GIF vs PNG

Diffen › Technology › Computers › File Formats

PNG files almost always offer better compression and a reduced file size compared to GIF. The PNG format also supports variable transparency and millions of colors while GIF only supports 256 colors and does not offer alpha channels. For online use, the only scenario where GIF files are appropriate instead of PNG is animations.

Comparison chart

GIF versus PNG comparison chart
	GIF	PNG
	current rating is 3.58/5 1 2 3 4 5 (74 ratings)	current rating is 4.29/5 1 2 3 4 5 (86 ratings)
Support for animation	Yes	No
Color management	No	Supports color management through the inclusion of ICC color space profiles
Support for multi-page	Yes	No
Support for transparency	Yes	Yes
MIME type	image/gif	image/png
File extensions	.gif, .gfa	.png
Raster/vector	Raster	Raster
Indexed color	Yes	Yes (for 1-8bit PNGs)
Support for metadata	Yes	Yes
Stands for	Graphics Interchange Format	Portable Network Graphics
Support for layers	Yes	No
Interlacing support	Yes	Yes
Type of format	Raster graphics image format	Raster graphics image format
Extendable	Yes (GIF89a)	No
Compression algorithm	Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW)	Lossless DEFLATE compression algorithm
Applications compatible	Most web browsers and productivity suites	Most web browsers and productivity suites
Patented	No	No
Uniform Type Identifier	com.compuserve.gif	public.png
Magic Number	GIF87a/GIF89a	89 50 4e 47 0d 0a 1a 0a

Applications

Unless your image is animated, use the PNG format.

Advantages of PNG over GIF

The PNG format offers several advantages over GIF files:

Better compression, resulting in reduced file size (typically 5 - 25% better)
PNG supports variable transparency (alpha channels).
PNG offers control of image brightness (via cross-platform gamma correction) and color correction.
PNG supports two-dimensional interlacing (a method of progressive display) while GIF does not.

Transparency

In a GIF file, only one color may be specified as transparent. GIF files end up producing halo effects when they used against background colors that are different from its assumed (usually white or black) background color.

PNG file have stronger transparency support, with an 8-bit alpha mask.

Market Share

The share of usage on the Internet (via HTTP Archive) of major image formats

References

About the Author

Nick Jasuja has over 15 years of technology industry experience, including at Amazon in Seattle. He is an expert at building websites, developing software programs in PHP and JavaScript, maintaining MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, and running Linux servers for serving high-traffic websites. He has a bachelor's degree in Computer Science & Engineering.

GIF vs. PNG