AVIF vs WebP vs JPEG XL
Last updated: October 2026. Three modern image formats are competing to replace JPEG, and most articles just say "they're all smaller." They aren't the same. This guide compares WebP, AVIF and JPEG XL on the axes that actually change your decision — real file size, quality behaviour, encoding speed, transparency and the support you can rely on today — and ends with a plain recommendation for each situation.
The one-paragraph answer
Want the safe default for a website today? Pick WebP — every current browser opens it and it encodes fast. Want the smallest files for photographic web images and can spend the encoding time? Pick AVIF. Care about archival quality, lossless files, editing masters or future-proofing? Pick JPEG XL — but keep a JPEG or WebP copy for the apps that still can't open it. Everyone else: convert on demand with the free local tools at the bottom of this page. Now the reasoning.
How the three formats differ under the hood
The lineage explains most of the trade-offs. WebP arrived in 2010 from Google, built on the VP8 video codec — the same family that powered early YouTube. It is a mature, conservative design: nothing exotic, broadly understood, universally supported. AVIF (2019) is built on AV1, the newer video codec behind modern streaming; inheriting video-coding tricks is what lets it crush file sizes, and inheriting video-coding complexity is why it is slow to encode. JPEG XL (finalised 2021, published as ISO/IEC 18181) came from a team that had built Google's PIK format, but unlike the other two it was designed from scratch as an image format rather than adapted from video — which is why it is fast, supports a genuine lossless mode and a high-bit-depth pipeline, and is unusually gentle on graphics with flat colours.
File size and quality
Against a JPEG of the same picture, the usual directional figures are: WebP about 25–35% smaller, AVIF about 40–50% smaller, JPEG XL roughly 30–50% smaller. Treat those as a ranking, not a promise — the winner moves with image type, encoder settings and quality target. AVIF tends to win when you squeeze very hard (aggressive low-bitrate web photos), JPEG XL is at its best toward the high and near-lossless end and on screen-friendly graphics, and WebP is the conservative middle that is always decent. The honest caveat applies to all three: exact results vary by content, so test on your own images — which is what the converters on this site are for.
Encoding speed (the underrated difference)
Here the three split sharply. WebP encodes in milliseconds in Chrome and Firefox, which ship a native canvas encoder. JPEG XL encoding is fast for a modern format. AVIF is the tortoise — borrowing the video codec's deep search makes encoding dramatically slower than the other two, which matters the instant you convert more than a handful of images. On this site that work happens on your own device rather than a server queue, but the CPU time is still real.
Transparency and the extras
- Transparency: all three support an alpha channel, so logos and cutouts survive whichever you choose.
- Animation: WebP and AVIF both animate; JPEG XL supports it too, but browser support for animated XL is still uneven, so for a shareable animation a GIF is the safer bet.
- Lossless: JPEG XL has a true-lossless mode and can even shrink an existing JPEG by around 20% without changing its pixels (lossless recompression); WebP and AVIF offer lossless modes too, but XL's is the more practical for photos and editing.
- HDR and wide colour: both AVIF and JPEG XL target high dynamic range; XL carries it through a floating-point pipeline that photographers and editors especially appreciate.
Browser and app support in 2026 — the honest picture
This is where the decision usually gets made, and where marketing copy gets sloppy, so here is the careful version.
- WebP — display support is effectively universal across current browsers. It is the safe "will it open" choice.
- AVIF — current Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari can display AVIF, so it is fine to serve on the web. What none of them expose is a built-in encoder, which is why the tools on this site encode AVIF with WebAssembly.
- JPEG XL — no longer the straggler it was. Chrome decodes .jxl by default from version 155 (October 2026), Firefox from version 158 (October 2026), and Safari shows still .jxl since version 17 (2023); Edge trails Chrome. Crucially, no browser encodes XL natively, which is why our tools use WebAssembly for that, and outside browsers — editors, phone galleries, upload forms, chat apps — support is still patchy.
Say it plainly: WebP and AVIF are safe to display to almost everyone now, while JPEG XL is safe to own but you often still need to convert it to share. That single fact decides most use cases.
A small comparison table
| Format | From | Engine | Typical size vs JPEG | Encoding | Best at |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WebP | 2010 | VP8 (video) | ~25–35% smaller | Fast | Universal-safe web images |
| AVIF | 2019 | AV1 (video) | ~40–50% smaller | Slow | Smallest photographic web files |
| JPEG XL | 2021 | Image-native | ~30–50% smaller | Fast | Lossless, editing, archiving, HDR |
Size figures are directional averages, not guarantees — your images, quality target and encoder will shift them, so always test on your own set.
Which should you actually use?
Use WebP when you are publishing to the open web and want a set-and-forget format every visitor's browser already handles, or when you need to save a WebP straight from a canvas.
Use AVIF when bandwidth is the whole game — image-heavy sites, galleries, e-commerce — and you can afford slower encoding, since browsers still display it to nearly everyone.
Use JPEG XL when your priorities are photo archiving, lossless masters, HDR or wide-gamut graphics — or you want the one format that handles both lossy and lossless well and can recompress an existing JPEG library. Just keep a conversion path back out for sharing.
Try every direction on your own photos
Because the "right" answer depends on your images, the fastest way to decide is to make the same file in all three and look. Every conversion here runs the real encoder or decoder in your browser tab via WebAssembly or canvas — nothing is uploaded, so private photos stay private. Make them: JPG to WebP, PNG to WebP, JPG to AVIF, PNG to AVIF, WebP to AVIF, JPG to JXL and PNG to JXL. Get back out with AVIF to JPG, AVIF to WebP, AVIF to JXL and JXL to AVIF, or compare formats at the AVIF and JPEG XL hub pages. For the deep dive on the newcomer, read our JPEG XL guide. Spotted an error or want a TL;DR added? Say hello.