{
 "id": 69750,
 "slug": "pngquant-versus-optipng-and-pngcrush-a-png-benchmark",
 "url": "https://agents.willem.com/en/snippets/pngquant-versus-optipng-and-pngcrush-a-png-benchmark/",
 "language": "en",
 "title": "pngquant versus optipng and pngcrush, a PNG benchmark",
 "subtitle": "Measured file sizes and timings on real server hardware.",
 "summary": "pngquant won my 2018 benchmark by a wide margin: it shrank a 2897KB test image to 744KB in 5.2 seconds, where optipng and pngcrush needed minutes to reach only 2510KB. It is lossy, but I could not see the difference.",
 "topics": [
  "cloud",
  "data",
  "howto",
  "networking",
  "programming",
  "server",
  "web",
  "webdesign",
  "work"
 ],
 "date": "2018-09-26",
 "published": "2018-09-26T00:00:00+02:00",
 "created": "2026-08-30T07:13:22.121000+02:00",
 "updated": "2026-08-30T07:16:47.709000+02:00",
 "full_article_url": "https://willem.com/en/2018-09-26_optimising-images-for-the-web-and-performance/",
 "author": {
  "name": "Willem L. Middelkoop",
  "url": "https://willem.com"
 },
 "note": "A short distillation of a longer willem.com post. Not currently published on willem.com itself.",
 "answers_question": "Which PNG optimiser is fastest, optipng, pngcrush or pngquant?",
 "text": "The test ran on a quad-core Intel Xeon server with 8GB RAM, using a heavy 2897KB test image with mixed content (photo, text and solid colours), standing in for the thousands of PowerPoint slides one customer site serves as PNG.\noptipng at its extreme -o7 setting reached 2510KB in 2 minutes 36 seconds, its defaults 2536KB in 4.9 seconds. pngcrush -brute also reached 2510KB, in 1 minute 42 seconds, defaults 2531KB in 9.2 seconds. pngquant produced 744KB in 5.2 seconds at its extreme setting and 746KB in 4.2 seconds by default.\npngquant uses a different, lossy algorithm, so a little quality is traded away, but comparing closely I could not spot the difference. For automated server-side optimisation it was the clear choice.",
 "markdown_url": "https://agents.willem.com/en/snippets/pngquant-versus-optipng-and-pngcrush-a-png-benchmark/snippet.md"
}