GIF optimiser head-to-head

Both GIF Wizard (http://www.gifwizard.com/) and Website Garage (http://www.websitegarage.com/) offer GIF optimisation services. Here are the results of trying their optimisers against the freely-available, open-source one in InterGif. This animation was used as the test case:

Original image

Size 15,178 bytes
48x58 pixels
256 colour palette (32 distinct colours used)

InterGif vs. GIF Wizard

Lossless optimisation
	GIF Wizard Size 4,785 bytes	InterGif Size 4,510 bytes; advantage 6%
Reduce to 32 colours
	GIF Wizard Size 4,550 bytes	InterGif Size 4,499 bytes; advantage 1%
Reduce to 8 colours
	GIF Wizard Size 2,756 bytes	InterGif Size 2,568 bytes; advantage 7% (Looks better too IMO!)

InterGif vs. websitegarage

GIF Lube, websitegarage's optimiser, doesn't seem to cope with animations, so I used a test image consisting of the first frame of the above animation:

Original image

Size 1,525 bytes
48x58 pixels
256 colour palette (29 distinct colours used)

Reduce to 64 colours [1]
	GIF Lube Size 1,149 bytes	InterGif Size 753 bytes; advantage 34%
Reduce to 32 colours
	GIF Lube Size 897 bytes	InterGif Size 753 bytes; advantage 16%
Reduce to 16 colours
	GIF Lube Size 711 bytes	InterGif Size 598 bytes; advantage 16%
Reduce to 8 colours
	GIF Lube Size 465 bytes	InterGif Size 412 bytes; advantage 11%

[1]: The GIF Lube output doesn't show a "lossless optimised" output. The output used here is one "optimised" to 64 colours, although exactly what GIF Lube is doing is a mystery as the original only contained 29 distinct colours. (This is also why InterGif's output is identical for "Reduce to 64 colours" and "Reduce to 32 colours".)

Ease of use

Both GIF Wizard and websitegarage must be used from their companies' web pages: InterGif can be downloaded as either a ready-to-run program or as source code, and thereafter used on your own workstations or servers without connecting to the Internet.

The downside of this is that it can be harder to use InterGif than the others, as you need to issue the conversion commands yourself rather than through a Web browser. The commands are usually dead simple though: to optimise a GIF called orig.gif and call the output better.gif, the command is just
intergif orig.gif -o better.gif

All Rites Reversed -- Copy What You Like