What is a webtoon? Meaning and how webtoons work

Webtoon meaning: where the word comes from

Webtoon is a Korean coinage that joins two English words, web and cartoon. In Korean it is written 웹툰. The term dates from around 2000, when Korean comics began moving from printed books and rental shops onto the internet. Korean web portals soon gave comics their own sections: Daum launched its webtoon service in 2003 and Naver launched Naver Webtoon in 2004.

Readers liked that the comics were free, and artists liked that online work faced lighter censorship than print. Over the next decade webtoons became the main way Korean comics were published. In July 2014 Naver's LINE Webtoon, now called WEBTOON, began publishing official English translations, with Tower of God among the first series. That is how most readers outside Korea first met the format.

How webtoons work

A webtoon is defined by its format, not by its story or where it comes from. This is how it works, and how you can spot one:

• Vertical scroll. There are no pages. Each episode is one long strip, and panels are stacked down the screen with space between them. The gaps do work a page cannot: a long empty stretch before a reveal, or a fall that keeps going as you scroll.
• Full colour. Webtoons are drawn and coloured digitally for screens, so almost all of them are in colour. Some even add music or simple animation.
• Episodes, not volumes. A story comes out one episode at a time, usually once a week on a fixed day. WEBTOON's Originals page sorts its ongoing series into a tab for each weekday, plus one for completed series (checked 30 October 2026). Long series run in seasons with breaks in between.
• Free to start, pay to read ahead. Most platforms let you read a lot for free and sell early access to the newest episodes. The next section explains how that works.

Free vs paid: how early access works

On WEBTOON, the biggest English platform, the free part is large: its App Store listing promises millions of episodes for free, and the app shows ads. The newest episodes of many series sit behind Fast Pass, which lets you read ahead with coins. WEBTOON's help pages say all Fast Pass episodes become free after a specific period, so if you can wait, you pay nothing. Coins can only be bought in the Android and iOS apps, not on the website. In the US App Store, the smallest pack is 10 coins for $0.99 (checked 30 October 2026).

WEBTOON used to have a second option, Daily Pass, which unlocked one episode a day for free. It ended on 29 May 2025, and older guides that mention it are out of date. Other apps use similar systems under different names: free episodes that unlock every day or every few hours, coins or points, and monthly memberships.

What is WEBTOON? The app vs the format

The word means two things, which causes a lot of confusion. Written in capitals, WEBTOON is a company and its app and website, at webtoons.com. It is run by WEBTOON Entertainment, a company in Korea's Naver group that listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in June 2024. Written normally, webtoon is the format, and other apps publish webtoons too.

WEBTOON itself has two very different sections:

• Originals: series published by WEBTOON with professional creators, many of them Korean manhwa in translation, such as Tower of God and True Beauty.
• Canvas: self-published comics that anyone can upload. Quality and content vary widely, and some Canvas comics are later picked up as Originals.

Outside WEBTOON, Korea's other big publisher is Kakao, whose KakaoPage published the Solo Leveling webtoon from 2018. In English, official webtoons also appear on apps such as Tappytoon, Manta and Comikey. Our guide to legal manhwa sites and manga apps compares them.

Webtoon vs manhwa: what is the difference?

Manhwa describes where a comic comes from: South Korea. Webtoon describes how it is made and read: a vertical colour strip in episodes. Most new manhwa are both, which is why fans use the words as if they meant the same thing. Two cases show the difference:

• Manhwa that are not webtoons. Korean comics from before the 2000s were printed books, mostly black and white with pages read left to right. They are manhwa, but not webtoons.
• Webtoons that are not manhwa. Lore Olympus, a retelling of Greek myths by New Zealand artist Rachel Smythe, is a WEBTOON Original. It won the Eisner Award for Best Webcomic in 2022, 2023 and 2024, the first series to win that category three years in a row. It is a webtoon, but not a manhwa. Chinese manhua are also often published as vertical colour strips.

If you want the Korean side in more depth, read what manhwa is and where it came from. To tell a Korean, Chinese or Japanese comic apart from one screenshot, the manga vs manhwa vs manhua guide shows what to look for in the sound effects and names.

How to read webtoons legally

The simplest start is the WEBTOON app or website: make an account and subscribe to a few series, so new episodes show up in your list. Other official apps license different series, so if a title is not on WEBTOON, check which platform holds its English rights. AniList's page for a series lists its official sources.

Avoid sites that post every new chapter for free with pop-up ads. They pay creators nothing, and anti-piracy groups warn that they can carry malware. Apps also come and go: Tapas, a long-running webtoon app, has announced it will close on 31 March 2027, and Pocket Comics closed in October 2025. Our where to read manga and manhwa legally guide keeps track of which apps are still running and what they cost.

Found a webtoon screenshot? Find the title

Webtoon panels are hard for manga image search engines, which were built around black-and-white pages. General engines do better: in our tests, Google Lens and Yandex named all three colour Korean and Chinese covers we tried. The trick is to search one frame, not the whole tall screenshot:

1. Pick a frame with a clear face or costume.
2. Crop out the app bars, the speech bubbles and the half-frames above and below.
3. Search with Google Lens, then Yandex, then SauceNAO.

If the search shows a title in Korean or under an English name you have never seen, paste it into AniList to see all of its names. No screenshot at all? Describe the story with genres and tags in find a manga or webtoon by description. MangaTrace finds titles; it does not host or translate any comics.