JPG vs PNG vs WEBP: Which Image Format Should You Use

Most format confusion comes down to one thing: JPG, PNG, and WEBP were built to solve different problems, not to compete on quality. Pick based on what is in the image, not habit.

The short version, if you want to stop reading here: use WEBP for anything going on the web, PNG when a file has to open in older software, and JPG when you need a photo that works absolutely everywhere. The rest of this explains why, and shows the numbers.

JPG: photos and anything with gradients

JPG uses lossy compression tuned for photographic detail — soft edges, gradients, lots of colour variation. It throws away information the eye barely notices and keeps file sizes small. The catch is that it does not support transparency, and every re-save adds a little more blur and artifacting, so it is a bad target for images you will keep editing and re-exporting.

The failure mode worth knowing is what JPG does to hard edges. Its compression works on 8×8 pixel blocks, which is fine for a sky or a face but visibly wrong for black text on white. You get faint halos around letters — mosquito noise — and they get worse the lower you push the quality.

• Good for: photos, hero images, anything with continuous tone
• Bad for: logos, text, screenshots, or images with hard edges — you will see fuzzy halos
• No transparency support at all, which is usually the dealbreaker
• Universally supported, in every browser and every piece of desktop software written in the last thirty years

PNG: anything with flat colour, text, or transparency

PNG is lossless — it preserves every pixel exactly, which is why logos, icons, screenshots, and diagrams look crisp instead of muddy. It also supports an alpha channel, which JPG cannot do at all. The tradeoff is size: a PNG of a photo can be three to five times larger than the same image saved as JPG, because lossless compression cannot throw anything away.

PNG gets chosen by default far more often than it should, mostly because screenshot tools produce it. That is the single most common source of unnecessary page weight I run into — a site serving 400 KB PNG screenshots that would be 40 KB as WEBP and look identical.

• Good for: logos, icons, UI screenshots, graphics with flat colour or text
• Bad for: photographs — you are paying a large size penalty for precision the photo does not need
• Full alpha transparency, with 256 levels rather than the on/off transparency of a GIF
• Lossless, so re-saving it a hundred times changes nothing

WEBP: the format to reach for by default

WEBP does both jobs. It has a lossy mode like JPG and a lossless mode like PNG, it supports transparency in both, and it handles animation. Google's own comparison across a large image corpus put WEBP files 25–34% smaller than JPG at equivalent quality. Browser support has been complete since 2020 — Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge all render it natively.

The one place JPG or PNG still make more sense: software outside the browser. Some desktop editors, a lot of email clients, and most print workflows still will not take WEBP. If an image is going into a newsletter template or off to a printer, stick with JPG or PNG.

The same image, every format: measured

Rather than repeat someone else's percentages, here is a file I encoded myself. The subject is a 1600 × 1000 screenshot of this site's compress page — flat colour, hard-edged text, a limited palette. Every number below is the actual byte count of an actual encoder output.

Two results are worth pulling out. First, WEBP's lossless mode came in 41% under the PNG while being pixel-for-pixel identical to it — that is free, with no quality argument to have. Second, WEBP at quality 85 landed at 44.8 KB against JPG's 161.5 KB at the same nominal quality, which is a much wider gap than the 25–34% Google's corpus study reports.

That gap is real but it is not general. Screenshots are close to the best case for WEBP: large flat regions, a small palette, and sharp edges that its predictive coding handles well. A detailed photograph — foliage, skin texture, film grain — narrows the difference considerably. Take the 25–34% figure as the honest expectation for photos and treat the table above as what happens with UI captures specifically.

If you take one thing from the numbers: converting a PNG screenshot to WEBP is usually an 80% size cut that nobody can see. There is no comparable win anywhere else in image optimisation.

What each format costs you

A decision rule that fits in your head

• Going on a web page, and you control the markup → WEBP, every time
• Photo with no transparency, needs to open anywhere → JPG at quality 85
• Logo, icon, or text-heavy graphic → WEBP if it is for the web, PNG if it is not
• Needs transparency and a small file → WEBP, which is the only format that does both well
• Going into an email template, a print job, or old desktop software → JPG or PNG
• It is your master copy and you will edit it again → PNG or the original source file, never JPG

Three mistakes that quietly cost you

Saving photographs as PNG

This is the expensive one. Lossless compression on a photograph preserves sensor noise and micro-detail that no viewer will ever notice, at several times the file size. If the image is a photo, it wants a lossy format.

Re-saving a JPG over and over

Every JPG save is a fresh lossy encode. Open, edit, save as JPG, repeat, and artifacts compound — generation loss. Keep a PNG or the original source as your working copy and export to JPG only as the final step.

Converting to PNG hoping to fix a bad JPG

PNG faithfully preserves whatever it is handed, artifacts included. It cannot reconstruct detail JPG already discarded. Converting a damaged JPG to PNG gives you a larger file with exactly the same damage in it.

What about AVIF?

AVIF compresses better than WEBP again, sometimes substantially. It is a reasonable choice in 2026, with support in all current browsers. Two things keep WEBP as the safer default: encoding is far slower, which matters when you are processing images in a browser tab, and tooling support outside the browser is younger and thinner than WEBP's. This site's converter outputs JPG, PNG, and WEBP.

If you are still unsure about a specific image, convert it to all three and compare the file size and how the edges look zoomed in. That fifteen-second test settles most format arguments, and it beats any general rule — including the ones above.