Country Size Comparison Tool
Pick any two of the 195 countries on this site to compare their true land area, population and continent — scaled to size, not to how they look on a flat map. Try Qatar vs Bahrain, or Canada vs Russia.
How to compare country sizes
Type a country into each box, or tap one of the popular pairs above, and the tool fills in area, population, continent and a true-to-scale outline for both. The outlines are sized by real land area in square kilometres, not by how large each country happens to look on the world map below — which is the detail most size comparisons get wrong.
It is a useful sanity check before travelling (is Vietnam really as big as it looks on a map?), for schoolwork, or for settling an argument about whether Texas is bigger than France (it is not, at roughly 696,000 km² to France’s 551,695 km² — but it is closer than most people expect).
Why country sizes look distorted on world maps
Almost every flat world map is a projection — a way of stretching a curved surface flat — and every projection distorts something. The Mercator projection, still the default on most wall maps and web maps, preserves angles and shapes at the cost of area: it inflates land dramatically the further that land sits from the equator. Russia, Canada and Greenland all look far larger relative to Africa, India and Brazil than they really are.
The scaled outlines above sidestep that problem by sizing each country’s silhouette directly from its land area, so a country twice the size of another is drawn with roughly twice the outline area — regardless of latitude.
Popular country size comparisons
Some of the most frequently compared pairs: Qatar vs Bahrain, India vs Pakistan, the United States vs China, Australia vs India, the United Kingdom vs Germany, and Canada vs Russia. Use the buttons above to load any of them instantly, or type in your own.