PNG vs SVG: raster or vector, and when each one works

By Andrew Butson · July 2, 2026 · 7 min read

PNG and SVG are not competing at the same job. PNG is a raster format: it stores a fixed grid of pixels, so it looks identical every time but only really works well at the size it was made for. SVG is a vector format: it stores instructions, like "draw this circle" or "fill that path," so it can be redrawn at any size with no loss of sharpness at all.

That single difference decides almost everything else about when to use each one.

The actual question is raster vs vector

A PNG is a grid of pixels, decided once and locked in at a certain width and height. Zoom in far enough and you see the individual squares; blow it up beyond its native size and it turns soft and blocky, because there is no more detail to reveal: the file simply doesn't contain any. An SVG never has this problem, because it doesn't store pixels at all. It stores a description, such as "draw a path here, fill it with this colour," and whatever is displaying it draws that description fresh at whatever size is needed. A logo saved as SVG looks exactly as crisp on a phone icon as it does printed on a billboard, from the same file.

This is why the comparison isn't really about which format looks better. A photo of a sunset has no clean shapes to describe as paths, so SVG is simply the wrong tool for it. You'd need a raster format regardless. A company logo, on the other hand, usually is built from clean shapes, and locking it into a fixed-size PNG throws away the one advantage that made vector worth having in the first place: scaling perfectly.

Where SVG wins: logos, icons, anything that has to scale

Logos and icons are the textbook SVG use case precisely because the same artwork needs to appear at wildly different sizes, from a favicon a few pixels across to an app icon to a full-width hero graphic on a homepage, and a single SVG file covers every one of them without separate exports. Because it's stored as shapes rather than pixels, an SVG logo also tends to be a tiny file, often smaller than even a modestly-sized PNG of the same image, since there's no per-pixel data to store at all.

Simple illustrations, line icons and UI graphics benefit the same way: they're usually built from a small number of shapes to begin with, which is exactly what SVG represents efficiently, and they often need to resize responsively as a page layout changes.

Where SVG simply can't work

Photographs are the clearest case: a sunset, a portrait, a product shot has continuous, irregular colour variation with no clean shapes to trace, so describing it as vector paths would need an absurd number of them and the result still wouldn't look like a photo. Raster is the only sensible model for that kind of image, which means PNG (or JPEG) rather than SVG.

Beyond photos, there's a more everyday problem: plenty of common destinations still don't handle SVG properly, or at all. Pasting an SVG into an email client or a Word or PowerPoint document often just fails to render, or the app expects a raster image and shows a blank box instead. Older browsers and a long tail of business software have the same gap. Favicons are a good example of the SVG-support story lagging behind: while modern browsers now accept an SVG favicon, plenty of tooling, older devices and some social-sharing previews still expect a PNG or ICO fallback, which is why favicon generators typically still export raster sizes alongside any SVG. If a file needs to work absolutely everywhere with zero risk of a broken image, PNG remains the safer choice even for artwork that started as vector.

Rasterizing an SVG fixes a resolution — permanently

Converting an SVG to PNG is a one-way trip: the vector instructions get drawn once, at a size you choose, into a fixed pixel grid, and everything about "scales to any size" is gone from that point on. This is exactly what you need when a destination only accepts raster images: most upload forms, image editors, marketplaces, social posts and plenty of CMSes fall into this category. The trade-off is that you have to pick a resolution up front, and it needs to be generous: enlarging the resulting PNG afterwards softens it in exactly the way the original SVG never would have.

There is no meaningful path back the other way. Turning a PNG into an SVG would mean tracing pixel data into shapes, a fundamentally different, much harder problem (called vectorization) that general-purpose converters don't do reliably, because a photo or a screenshot rarely has clean shapes to trace in the first place. If you need a vector version of something, you need the original vector source, or artwork redrawn as vector from scratch, not a format conversion.

Frequently asked questions

Is SVG better than PNG?

Neither is universally better. They solve different problems. SVG is unbeatable for logos and icons that need to scale cleanly to any size; PNG is the only sensible choice for photos and for anywhere SVG isn't reliably supported.

Can I convert a PNG to SVG?

Not meaningfully with a simple format conversion. SVG stores shapes, not pixels, so turning a PNG into SVG would require tracing the image into paths (vectorization), which only works well on very simple source images and isn't something Morphr offers. A photo or screenshot has no clean shapes to trace.

Why does my SVG logo look wrong in email or Word?

Plenty of email clients and office apps render SVG poorly or not at all, since support for it outside browsers is still patchy. Converting the SVG to PNG first gives you a raster image that displays reliably everywhere.

What resolution should I use when converting SVG to PNG?

Pick the largest size you'll realistically need. Because the PNG is fixed once it's rendered, enlarging it later will blur it: going bigger than you need costs only file size, while going too small can't be undone.