PNG vs JPG vs WebP: Which Image Format Should You Use?

Is WebP better than JPG?

For images on a website, WebP is usually the better choice: it tends to produce smaller files at a similar visual quality, and unlike JPG it can store transparency. In our test, a landscape photo saved at quality 85 came to 538 KB as WebP and 638 KB as JPG. The gap was wider on a screenshot of this site, where WebP weighed 49 KB against 85 KB for JPG.

WebP is not smaller in every case, though. At quality 95 the same photo was 870 KB as WebP and 849 KB as JPG, so at very high settings the advantage can disappear. JPG also wins on compatibility: every device, editor and upload form understands it, while some older apps, email clients and print services still reject WebP. Use WebP for web pages and JPG for files you send to other people.

PNG vs JPG: which should I use?

Use JPG for photographs and PNG for screenshots, logos, diagrams and anything with text or a transparent background. The difference comes from how they compress. PNG is lossless, so it reproduces every pixel exactly; JPG is lossy and approximates fine detail in a way that suits the soft gradients of a photo.

Our measurements show why the choice matters. A landscape photo took 4.8 MB as PNG and 638 KB as JPG at quality 85, a saving of 87%. A screenshot went the other way: 78 KB as PNG, but 85 KB as JPG, because JPG wastes bytes on sharp edges and flat colours and blurs small text. If an image mixes both, such as a photo with a caption, JPG at a high quality setting is usually a reasonable compromise.

Which format gives the smallest file?

In our tests WebP produced the smallest file for every kind of image at quality 85, but the runner-up changed with the image. For the landscape photo, WebP came to 538 KB, JPG to 638 KB and lossless PNG to 4.8 MB. For the website screenshot, WebP came to 49 KB, the original PNG to 78 KB and JPG to 85 KB, so PNG beat JPG.

The transparent logo showed the same pattern: 25 KB as WebP, 27 KB as JPG and 224 KB as PNG — and the JPG lost its transparent background in the process. File size also depends heavily on the quality setting: the photo ranged from 311 KB to 849 KB as a JPG between quality 50 and 95. Choose the format for the kind of image first, then tune the quality.

Does converting JPG to PNG improve quality?

No. Converting a JPG to PNG cannot bring back detail that JPG compression already removed; the PNG is an exact copy of the JPG as it is, artefacts included. What it does change is the file size, and not for the better: our test photo, a quality-92 JPG copy of the original PNG, grew from 750 KB to 4.8 MB as a PNG.

There is still a good reason to do it. A PNG does not lose anything when you save it again, while a JPG loses a little more detail every time it is edited and re-saved. If you are going to retouch, annotate or crop an image over several sessions, converting to PNG first stops the damage from accumulating. When you have finished editing, you can export a final JPG or WebP for sharing. The same logic applies to WebP: converting it to PNG keeps it exactly as it is, but never makes it sharper.

Which formats support transparency?

PNG and WebP both support transparency, including soft, semi-transparent edges; JPG does not support it at all. That makes PNG the traditional choice for logos, icons and cut-out images, and WebP a smaller alternative for the same images on a website. Our transparent test logo kept its background as WebP at 25 KB, compared with 224 KB as PNG.

When an image with transparency is converted to JPG, every transparent pixel has to become a solid colour. This site fills those areas with white, which looks right on most pages and documents but leaves a visible white box on coloured backgrounds. If you see that happen, convert to PNG or WebP instead. Converting a JPG to PNG or WebP will not make its background transparent, either; you need to remove the background in an image editor first.

Which format works everywhere?

JPG is the most compatible image format: every phone, computer, browser, image editor, printer and upload form can open it. PNG comes a close second and is accepted almost everywhere too, apart from the odd photo-printing service that insists on JPG. WebP is the newest of the three, and support is still catching up outside web browsers.

Every current browser displays WebP, and many websites serve their images in it, which is why pictures you save from the web often arrive as .webp files. Some desktop software, older versions of office suites, email clients and online forms still cannot open them, though. A practical rule: use WebP for images you publish on your own website, and JPG or PNG for files you email, upload elsewhere or send to print. If someone cannot open a WebP you sent, converting it to JPG or PNG takes a few seconds.

What about AVIF and HEIC?

AVIF and HEIC are newer formats that can compress images even more efficiently than WebP, but neither is as widely supported for everyday use. HEIC is the format many iPhones use for photos; it opens easily on Apple devices but often needs converting elsewhere. AVIF is increasingly used on websites, and current browsers display it.

This site sticks to PNG, JPG and WebP because those are the formats browsers can reliably create on their own, which is what lets every conversion run on your device without uploading anything. Creating AVIF or HEIC files in the browser would need extra software, and support still varies a lot between browsers and apps. For most people, WebP already captures most of the size benefit of these newer formats while opening in far more places, so it remains the practical choice for web images today.

How we measured

All sizes on this page come from this site's own converter, running in Chromium 156.0.8078.4 on 2026-10-23. We used three test images: a landscape photo (a CC0 picture by Bernard Gagnon from Wikimedia Commons), a screenshot of this website and a logo with a transparent background, the last two made by us. Each started as a lossless PNG and was converted to every format at quality 50, 75, 85 and 95. For the JPG and WebP starting points, we first saved each PNG at quality 92, so a JPG or WebP source is a smaller copy of the original PNG. Other browsers, other images and other converters will give different numbers, so treat them as examples rather than rules.

Convert between formats

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