Squoosh Alternative: Is ImgTweak Better for Image Compression in 2026?

An honest, feature-by-feature comparison, not an advertisement. Here is exactly where each tool wins, and where it doesn't.

Daniel Osei·September 7, 2026·12 min read

If you've used Squoosh before, you already know what it does well. Drop in a photo, pick a codec, drag a slider, watch the file size and quality trade off against each other in real time. It's a genuinely good tool, built by Google's own Chrome Labs team, and it's been the default recommendation in a lot of web performance guides for years.

It's also built around one image at a time, with no way to target a specific KB limit, and nothing beyond the compressor itself. If that's ever gotten in your way, here's an honest look at what an alternative actually needs to do differently, not just claim to.

What Squoosh Actually Gets Right

Worth saying clearly before anything else: Squoosh deserves its reputation. It runs entirely in your browser using WebAssembly, so your images are processed locally and never uploaded anywhere, the same architecture ImgTweak uses. It's fully open source, published under Google Chrome Labs' GitHub, so anyone can inspect exactly what the code does. It's installable as a progressive web app, meaning you can add it to your device and use it offline once it's loaded.

The feature that sets it apart is the comparison slider. Load an image, adjust the codec's settings, and drag between the original and compressed result at the pixel level to see exactly what you're trading away. For someone hand-tuning a single hero image where every kilobyte and every visible artifact matters, that level of manual control, chroma subsampling, quantization tables, per-codec effort levels, is genuinely more granular than most compressors offer, ImgTweak included.

Where Squoosh Runs Out of Road

The gap shows up the moment you need to do the same thing more than once, or need a specific number rather than a visual judgment call.

Squoosh has no batch processing. There's an open feature request on its GitHub repository asking for exactly this, and as of this writing it remains unimplemented, which is why third-party wrapper tools have popped up specifically to bolt batch support onto Squoosh's own codecs. If you've got twenty product photos to compress for a store listing, Squoosh means twenty separate manual passes.

There's also no way to say "make this file 100KB" and have the tool find the right settings for you. Squoosh works by quality percentage and codec parameters, which means hitting a specific size limit, the kind a passport portal or job application form actually asks for, is trial and error: adjust the slider, check the resulting size, adjust again.

And Squoosh is, deliberately, just the compressor. There's no resize tool, no watermarking, no EXIF viewer, no format-specific guidance for what a given portal or platform actually expects. It's a focused, single-purpose tool, which is a legitimate design choice, but it means every adjacent task happens somewhere else.

Squoosh vs ImgTweak, Feature by Feature

Where ImgTweak Actually Wins

Batch processing. The main compressor handles multiple images in one pass, applying the same format and quality settings across a whole batch, which is the single biggest practical gap in Squoosh for anyone doing this regularly rather than once.

Hitting an exact target size, for a batch too. If you've been told a photo needs to be under 100KB, under 50KB, or any other specific figure, reduce image size in KB lets you type in any custom KB or MB number and apply it to a whole batch of images at once, rather than guessing a quality percentage per file. There's also the dedicated compress to 100KB family of pages for the most common fixed targets.

Tools built around the actual task. Compress for passport photos, compress for job applications, and compress for email each start from the right default for that specific situation, format, target size, common presets, instead of a blank codec panel you have to know the right numbers for already.

Everything else that comes after compression. Resize, crop, watermark, an EXIF and GPS metadata viewer, a color palette generator, and dozens of format converters live in the same toolset, so a typical workflow doesn't mean bouncing between five different sites.

Where Squoosh Still Wins

Being direct about this matters more than padding out ImgTweak's side of the table. If you want the most granular manual control over a single image's compression, adjusting quantization tables, chroma subsampling, and codec-specific effort levels by hand while watching a pixel-level comparison, Squoosh's interface is built for exactly that in a way a broader, more guided tool generally isn't.

It's also the right call if open-source transparency matters to you specifically, or if you want something installable and usable fully offline as a standalone app rather than a website you visit.

A Practical Example: Hitting a Portal's File Size Limit, for a Whole Batch

This is the clearest case where the difference actually plays out. Say a government form requires several photos, each under 100KB, JPEG only.

In Squoosh, that means loading each photo one at a time, picking MozJPEG, setting an initial quality guess, checking the resulting file size in the corner of the screen, and adjusting the slider up or down until the number lands where you need it. Repeat that for every image in the batch.

In ImgTweak's reduce image size in KB tool, you type in the exact number, 100 in this case, drop the whole batch of images in at once, and it processes each one against that same target automatically, downloading everything together as a ZIP when it's done. The tool searches for the highest quality that fits first, and only reduces pixel dimensions if quality alone genuinely can't reach the target. If a specific image is already under 100KB before you even start, it's returned untouched rather than needlessly recompressed. The full explanation of how target-size compression actually works covers the mechanism in more depth.

Who Should Actually Use Which

If you're a developer or designer hand-optimizing a small number of hero images and you want to see exactly what each codec setting does at the pixel level, Squoosh is still a strong, legitimate choice, and there's no real reason to switch away from it for that specific job.

If you're processing more than one image regularly, need to hit a specific KB or MB limit rather than eyeball a quality slider, or want tools built around a specific task like a passport photo or a job application upload rather than a general-purpose codec panel, ImgTweak's broader toolset covers that ground more directly.

Plenty of people reasonably use both: Squoosh for the occasional image where manual precision matters most, ImgTweak for everything with a batch, a deadline, or a specific size requirement attached to it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is ImgTweak actually free like Squoosh? Yes. Every tool on ImgTweak is free to use with no account required, the same as Squoosh.

Does ImgTweak upload my images anywhere, unlike Squoosh? No, and this isn't a real difference between the two. Both process images entirely in the browser using WebAssembly. Neither uploads your files to a server. If you want to verify this for either tool yourself, here's how to check any image tool's actual network behavior.

Can I get Squoosh's side-by-side comparison slider in ImgTweak? ImgTweak's tools show a before-and-after comparison slider on results, though Squoosh's live, adjustable-while-you-tune version tied directly to codec settings is a more integrated version of the same idea, and remains one of its stronger points.

Does ImgTweak support the same image formats as Squoosh? Both support the core set that matters for the web: JPEG (via MozJPEG), PNG (via OxiPNG), WebP, and AVIF. ImgTweak additionally accepts HEIC as an input format and extends into PDF, ICO, and Base64 conversions that fall outside Squoosh's scope as a dedicated image compressor.

Why doesn't Squoosh have batch processing yet? It's a long-requested feature that remains unimplemented as an open issue on the project's public GitHub repository. Third-party tools built specifically to add batch support on top of Squoosh's own codecs exist because of this gap.

Try ImgTweak for Yourself

If batch processing or an exact target size is the thing that's been sending you back to Squoosh's single-image workflow one photo at a time, the main compressor handles a full batch in one pass, and reduce image size in KB gets a whole batch to an exact target together without the manual guesswork. Both run entirely in your browser, same as Squoosh, nothing uploaded either way.

Written by

Daniel Osei

Web Performance Engineer

Daniel has spent 6 years optimizing images and web assets for publishers and e-commerce brands. He writes about image formats, compression techniques, and web performance at ImgTweak.

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