The application won't have as much effect on the image quality as you might think.
What will have an immense impact are two things:
1. the quality of the image before any resizing
2. what size you plan on resizing the image to
If you start with a low-quality image and then blow it up to 5 times the size, you're going to get even lowered image quality... no matter what software you use.
Sure, you can try to tweak things (the old sharpen/blur, sharpen/blur... etc) but you will still end up with a poor quality image if you enlarge an image past a certain point.
Even with medium to high quality resolution/dpi images, you will still encounter quality loss if the image is enlarged too much.
The same goes for any bitmap image (.jpg, .tiff, .png, .gif....etc)
My advice would be always start with the absolute best quality image resolution. Do as little resizing as possible, just start with the image as close to the size that you need from the beginning.