SVG vs PNG: which download should you use?
Both buttons give you the same artwork. They behave completely differently the moment you resize it, edit it, or send it to a printer.
The short answer
Download the SVG if the artwork will be resized, edited, recoloured, or printed large — a logo, a sign, a cut file, anything going on something bigger than a screen. Download the PNG if the artwork is finished and just needs to be viewed or shared — a social post, a forum avatar, an email attachment, a slide — or if you used the Paint or Canvas textures and want them to survive intact everywhere.
What the two formats actually are
A PNG is a grid of pixels. The file stores a colour for every pixel in the image, losslessly compressed. Its resolution is fixed the moment it is written: a 2000 × 1500 PNG has 3 million pixels of information and will never have more, no matter what you do to it afterwards.
An SVG is a set of drawing instructions — a list of shapes, each with an outline and a fill colour, written in XML text. There is no resolution stored anywhere in the file. When you open it, the renderer draws those shapes fresh at whatever size the screen or printer asks for. That is the entire difference, and every practical consequence below follows from it.
Scaling: the difference you will notice first
Enlarge a PNG and the software has to invent pixels that were never recorded. It interpolates between the ones it has, and the result softens — gently at 150%, obviously at 400%, and into visible mush beyond that. Edges that were crisp become gradients. There is no setting that fixes this; the information genuinely is not in the file.
Enlarge an SVG and nothing is invented, because nothing was fixed. The shapes are re-drawn at the new size and the edges stay exactly as sharp as they were. A vector logo is as clean on a billboard as on a business card, from the same file. This is the reason vector formats exist and the reason sign shops, print houses, and cutting machines ask for them.
File size: the surprise that catches people out
People often assume vectors are always smaller. They are not. A PNG's size scales with its pixel count. An SVG's size scales with its shape count — how many separate polygons the tracer produced.
For a two-colour logo, that is a handful of shapes and the SVG will be a few kilobytes against a PNG's hundreds. For a detailed photograph traced at high quality, the engine may produce tens of thousands of polygons, and the SVG can end up larger than the PNG — sometimes several megabytes — while also being slower for a browser to draw, because it has to render every one of those shapes on the fly.
If your SVG comes out unexpectedly huge, that is the lever to pull: lower the Quality Level, reduce the Color Quantization, or raise the Polygon Fill Size. All three reduce shape count, and shape count is the file.
Editing and recolouring
An SVG opens in Illustrator, Inkscape, Affinity Designer, Figma, or any text editor, and every shape in it is a separate object you can select, move, delete, or refill. Changing a logo's colour is selecting the shapes and picking a new fill. You can delete a stray blob, nudge a curve, or pull one element out to use on its own.
A PNG offers none of that. To a raster editor it is one flat layer of pixels; "changing the colour" means masking and painting, and any edit near an edge fights the anti-aliasing. If you intend to touch the artwork again after it leaves this tool, take the SVG.
Where SVG causes trouble
- The textures. Paint Texture and Canvas Texture are included in the SVG, but some vector editors — Adobe Illustrator in particular — will flatten or rasterize those effects on import, so the look you saw in the preview may not survive the round trip. The PNG always preserves it exactly.
- Very high shape counts. A 40,000-polygon SVG can make an editor sluggish and a browser stutter, and some older printer RIPs choke on them outright.
- Places that simply will not take one. Most social platforms, many forums, a lot of e-commerce product uploaders, and most email clients reject or refuse to display SVG. Send a PNG.
Where PNG is the right answer
- Anything going to a website, social post, slide deck, or email at a size you already know.
- Anything where the textured, painterly look matters more than editability.
- Any recipient who has told you they want a raster file, or whose upload form only accepts PNG or JPG.
Our PNG export is written at 2× the original image's resolution, so it has real headroom — you can place it at 100% and still have detail in hand, or print it at a modest size without softness. It is a finished picture, not a source file.
Quick decision table
| What you're doing | Take | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Logo for a sign, shirt, or vehicle wrap | SVG | The shop will scale it; they may also need to separate colours. |
| Cut file for vinyl, laser, or CNC | SVG | Cutting software follows paths, not pixels. |
| Posting the art on social media | PNG | SVG usually isn't accepted, and won't display if it is. |
| Printing a poster | SVG, unless textured | Scales to any size; textured art is safer as PNG. |
| Handing off to a designer | Both | SVG to work from, PNG to show the intended look. |
| Website hero or icon | SVG if simple, PNG if complex | Simple SVGs are tiny and razor-sharp; complex ones are slow. |
| You'll recolour it later | SVG | Shapes carry editable fills. |
Not sure? Take both.
The two downloads are generated from the same result and cost you nothing but a second click. Keep the SVG as your master and the PNG as the copy you hand around. That way the version you can still edit never gets lost.