WebP vs AVIF in 2026: the honest comparison

WebP is the safe choice: supported everywhere since 2020, simple to generate, and on photographs it typically saves 25–35% over JPEG. For UI screenshots and graphics with flat colors, pngquant-style palette reduction into WebP can hit 90%+ savings.

AVIF is the size champion: based on AV1, it usually beats WebP by another 20–50% on photos. The catch is encoding time (slower, though fine for batch jobs) and support — everything modern, but older browsers and some enterprise WebViews still lack it.

Our advice: if your users are on modern phones and desktop browsers, serve AVIF with a WebP fallback via <picture>. If you cannot manage fallbacks, just use WebP and stop worrying.

Real numbers from our engine (a 10.9 MB PNG photo): AVIF came out at 183 KB (−98.3%), WebP at roughly 400 KB (−96%). Both are excellent; AVIF just hurts a little less.