What is GIF?
GIF is thirty-eight years old and refuses to die, because it animates and everything opens it. The cost is its palette: 256 colours per frame, so photographs come out visibly banded. Transparency is on-or-off per pixel, with no partial opacity.
What is MP4?
MP4 is the container video actually travels in - what phones record, what messaging apps accept, what every player since the iPod era opens. It usually carries H.264 video, and its one structural quirk matters to converters: the index of every frame lives in a table that has to be exactly right, or nothing plays.