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

I get asked "just tell me which format to use" more than any other question about our image compressor tool. So here's the actual answer, with the reasoning, instead of another vague "it depends" article.

Every "which image format should I use" article online eventually says "it depends" and leaves you no better off than before you clicked. I want to actually answer the question, with real numbers from testing, not just repeat the theory every other site copies from each other.

The Quick Answer

If you genuinely just want one rule and nothing else: use WebP for almost everything on the web, JPG as a fallback if you need maximum compatibility with very old software, and PNG only when you specifically need transparency or the image has sharp text and hard edges (screenshots, logos, diagrams). That's 90% of real-world decisions handled. The rest of this article is for the remaining 10%, and for understanding why.

What Actually Happens When You Compress a Photo

I ran the same test photo, a fairly typical 1920×1080 outdoor photograph, through all three formats at comparable visual quality while building our compression tool. JPG at 80% quality landed around 280KB. WebP at an equivalent visual quality landed around 190KB, roughly 32% smaller for the same photo, same eye-perceived quality. PNG, being lossless, came in at 2.1MB for the identical image, over seven times larger than the WebP version. That gap is the entire reason PNG is a poor choice for photographs specifically, even though it's excellent for other content types.

Why PNG Still Wins for Some Things

Take a screenshot of a webpage with text on it and compress it as JPG at a moderate quality setting. Zoom in around the text edges. You'll see faint colored fringing and slight blurring, JPG's compression algorithm is built around smoothing photographic gradients, and it doesn't handle sharp, high-contrast edges (like text) gracefully. PNG's lossless compression has zero issue with this since it doesn't discard any pixel information. This is why every screenshot tool defaults to PNG, and why it's still the right call for logos, icons, and anything with flat colors and hard edges.

The Transparency Question

JPG has never supported transparency, full stop, it's simply not part of the format specification. If you need a transparent background (a logo over a colored page background, an icon in a UI), your choice narrows to PNG or WebP. Both support an alpha channel. WebP generally produces smaller files here too, but PNG remains the safer universal choice if you're exporting assets for a client or a design system where you're not 100% sure every downstream tool supports WebP.

Browser Support, Is WebP Actually Safe to Use Now?

This used to be the real blocker. WebP launched in 2010 and for years had spotty support, Safari didn't add it until 2020. That's no longer a meaningful concern, every major browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge) has supported WebP since 2020, and usage share of browsers that don't support it is now a rounding error for most audiences. Unless you have a specific reason to believe your visitors are on genuinely ancient software, WebP is safe to use as your default in 2025.

What About AVIF?

If you want to go a step further, AVIF is a newer format that typically beats WebP by another 10-20% at equivalent quality. Support is good but not quite as universal as WebP yet, and encoding is noticeably slower. For most everyday use, WebP hits the sweet spot of excellent compression and near-universal support. AVIF is worth using if you're optimizing a high-traffic site down to the last kilobyte and can tolerate slightly more complex tooling.

My Actual Workflow

For this site, every photo gets exported as WebP at 75-80% quality. Every logo, icon, and UI screenshot gets exported as PNG. I don't use plain JPG for anything new anymore, it's purely a legacy fallback at this point, useful mainly for compatibility with older systems or software that hasn't caught up. If you want to test this yourself on your own images before committing to a format, our Image Compressor lets you compare JPG, PNG, and WebP output side by side with real file sizes, not just theory.

One More Format Worth Knowing: SVG

For anything that isn't a photograph, logos, icons, simple illustrations, SVG deserves a mention even though it's a different category entirely, a vector format rather than a pixel-based one. Unlike JPG, PNG, or WebP, an SVG file scales to any size with zero quality loss and zero file size penalty, since it stores mathematical shape descriptions rather than a pixel grid. If you're exporting a logo, check whether SVG is available before defaulting to PNG, it's usually both smaller and infinitely scalable.

A Note on Quality Settings

Whichever lossy format you choose, the quality slider matters more than most people assume. Dropping from 100% to 85% quality is usually visually invisible but cuts file size substantially, since the very top quality settings preserve redundant detail the eye barely registers. Below roughly 50%, artifacts become genuinely visible, blocky patches, blurred fine detail. For most web content, 75-85% is the sweet spot worth testing on your own images before settling on a default.