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

Short answer: use WebP for images on your website, JPG for photos you're printing or sharing outside the web, and PNG for logos, icons, or anything that needs a transparent background. Here's why, with the actual numbers.

The core trade-off: compression vs. quality vs. transparency

Every image format is a different answer to the same three questions: how much can we shrink the file, how much visual detail are we willing to lose, and do we need to support see-through pixels? PNG, JPG, and WebP land in different places on all three.

Format	Compression	Transparency	Best for
PNG	Lossless	Yes (full alpha)	Logos, icons, screenshots, line art
JPG	Lossy	No	Photographs, camera images
WebP	Lossy or lossless	Yes (full alpha)	Web images — replaces both JPG and PNG

PNG: lossless, but heavy

PNG never throws away image data — every time you save a PNG, you get back exactly what you started with, pixel for pixel. That makes it the right choice for anything with sharp edges, flat colors, or text: logos, icons, diagrams, and screenshots all compress well as PNG because those images don't have the millions of subtly-different colors a photograph does. The trade-off is file size: a photographic PNG can be five to ten times larger than the same image saved as JPG.

JPG: small files, but no transparency and gradual quality loss

JPG was built for photographs. It compresses by discarding color information the human eye is least likely to notice, controlled by a quality setting from 0–100. At quality 80–90, most people can't tell a JPG apart from the original — but there are two real costs. First, JPG has no transparency channel, so a logo saved as JPG gets a solid background baked in. Second, JPG is a "lossy" format: every time you open, edit, and re-save a JPG, it loses a little more detail — a phenomenon called generation loss.

WebP: the modern answer to both

WebP, developed by Google, supports both lossy compression (like JPG) and lossless compression (like PNG) — and it supports full transparency in both modes. At matched visual quality, WebP files typically run 25–35% smaller than JPG and dramatically smaller than PNG. Since 2020, WebP has been supported by every major browser, which is why Google's own PageSpeed Insights recommends converting images to WebP to improve page load time — image weight is one of the biggest levers for Core Web Vitals and search ranking.

A simple decision rule

• Publishing to a website? Use WebP. It's smaller than both alternatives and still supports transparency.
• Sharing a photo by email, printing, or uploading somewhere that might not support WebP? Use JPG.
• Need a transparent background and maximum compatibility (logos, icons)? Use PNG.

Whichever direction you need to go, you can convert between all three instantly and privately — the conversion happens in your browser, so the image never leaves your device. Try PNG to WebP, JPG to WebP, or WebP to PNG.