WebP vs GIF for a short looping clip
GIF has stuck around because every platform supports it, but it hasn't changed since 1989: a hard 256-color-per-frame ceiling and no real compression beyond that palette trick. Animated WebP is a modern successor built on the same VP8 codec work that powers WebM — it supports lossy encoding with a tunable quality knob, so you trade a little sharpness for a meaningfully smaller file instead of fighting palette banding. For screen recordings, UI walkthroughs, and short loops, that usually means a WebP 25-50% smaller than the GIF you'd get from the same source at the same resolution and frame rate.
What this tool does, exactly
The pipeline trims your clip to the start time and length you set, scales it with lanczos, then encodes with libwebp at your chosen frame rate and quality. Output loops indefinitely by default, matching how browsers render both animated GIF and animated WebP inline. Audio is discarded, because neither format carries an audio track.
When to still reach for GIF instead
A handful of surfaces still expect a literal .gif: some older chat clients, a few README renderers, and any pipeline that explicitly validates the file extension rather than the actual image format. If you're not sure the destination supports WebP, the video to GIF converter is the safer default. For everything else — a doc, a modern CMS, a Slack message, a web page — animated WebP is a straightforward smaller-file upgrade.
Sister tools
Already have a GIF that's too big? Compress GIF shrinks it without a re-record. Need the opposite direction — an existing GIF turned into a video for a platform that penalizes large image attachments? GIF to MP4 converter. And if you'd rather skip the file-format dance entirely, Clipy records straight to a hosted MP4 link that auto-plays in Slack, email, and every modern chat app.