Gifski review

Gifski does one job, turning video into GIFs, and its documentation focuses on quality. It uses pngquant to build palettes with temporal dithering, which the developer says can reach thousands of colors per frame, and it supports lossy LZW compression, temporal smoothing and denoising. The Mac app from Sindre Sorhus adds trimming, cropping, exact dimensions, speed, loop delay and a bounce mode, and it outputs up to 50 FPS. A Windows GUI and command-line builds are also free. The limits are stated plainly: the Mac listing says Gifski is a converter, not a GIF creator, and will never support adding text, and the site warns that default output files are large, so you lower width, frame rate or quality to fit upload limits. Still-image GIFs need the CLI and ffmpeg. We compared documented features and published prices.

Who it is for

Designers and developers who want the sharpest video-to-GIF quality

Price

Free; commercial library licenses on request.

It's free.
Quoted from the vendor pricing page on November 11, 2026.

Key features

• Uses pngquant palettes with temporal dithering for thousands of colors per frame
• Mac app trims, crops, sets dimensions, speed, looping and bounce (yo-yo) playback
• Generates GIFs up to 50 FPS in the Mac app
• Windows GUI and CLI binaries for Linux, macOS and Windows
• Library for C#, Swift, Rust, C and C++ integration

Strengths and weaknesses

• Strength: Free GUI apps for Mac and Windows
• Strength: Lossy LZW compression and quality sliders to hit file size limits
• Strength: Mac App Store version adds a share extension and system service
• Weakness: The Mac app is a converter only and will never add text or elements
• Weakness: Default settings favor quality, so files can be very large
• Weakness: Making a GIF from still images requires the command line

Key facts

• Price: Free
• Platforms: macOS, Windows, command line on Linux
• Max frame rate: 50 FPS in the Mac app
• Input: Video files; PNG frames on the CLI

Where it ranks

Gifski is No. 3 in our Best GIF Makers verdict.