GIF vs WEBP
Animated WebP is much smaller than GIF and keeps full colour and soft transparency, where GIF is limited to 256 colours. GIF still wins on compatibility: every app, email client and chat plays it.
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Choose GIF when
- Email and older chat apps, where WebP may not animate.
- Anywhere you cannot check what software will open it.
Choose WEBP when
- Animations on a website, at a fraction of the size.
- Stickers, which WhatsApp and others require as WebP.
- Anything with photographic colour, which GIF bands.
What GIF actually is
GIF holds at most 256 colours chosen per image, and it can hold several frames with delays between them, which is why it became the format for short looping animation. Its transparency is a single colour switched on or off, with no partial values, so edges against a coloured background look ragged.
A ten-second GIF is often larger than the MP4 it came from and looks considerably worse. The 256 colour limit, not the length, is what does the damage.
What WEBP actually is
WEBP does both jobs in one format: a lossy mode that beats JPG at the same visual quality, and a lossless mode that beats PNG. Unlike JPG it keeps an alpha channel, so a lossy image can still have a transparent background, which is the combination the web wanted for twenty years.
A WEBP renamed to .jpg still fails validation, because uploaders read the first bytes of the file rather than the name. Convert it properly.
GIF and WEBP side by side
| GIF | WEBP | |
|---|---|---|
| Extension | .gif | .webp |
| Media type | image/gif | image/webp |
| Compression | Lossless, after palette reduction | Lossy |
| Transparency | Yes | Yes |
| Animation | Yes | Yes |
| Quality setting | Not applicable | Yes |
| We can write it | Yes | Yes |
Questions
Is WebP better than GIF?
Technically, yes, in every way except how many places it plays.