Video files are large, and most everyday video tasks are really about managing that size and format without needing professional editing software — compressing a file small enough to actually send, converting between formats a specific platform or device will accept, trimming out just the relevant clip, or pulling the audio out entirely.
Video compression involves a genuine trade-off between file size and visual quality, and there's no setting that avoids this trade-off entirely — only ways to manage it intelligently. Our video compressor is deliberately tuned toward keeping quality high while still meaningfully reducing size, rather than maximizing compression at the cost of a visibly worse result.
Converting video to GIF is a fundamentally different process than converting between two video formats — a GIF has no audio track and a much more limited color palette by design, so a GIF converted from video will always look visually different (usually lower quality) than the source clip, not just smaller. This is an inherent property of the GIF format itself, not something a better converter could avoid.