SVG is an XML description of shapes, which is why it scales to any size. GIF is a palette of at most 256 colours, all-or-nothing transparency, and animation. ImageMagick sits between the two, and this page says exactly what happens to an SVG file on the way to becoming a GIF one.
What runs when an SVG file becomes GIF
ImageMagick 6.9.12, on a machine we rent and watch. Your SVG file is uploaded once, ImageMagick runs once, the GIF comes back, and neither file is kept. SVG to GIF is one of the 3649 pairs that engine was probed on with a real file, which is why it has a page here and why the pairs the probe could not prove do not.
What survives from the SVG into the GIF
The pixel dimensions of your SVG file. The GIF comes out the size the SVG went in, because nothing on this path resizes anything.
What SVG to GIF costs you
Scalability. SVG describes shapes, GIF stores a grid of pixels, and the engine rasterises at 150 dots per inch on the way across. That density is a deliberate choice: at the 72 dpi ImageMagick defaults to, an A4 SVG page comes out 595 pixels wide and reads as a failed conversion. Enlarge the GIF afterwards and it blurs, because there is nothing left to redraw from.
Colour depth. GIF holds 256 colours at most, so a photographic SVG gets quantised and its gradients band.
If a model is going to read the GIF
A GIF file is pixels, and pixels are expensive for a model to read. Handed this GIF, an assistant spends its budget looking at the picture rather than reading it, and it will paraphrase what it thinks it saw. If your SVG is mostly words, the useful move is to pull the text out of it, not to change which picture format holds it.
SVG to GIF, measured rather than promised
Running SVG to GIF against the real engine with a real file, ImageMagick wrote 1,232 bytes of GIF in 0.1 seconds, machine otherwise idle. That is one SVG file on one day and not an average, which is why the number is given together with the file that produced it.
The SVG to GIF verdict was reached by a format signature, meaning at least four bytes unique to the format were found at the right offset. Which check was used matters, because they do not all prove the same thing, and a status code of 200 proves nothing whatsoever about whether the GIF file has anything inside it.
The same SVG file, sent somewhere else
Other outputs the probe measured out of an SVG file, so the cost of choosing GIF can be read against something. Sizes do not compare across engines, because each family was probed with its own SVG witness file.
SVG to PDF: 4,195 bytes in under a tenth of a second, verified by a format signature.
SVG to JPG: 2,483 bytes in under a tenth of a second, verified by a format signature.
SVG to PNG: 1,268 bytes in under a tenth of a second, verified by a format signature.
SVG to WEBP: 608 bytes in under a tenth of a second, verified by a format signature.
SVG to TIFF: 2,464 bytes in under a tenth of a second, verified by a format signature.
Other ways into GIF, and what they measured
Among the published routes into GIF, SVG is the number 19 largest output of the 19 measured. The witness files differ, so this ranks the probe run and not your document.
TIFF to GIF: 3,512 bytes in 0.1 seconds.
WEBM to GIF: 177,876 bytes in 0.1 seconds.
WMV to GIF: 182,516 bytes in 0.1 seconds.
PNG to GIF: 3,512 bytes in 0.1 seconds.
MP4 to GIF: 164,004 bytes in 0.2 seconds.
What we will not pretend about SVG to GIF
An SVG file over 25 MB is refused before the upload finishes rather than after it, so you do not wait for a rejection.
An SVG to GIF run that passes 30 seconds is killed, and the ImageMagick process is killed with it. A run left behind would sit on one of the machine's two cores until somebody noticed.
No text is read out of the SVG anywhere on this path. Converting a picture to GIF never turns it into words, whatever the picture happens to contain.
ImageMagick was not saturated at sixteen simultaneous conversions: it held 47.5 a second while latency moved from 0.22 s to 0.34 s, and the service memory did not move off 51 MB. That is the measured headroom behind SVG to GIF, not a marketing number.
One SVG file at a time, chosen in the browser. There is nothing else to set up and nothing else on offer.
SVG to GIF: what people ask
What actually converts my SVG file to GIF?
ImageMagick does it, 6.9.12, on a machine we rent and watch. Not a browser trick and not somebody else service: the SVG file is uploaded once, ImageMagick runs once, the GIF comes back, and neither file is kept afterwards.
How long does SVG to GIF take?
On the file the probe used, ImageMagick took 0.1 seconds and wrote 1,232 bytes of GIF. That is one real measurement on one real SVG file, not an average and not a promise about yours: a larger SVG takes longer, and past 30 seconds the run is stopped.
What do I lose going from SVG to GIF?
The one to know about first: Scalability. SVG describes shapes, GIF stores a grid of pixels, and the engine rasterises at 150 dots per inch on the way across. That density is a deliberate choice: at the 72 dpi ImageMagick defaults to, an A4 SVG page comes out 595 pixels wide and reads as a failed conversion. Enlarge the GIF afterwards and it blurs, because there is nothing left to redraw from.
What pixel size does the GIF come out at?
Whatever 150 dots per inch makes of your SVG, and that density is a decision rather than a default. An SVG carries shapes and page dimensions, never pixels, so a scale has to be fixed before a single pixel is drawn. If you need another size, the SVG is the file to go back to: of the two it is the only one that still knows the shapes.
Is SVG to GIF free?
There is a free allowance every month, and one SVG to GIF conversion costs half a credit against it. When the allowance runs out the tool says so and stops, rather than quietly handing you a worse GIF.