Battle of the Codecs

See how JPEG XL stacks up against other file formats.

JPEG XL
2021
JPEG
(de facto) 1992
PNG
1996
JPEG 2000
2000
WebP
2010
HEIC
2015
AVIF
2019
Compression (Photos)
Low Fidelity
Medium Fidelity
High Fidelity
Lossless
Compression (Other Images)
Lossy non-photographic
Lossless non-photographic
Mixed photo/non-photo
Speed
Single-core encode speed
Single-core decode speed
Parallelizable
Limits
Precision Max Depth 32 bit 8 bit 16 bit 38 bit 8 bit 10 bit 10/12 bit
Supports Lossy 4:4:4
Wide gamut/HDR
Maximum Number of Channels 4,099 4 4 16,384 4 5 5
Maximum Image Dimensions 1,073,741,823
x
1,073,741,823
65,535
x
65,535
2,147,483,647
x
2,147,483,647
4,294,967,295
x
4,294,967,295
16,383
x
16,383
8,193
x
4,320
8,193
x
4,320
Features
Supports animation
(M-JPEG)
(APNG)
(MJ2)
Progressive decoding
Alpha transparency
Depth map
Overlays
Authoring workflow suitability
Generational loss resilience
n/a
Lossless JPEG recompression
n/a
Royalty-free

Chart adapted from Time for Next-Gen Codecs to Dethrone JPEG (Jon Sneyers, Cloudinary blog, February 2021).