JPEG vs PNG vs WebP in 2026 — A Quick Reference

Browser support for WebP became a non-issue around 2023, and AVIF is now supported everywhere except a few corporate IE-equivalents. So the format question stopped being 'what will work' and started being 'what's best for this specific image'. Here's a short reference.

Use JPEG for photographs that don't need transparency. The format is older but its compression curve for natural images with smooth gradients is still excellent, and every tool on every platform handles it without fuss. Quality 80 is the sweet spot — below that you start to see banding in skies; above that you're paying bytes for invisible improvements.

Use PNG for screenshots, UI mockups, illustrations with sharp edges, and anything that needs lossless quality or transparency. PNG is bad at photographs (a JPEG of the same photo will be 5–10× smaller) and good at flat-color images. PNG-8 (256-color palette) is also still useful for icons and simple graphics, often beating PNG-24 by a wide margin.

Use WebP when you want JPEG's compression curve plus transparency, or when you want roughly 25–35% smaller files than JPEG at the same visible quality. WebP is now the default I'd reach for on the web — except when interoperability matters (some non-browser image viewers still trip on it).

Use AVIF when file size is the priority and you control the consumer (your own website, an app you build). AVIF compresses dramatically better than WebP for photos, but encoding is slower and editing tooling is still catching up.

A rule of thumb that's served me well: pick PNG for anything you'll edit again, JPEG for anything you'll only display, WebP for the web specifically. AVIF if you need every byte to count.

Our image converter handles all four formats client-side — drop a file in, pick the target format, and the conversion happens in your browser using the Canvas API and a WASM encoder for AVIF. No upload, no quality fingerprinting, no service stamping its own metadata onto your output.