About Heimly

What Heimly is

Heimly is a tool for deciding where to live in Vienna. It combines the City of Vienna's open government data with OpenStreetMap and turns them into two things: a Living Report for any address in the city, and a comparison of all 23 districts.

A listing tells you about a flat. Heimly tells you about what surrounds it: how far the nearest school or tram stop is, how many doctors and supermarkets are within walking distance, and how loud the road outside is. For now, Heimly covers Vienna only.

Checking an address

Search any Vienna address to open its Living Report. It shows the nearest schools, kindergartens, public transport stops, parks, shops and doctors on a map, how many of each are nearby, and a Living Score that summarises them.

Where the data exists, the report also shows information about the building, road traffic noise at the address, and answers from verified residents about what living there is like. Residents' answers appear alongside the score and are never mixed into it. You can compare two addresses side by side and, with an account, save the ones you are considering.

Search an address →

How the Living Score works

Every address gets a score from 0 to 10 in nine categories. For most categories the score combines two measurements: how far away the nearest relevant place is, and how many there are within a few hundred metres to a kilometre. Distances are measured in a straight line, except for walkability, which follows the actual street network.

• Green: distance to the nearest park and how many parks are nearby
• Transport: U-Bahn, tram, bus and rail stops
• Kindergartens: kindergartens and childcare groups
• Schools: schools of all types
• Universities: university and college buildings
• Healthcare: doctors, pharmacies and hospitals
• Shopping: supermarkets, bakeries, cafés, restaurants and pharmacies
• Walkability: everyday destinations reachable on foot along real streets
• Nightlife: bars, pubs and clubs

The overall Living Score is a weighted average of the category scores. The weights come from a lifestyle profile: Balanced, Family, Remote Worker, Student, Dog Owner or Retirement. A profile changes how much each category counts, never what is measured. If a category has no data for an address, it is left out and the remaining weights are rescaled instead of being filled in with a guess.

Finding a district

Find My District ranks all 23 districts by how well they match what matters to you. Pick a lifestyle profile or set the importance of each category with a slider, and the ranking and the map update immediately.

A district's score in each category is the median of the scores of all its addresses. Because a district is not one place, every district page also shows the range covering the middle half of its addresses: a wide range means it depends a lot on where in the district you end up. For green space, districts are compared by the share of their area that is public green space, because almost every address in Vienna is close to some park.

Open Find My District →

Where the data comes from

Heimly only uses public data:

• City of Vienna Open Government Data (data.wien.gv.at): addresses, buildings, district boundaries, public green spaces, parks, playgrounds, dog zones, sports facilities, schools, kindergartens, universities, hospitals, nursing homes, doctors, pharmacies and public transport stops.
• OpenStreetMap: supermarkets, bakeries, cafés, restaurants, bars, pubs, nightclubs, and the street network used for walking distances.
• Austria's strategic noise maps under the EU Environmental Noise Directive (laerminfo.at, 2022): road traffic noise over the whole day and at night.

Distances and counts are calculated once for every address when the data is imported, and stored. The numbers you see in a report are the same numbers its score was calculated from.

Reading the results

A high score means the places in a category are close and plentiful, not that they are good. Heimly measures access: it does not rate schools, doctors or restaurants.

Scores are capped at 10, so in the dense inner districts several categories reach the top and stop telling places apart. Look at the individual distances and counts in a report, and at the ranges on district pages, not only at the headline number.

The best address or district is the one that fits your priorities. Try different lifestyle profiles to see how much the answer depends on them.

Limitations

• Safety, air quality and rents are not covered. There is no suitable open data for them yet, so Heimly leaves them out rather than estimating.
• OpenStreetMap is maintained by volunteers. Shops, cafés and nightlife are mapped less completely in the outer districts, which can understate those scores there.
• A straight-line distance can understate how far something really is when a railway, the Danube or a major road is in the way. Only walkability uses real walking routes.
• Noise covers road traffic from the official noise maps. Rail, aircraft and neighbourhood noise are not included.
• The data reflects the most recent import. Places that opened or closed since then are not shown yet.
• Heimly currently covers Vienna only.