WebP vs AVIF: Which Modern Image Format to Choose in 2026

Who's who: WebP and AVIF in two paragraphs

WebP was created by Google in 2010, based on the VP8 video codec. The idea was simple: borrow the clever tricks of video compression and apply them to a single picture, so it weighs less than JPEG and PNG while still handling transparency and animation. Over a decade and a half, WebP became a familiar part of the web — supported by every current browser and almost every CMS.

AVIF is younger: it appeared in 2019, built by the Alliance for Open Media (whose members include Google, Netflix, Apple and Amazon) on top of the newer AV1 video codec. AV1 compresses video markedly harder than its predecessors, and that same power carried over to the single frame. Put plainly: WebP is "a still image from the VP8 world," while AVIF is "a still image from the AV1 world" — one generation newer.

Size and quality: who weighs less

This is the headline question — the whole reason anyone migrates to a new format. And here AVIF wins. At the same visual quality, AVIF is usually 20–30% smaller than WebP, and on complex photos with smooth transitions the gap reaches 30–40%. Compared to the old JPEG, AVIF saves roughly half the weight.

WebP is no slouch either: against JPEG it's 25–35% lighter, and in lossless mode it beats PNG by about a quarter. So even the "runner-up" format is dramatically better than what most sites use by default.

One important caveat: AVIF's advantage shows up most on large photographs. On small elements — icons, avatars, simple flat graphics — the difference in bytes can almost vanish, because each format has overhead (headers) that eats up the advantage on a tiny file.

HDR and deep color: AVIF's trump card

This is where a real gulf opens between the two. WebP works in 8 bits per channel only — that's 16.7 million colors, enough for most images but not all. AVIF handles 10 and 12 bits, supports HDR (extended brightness range) and a wide color gamut.

What does that mean in practice? Mainly, no banding. Banding is those ugly step-like stripes that appear on smooth gradients: a sunset sky, a blurred background, the light-to-shadow transition on skin. Eight-bit WebP doesn't always have enough colors to render the transition smoothly, and stripes appear. AVIF, with its 10–12 bits, encodes the same gradients cleanly.

Encoding and decoding speed

AVIF pays for its better compression with speed. Because it's built on the heavyweight AV1 video codec, AVIF encoding is noticeably slower than WebP — sometimes several times over. For a single image that's a matter of seconds, but if you run a store with tens of thousands of products, the difference in build hours becomes tangible.

With decoding (displaying the finished image in the browser) the story is gentler: AVIF costs slightly more CPU than WebP, but it's practically unnoticeable to the end user — modern devices decode both formats quickly. WebP is a hair lighter here, which is sometimes called its hidden advantage on weaker phones.

Browser support in 2026

This used to be the decisive argument against AVIF, but by 2026 the gap has all but closed. Both formats are supported by every major browser on desktop and mobile. According to recent data, WebP is understood by around 95–96% of browsers and AVIF by around 93–95%.

The rollout timeline explains the small lag: Chrome added AVIF in 2020, Firefox in 2021, and Safari only in 2023. By then WebP had been "everywhere" for several years. But today you can safely serve either format to users — just provide a fallback for the remaining couple of percent on older browsers (more on that below).

Animation and transparency

Good news: on these two points the formats are practically even. Both support transparency (an alpha channel) and both do animation — meaning they can replace PNG (for logos on a transparent background) as well as the heavy GIF (for short looping clips), and at a far smaller weight.

The nuance is in the details. WebP's transparency is 8-bit; AVIF's can be 10/12-bit, which again helps with smooth semi-transparent transitions. On the animation side, though, WebP currently has more mature, familiar tooling: there are noticeably more libraries and editors that reliably build animated WebP than animated AVIF. If animation is your main scenario, WebP is the calmer choice right now.

What to choose for your task

Enough abstractions — here are concrete recommendations by scenario.

• Photos, galleries, large banners → AVIF. Maximum weight savings and clean color without banding. This is exactly where its strengths fully emerge.
• Icons, logos, flat graphics, screenshots → WebP. The size difference is minimal, while WebP encodes faster and slots into any pipeline more easily.
• Animation instead of GIF → WebP. Same result, but with established tooling.
• Huge catalogs (thousands of images) → weigh your build time. If AVIF's slow encoding strains your budget, WebP delivers 80% of the benefit at a fraction of the cost.
• Need one format "for everything," kept simple → WebP. The widest support and the fewest pitfalls.

The picture strategy: both formats at once

Here's the key secret: on a production site, "WebP or AVIF" is a false choice. The right answer is "WebP and AVIF," and the browser decides. The <picture> tag lets you list several variants of one image, and the browser picks the first format it understands, ignoring the rest.

You order them from most efficient to most compatible: AVIF first, then WebP as the fallback, and plain JPEG last — for the rare browsers that know neither.

Schematically it looks like this: <picture> → <source type="image/avif"> → <source type="image/webp"> → <img src="...jpg">. One block of markup, and every visitor gets the file best suited to their device — without losing a byte of savings or a sliver of compatibility.

Need a different source? Convert photos from JPG to WebP, turn WebP back into a universal JPG, or see the full list of conversions on the all formats page.