.S. cities — not just the popular ones — and every comparison links back to the full profile for each city.

Independence and accuracy

Side By City is an independent project and is not affiliated with any government agency. We work to present the underlying data accurately, but datasets are updated on the agencies' own schedules and not every agency reports every metric for every place, so some figures may be missing or lag the present. If you spot something that looks wrong, we'd genuinely like to hear about it — see our Contact page.

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