PNG vs GIF

In 1994 the patent holder on GIF’s compression began asking for licence fees from software that wrote the format. Within months a group of developers had specified a replacement, and PNG was published in 1996: better compression, millions of colours instead of 256, real transparency, and free of any patent.

It succeeded almost completely. Everything GIF was used for in 1995 — logos, buttons, diagrams, interface graphics — became PNG, and the only thing left behind was the one feature PNG deliberately omitted.

Animation. A GIF holds a sequence of frames with timing, plays automatically, loops forever and needs no player, no controls and no permission — which is why it survived a format war it otherwise lost comprehensively.

PNG holds one frame. APNG, the animated extension, exists and is supported by every current browser, and it is still not what anybody means by "a gif". The word has stopped being a format and become a genre: short, silent, looping, posted. Platforms that accept "GIFs" now overwhelmingly convert them to video behind the scenes and keep the name.

A GIF picks a palette of at most 256 colours for the whole image, and every pixel must be one of them. For a logo with four flat colours that is plenty. For a photograph it is nowhere near enough — the sky bands into visible stripes, skin tones go blotchy, and gradients break into steps.

PNG carries millions of colours and does not choose. That difference is why a photograph should never be a GIF, and why old web pages full of GIF photographs look the way they do. The reduction is also permanent: converting that GIF to PNG preserves what is there and cannot restore the colours discarded when the palette was chosen.

GIF transparency is one bit. A pixel is either completely see-through or completely opaque, with nothing in between, which is why cut-out GIFs have stair-stepped edges and a faint fringe of whatever colour they were designed against.

PNG has a full alpha channel with 256 levels, so an edge can fade properly and a logo can sit on any background. On a page with a coloured or patterned background, this is immediately visible, and it is the reason interface graphics moved to PNG the moment browsers supported it.

For a still image with few colours, GIF is occasionally smaller — a two-colour icon of a few hundred bytes is about as compact as it can be in either format. Beyond that, PNG wins: its compression is better, and it is not paying for a palette table.

For animation the comparison is brutal. GIF stores frames with only crude sharing between them, so a three-second clip routinely runs to several megabytes where the same clip as MP4 is a couple of hundred kilobytes and looks better. Any moving image that is genuinely video should be video; GIF’s file size is the reason platforms quietly convert it.

If it is still: convert it to PNG. Smaller, no palette limit, proper transparency, and nothing is lost because the GIF had already discarded everything it was going to.

If it moves and needs to keep moving: convert it to MP4 or WebM. Every frame survives, it plays everywhere, and it is a fraction of the size. If it moves and the motion does not matter — a diagram that happens to have been saved as an animation — take the first frame as a PNG.

The only reason to keep a GIF as a GIF is a destination that will accept nothing else, which in 2026 is a short list: a few forum and email contexts, and some older signage or embedded displays.

A still graphic on a website should be WebP, with PNG as the fallback. WebP does everything PNG does at a quarter to a half fewer bytes, and it also handles animation, which makes the whole comparison on this page a historical one on the modern web.

A moving image should be a video — MP4 for compatibility, WebM where the site controls the player. The only situation that genuinely calls for a GIF today is one where somebody else’s system asks for it by name.