How Much Better is AVIF?

There are several studies and examples that demonstrate how much better AVIF is for compressing, or reducing the byte size of an image, while still maintaining the image quality. Netflix has been cheering for AVIF for a while. Google themselves are demoing and comparing AVIF image quality and file size to legacy image formats. Not surprisingly, they find AVIF superior. According to the many tests and demos, AVIF is around 20% more effective than WebP!

Like always, there are outliers. The comparison on ctrl.blog illustrates the performance differences between the formats well. AVIF never produces a heavier output image than the jpeg baseline. Still, there might be cases where WebP, and even JPEG, produce smaller and visually better results than AVIF, just like there are images that will be lighter and higher visual quality with JPEG compression than WebP compression. For example, one common challenge with compression algorithms for still images with roots in the video domain, the background may lose a lot of detail. In those cases webp or JPEG, or JPEG2000, may still be the best option.

In our own testing and experience, ImageEngine convert millions of image every day. Today, our WebP optimization generates a 70% reduction in image payload size. While savings depends on many factors around the original image and the requesting devices, we anticipate that AVIF will average over 80% reduction in image payload size.

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