Squoosh Alternative: Same Privacy, But It Does Batches

Squoosh is the one competitor where the usual privacy argument does not apply, so let us drop it up front. Squoosh compresses in your browser. Nothing gets uploaded. On that count it is exactly as private as ZeroPNG, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

The reason people go looking for an alternative is much more boring: you have 60 screenshots to compress and Squoosh does one at a time. Open image, adjust, save, close, repeat. Sixty times.

This is not a secret weakness. It is written in Squoosh's own FAQ, where batch processing is described as their most requested feature and something they are thinking about for Squoosh v2. The project is still alive, by the way. The repo had commits within the last couple of weeks as of August 2026, and it has over 25,000 stars.

What ZeroPNG does differently

Same architecture, different priorities. Both tools compile image codecs to WebAssembly and run them in the browser. Squoosh optimized for depth on a single image. ZeroPNG optimized for getting through a folder.

Drop 200 files into the ZeroPNG compressor and it processes all of them with one settings panel, then hands you a single ZIP. That is the entire pitch. It is not clever, it is just the workflow most people actually have.

The second difference is scope. Squoosh is a compressor. ZeroPNG is a set of tools that includes a compressor, plus conversion, cropping, resizing, watermarking, EXIF stripping, PDF assembly, vectorizing and a couple of local AI tools.

Squoosh vs ZeroPNG, as of August 2026

Feature	ZeroPNG	Squoosh
Where it runs	Your browser	Your browser
Files uploaded	None	None
Batch processing	Yes, plus ZIP download	No, one image at a time
Codec fine-tuning	Quality slider and max width	Deep per-codec settings
Codecs offered	PNG, JPEG, WebP, AVIF, plus separate JXL and SVG tools	MozJPEG, OxiPNG, WebP, AVIF, JPEG XL, WebP2, QOI
Before and after view	Per-file size comparison	Split-screen visual slider
Other image tools	19 in total	Compression, resize and rotate
Open source	No	Yes, Apache 2.0
Command line tool	No	An npm package still exists, but the source was removed from the repo
Price	Free	Free

The 60-screenshot problem, in actual minutes

Work through what the two workflows cost you on a real task. Say you have 60 screenshots for a documentation site and you want them all at WebP quality 80.

In Squoosh: open the app, drag in image one, pick WebP on the right panel, set quality, wait for the encode, click download, clear it, drag in image two, and repeat. Even at a brisk 20 seconds per image with no thinking, that is 20 minutes of clicking. The settings do persist between images in a session, which helps, but the open-save-clear loop does not go away.

In ZeroPNG: drag the folder in, set WebP and quality 80 once, press the button, wait, download one ZIP. The waiting part is real, especially for AVIF, but you can walk away from it.

That is the whole difference. Not quality, not privacy, not price. Just the number of times your hand has to move.

Where Squoosh is still the better choice

Squoosh is genuinely excellent and there are jobs where reaching for ZeroPNG instead would be a downgrade.

Squeezing the last few kilobytes out of one important image

Squoosh exposes the actual codec knobs. With MozJPEG you get trellis quantization, progressive settings, chroma subsampling and smoothing. With AVIF you get effort and tile controls. ZeroPNG gives you a quality slider and a max width, which covers maybe 95 percent of real needs and none of the remaining 5. For a hero image on a landing page where every kilobyte is being argued about, Squoosh will get you further.

The split-screen comparison view

Squoosh's side-by-side slider, with a synced zoom, is the best artifact-hunting interface on any free image tool. You can drag across a face at 400 percent and see exactly where quality 62 starts to fall apart. ZeroPNG shows you file sizes and a preview. That is enough for a batch of product photos and not enough for pixel-level judgment calls.

Experimental formats and scripting

Squoosh ships WebP2 and QOI alongside the mainstream codecs, which is useful if you are benchmarking or just curious. ZeroPNG does not carry either.

There is a caveat on the scripting side that a lot of articles have not caught up with. The Squoosh CLI is still on npm as @squoosh/cli, but the last release was January 2023 and the source has since been removed from the Squoosh repository. The FAQ still links to a folder that is no longer there. It may work for you and there are community forks, but treat it as unmaintained rather than as a supported path.

You want to read the code

Squoosh is open source under Apache 2.0. You can audit every line, fork it, or self-host it behind a firewall. ZeroPNG's application code is not open source. Our privacy claim is verifiable through your browser's Network tab rather than through the source, which is weaker, and it is fair to say so.

What ZeroPNG adds that Squoosh never set out to do

Squoosh is a compressor with a resize and rotate option attached. That focus is a feature, not a gap, and it is part of why the app feels so clean. But image work rarely stops at compression.

The tools that most often come up in the same afternoon as compressing something: converting HEIC photos from an iPhone so Windows can open them, stripping GPS coordinates before publishing, cropping to Instagram or YouTube dimensions, watermarking a batch of client proofs, turning photos into a PDF to email, and auditing a live page to see which images are slowing it down.

All of those run locally too, on the same architecture, which means the privacy story does not change when you move from one to the next. With Squoosh you would compress locally and then go find a server-side tool for the crop, which quietly undoes the thing you liked about Squoosh in the first place.

How to switch, or when to use both

Honestly, using both is the sensible answer. Here is the split we would suggest.

1. Bulk work, meaning anything over about five images, goes to the ZeroPNG compressor. One settings pass, one ZIP.
2. One critical image where you want to tune the encoder by hand goes to Squoosh.
3. Anything that is not compression, like cropping, watermarking a batch, or stripping metadata, goes to ZeroPNG, because Squoosh does not do those.

Both are free, neither wants your email, and neither will upload your files. Not a bad situation.

Common questions

Is Squoosh still maintained in 2026?

Yes. The GitHub repository is active and not archived, with commits in August 2026. It is a Google Chrome Labs project rather than a supported Google product, which is a meaningful distinction, but the lights are on.

Which compresses better, Squoosh or ZeroPNG?

At default settings they are close, because both use the same underlying codec families. Squoosh can beat ZeroPNG if you know the codec settings and take the time to tune them per image. Most people do not, and at that point the difference is small enough to ignore.

Does Squoosh support batch processing?

Not in the web app. Their FAQ still calls batch processing their most-popular request and something they are thinking about for Squoosh v2. A command line tool exists on npm, but it was last released in January 2023 and its source has been removed from the repository, so it is not a maintained route.

Are Squoosh and ZeroPNG equally private?

Yes, on the core claim. Both process images locally and neither uploads your files. Squoosh has the edge on verifiability because you can read its source code.