Manga vs manhwa vs manhua: how to tell them apart

How to tell them apart from one page

Check these in order. The first one settles it most of the time.

1. The script. Look at sound effects, signs and any untranslated text. Kana means Japanese, Hangul means Korean, Chinese characters alone mean Chinese.
2. The format. A page with a grid of panels is the print format. A long strip with panels stacked down a phone screen is the webtoon format.
3. The colour. Black and white with grey screentone points to manga. Full colour points to manhwa or manhua, with exceptions below.
4. The reading direction. Pages that run right to left, with the spine on the right, are manga.
5. The names. Kim, Lee or Park and words like hyung or noona are Korean. Cultivation terms, sects and "senior brother" are typical of Chinese stories.

Manga vs manhwa vs manhua at a glance

How do you read the script in the sound effects?

You do not need to read the language, only to recognise the shapes. Sound effects are the best place to look, because translators often leave them in the art.

• Japanese: a mix of simple curvy symbols (hiragana, like の or あ), sharp angular ones (katakana, like ド or ン) and some complex characters. Little dashes and small "ッ" marks are common in sound effects.
• Korean: Hangul, built from circles, short lines and right angles stacked into square blocks, like 쾅 or 나 혼자만. A circle (ㅇ) inside a block is the giveaway.
• Chinese: dense, square characters only, with no curvy kana between them, like 轰 or 第一话.

Search engines can read these too. When we ran the Solo Leveling cover through Bing, it read 나혼자만 off the art; on Tales of Demons and Gods it read the Chinese chapter heading 第一话·重生; on One Piece it read ワンピース. Paste any of those into AniList's search and it finds the series.

Is it read right to left or top to bottom?

Manga is read right to left: the first panel is top right and the book opens from what an English reader would call the back. Official English releases of manga usually keep that direction, so a right-to-left page is still a good sign of manga.

Modern manhwa and manhua are mostly made for phones: one long strip, panels stacked down the screen, read top to bottom. When Korean webtoons are printed as books, they read left to right. Printed manhua vary, so lean on the script instead.

What do colour and format tell you?

Manga magazines print in black and white with grey screentone, and the collected volumes keep it that way apart from a few colour pages. A full-colour page with soft digital shading and wide gaps between panels is almost certainly from a webtoon, which today means Korean or Chinese most of the time.

A screenshot gives itself away too. A tall, narrow image with an app bar at the top is a webtoon. A wide page with a two-page spread is print.

Edge cases that fool people

• Colour manga. Some manga get official full-colour editions, and some Japanese series are drawn as vertical colour webtoons. Check the script.
• Black-and-white manhwa. Korean comics printed before the webtoon era were mostly black-and-white pages.
• Translated sound effects. Some releases redraw the sound effects in English. Then look at signs, shop fronts, phone screens or names.
• The anime. Solo Leveling has a Japanese-made anime, so people call it a manga. The original is a Korean manhwa.

Why each type needs a different search engine

Engines can only find what they have indexed. SauceNAO's index list shows its manga coverage comes from scanned chapter pages, plus fan-art boards. That makes it the specialist for a black-and-white manga page. We have not scored it on panels yet, and its security check blocked our scripted tests, so treat that as what its index suggests, not a measured result. (In a later browser test it did name four colour covers, which you can see in the Google Lens vs SauceNAO test log.)

For colour work, our tests were clearer. Google Lens and Yandex named all three non-Japanese covers we tried: Solo Leveling, Tower of God and Tales of Demons and Gods. IQDB, which searches anime fan-art boards, found nothing relevant for Tower of God and only a 60% "possible match" for Tales of Demons and Gods. Lens and Yandex see the whole web, including Korean and Chinese shops and wikis.

That is why MangaTrace changes the button order by type. For manga it puts SauceNAO, IQDB and Google Lens first. For colour manhwa and webtoon images it puts Google Lens, Yandex and then SauceNAO first. When no engine finds it, the SauceNAO alternatives comparison shows which engine to try next for each type, and the manhwa finder by picture handles webtoon strips.

Still not sure? Let AniList settle it

Once you have a title, its AniList page shows the country of origin. That is also what MangaTrace's find-by-description tool uses for its manga, manhwa and manhua filter. If you have no title yet, start with the step-by-step guide to finding a manga from a picture.