LobstersFriday · October 16, 2026FREE

JPEG XL vs AVIF for web use-cases

Jake Archibald published a JPEG XL versus AVIF comparison on 15 October 2026, noting that JPEG XL has now landed in all major browsers. For lossy photos on the web, he writes that AVIF almost always produces smaller files than JPEG XL: at default effort settings the best JPEG XL version is typically 15–25% larger than the equivalent AVIF, narrowing to typically 6–20% at maximum effort, with outliers where JPEG XL is close to or beats AVIF. The encoder matters: jixel, a newer JPEG XL encoder, usually produces smaller files than libjxl except when an image has detailed transparency. For screenshots and illustrations, the equivalent JPEG XL is 30–90% larger at default effort and 20–70% larger at maximum effort. For transparency, the libjxl version is 31–44% larger at default effort and 61–70% larger at maximum effort, while jixel always encodes transparency losslessly, making its files 2–3x the size of AVIF's. AVIF is generally faster to encode and uses less memory when file size is factored in, and faster to decode; JPEG XL typically takes 2–3x as long to decode at medium quality, with the gap narrowing at very high qualities. For lossless, JPEG XL is the clear winner, with lossless WebP 9–17% larger for photos and lossless AVIF 30–120% larger. JPEG XL can also make existing JPEGs 9–20% smaller without further loss. Benchmarks used avifenc 1.4.2, libjxl 0.12.0 (cjxl), jixel 0.4.2 (git f487299), and cwebp 1.6.0, run on a 2024 MacBook Pro (M4 Pro).