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JPG vs PNG vs WEBP: Which Should You Use?
A plain-English comparison of the three formats you will meet every day, and a simple rule for choosing between them.
The one-line answer
Photographs: JPG, or WEBP if you want smaller files.
Logos, screenshots, anything with flat colour or transparency: PNG.
Website images where every kilobyte matters: WEBP.
Lossy and lossless, explained without jargon
Every image format has to make a choice: keep every pixel exactly as it is, or throw some information away to make the file smaller.
Lossless formats keep everything. Save, reopen and save again a hundred times and the picture is identical. PNG works this way.
Lossy formats discard detail your eye is unlikely to miss. The file gets dramatically smaller, but the discarded information is gone forever. JPG works this way, and WEBP can work either way.
The practical consequence is that lossy formats degrade a little every time you re-save them. Editing a JPG ten times leaves it noticeably worse than the original.
JPG
JPG has been the standard for photographs since the 1990s and every device on earth can read it. It is very good at compressing the smooth gradients found in real scenes: skies, skin, out-of-focus backgrounds.
Where it struggles is sharp edges against flat colour. Text, logos and screenshots develop faint smudges around the edges, often called mosquito noise. JPG also cannot store transparency at all, so anything transparent becomes white or black.
PNG
PNG keeps every pixel exactly and supports full transparency, which makes it the natural choice for logos, icons, diagrams and screenshots. The cost is size: a photograph saved as PNG can easily be five to ten times larger than the same photograph as JPG, with no visible benefit.
PNG is also the right choice when a file will be edited repeatedly, because re-saving never degrades it.
WEBP
WEBP is the newer option and can behave like either of the others. In lossy mode it typically produces files around a quarter smaller than JPG at similar quality. In lossless mode it beats PNG on size while keeping transparency.
Support is now near-universal in browsers, which is why most modern websites use it. The main hesitation is outside the browser: some older desktop software and a few printing services still prefer JPG or PNG.
Side by side
| JPG | PNG | WEBP | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Keeps every pixel | No | Yes | Either mode |
| Transparency | No | Yes | Yes |
| File size, photos | Small | Very large | Smallest |
| Sharp text and edges | Weak | Excellent | Good |
| Safe to re-save | No | Yes | Only lossless mode |
| Universal support | Yes | Yes | Browsers yes, some apps no |
How this affects upscaling
Two points matter when you enlarge an image.
First, the format of your original limits the result. A JPG that was saved at low quality already contains compression artefacts, and an upscaler will enlarge those artefacts along with everything else. If you have a PNG original or a higher-quality JPG, start from that.
Second, the output format should match the purpose. Our upscaler defaults to keeping the format you uploaded, and writes JPG and WEBP at maximum quality so nothing extra is thrown away. If you are enlarging a logo, choose PNG explicitly so the edges stay perfectly clean.
A rule you can remember
If the image came out of a camera, use JPG or WEBP. If it came out of a design program, use PNG. If it is going on a website and size matters more than compatibility, use WEBP.
You can convert between all three when you upscale an image by choosing the download format.