PNG was made as an improved replacement for GIF. It supports up to 32bit / true colour images and saves them losslessly with good compression, transparency is also supported. They are supported by most applications. The main things against them is that compression can be (comparatively) slow, though this is not really an issue given hardware speeds. Also newer formats like WebP and JPEG XL can offer better compression.
✔️ Excellent support in applications.
✔️ True colour lossless support.
❌ Slow Compression / Decompression speed.
❌ Compression is beaten by newer formats such as WebP and JPEG XL.
Bonus tip: Run any saved PNG through OptiPNG, through a variety of methods it can make PNG's much smaller. For low colour PNG's, the difference can be huge!
Bonus tip 2 : Sometimes you can reduce an image to 256 colours without any real difference. Saving as a GIF or 256 colour PNG can then result in a much smaller file than a 24bit PNG.
Other image formats:
GIF |
JPEG |
JPEG XL |
PNG |
QOI |
WEBP
Comparison
Updated (20/06/2026)