Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Ant Design VS React Icons

Compare Ant Design VS React Icons and see what are their differences

Ant Design logo Ant Design

An enterprise-class UI design language and React implementation with a set of high-quality React components, one of best React UI library for enterprises

React Icons logo React Icons

Include popular icons in your React projects easly with react-icons.
  • Ant Design Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-17
  • React Icons Landing page
    Landing page //
    2024-05-21

Ant Design features and specs

  • Comprehensive Component Library
    Ant Design offers a rich set of customizable UI components that follow modern design principles, making it easier to build visually appealing and consistent user interfaces.
  • Design System
    It comes with a robust design system that provides guidelines and best practices for developing user interfaces, ensuring coherence and efficiency in design.
  • Responsive and Adaptive
    Ant Design's components are designed to be responsive, ensuring that applications look good on various screen sizes and devices.
  • Internationalization Support
    Built-in support for internationalization allows developers to easily localize their applications for different languages and regions.
  • Extensive Documentation
    Ant Design provides comprehensive documentation, examples, and tutorials to help developers quickly get started and effectively use the library.
  • Active Community and Support
    It has an active community and regular updates, which means continuous improvements, bug fixes, and support.

Possible disadvantages of Ant Design

  • Large Bundle Size
    Ant Design can contribute to a larger bundle size, which may impact performance, particularly in low-bandwidth environments.
  • Steep Learning Curve
    The extensive features and components can be overwhelming for beginners, requiring time to learn and adapt to the framework.
  • Opinionated Styling
    Ant Design follows specific design guidelines, which may not align with all projects’ design requirements or preferences, limiting customization options.
  • Dependency on Less
    It relies heavily on Less for styling, which may be a drawback for teams who prefer or are more proficient in other CSS pre-processors like Sass or plain CSS.
  • Limited Flexibility with Custom Themes
    While customization is possible, creating a custom theme can be complex and time-consuming compared to other UI frameworks.
  • Compatibility Issues
    Occasional compatibility issues may arise, especially when integrating with other libraries or tools that haven’t been designed to work with Ant Design.

React Icons features and specs

  • Wide Variety
    React Icons provides a large collection of icons from various popular icon libraries, allowing developers to find and use the icons that best fit their design requirements.
  • Ease of Use
    The library is user-friendly and easy to integrate into React applications. Developers can quickly import and include icons in their components without hassle.
  • Consistent Appearance
    By using React Icons, developers can maintain a consistent look and feel across their application since the icons are standardized and follow modern design guidelines.
  • Customization
    React Icons allows for easy customization through properties, enabling developers to adjust size, color, and other styles to match the application's theme.
  • Lightweight
    Even though it offers a wide range of icons, React Icons is designed to be lightweight and optimized, ensuring that it does not significantly impact the application's performance.

Possible disadvantages of React Icons

  • Limited to Supplied Libraries
    React Icons is limited to the icon libraries it supports, which might not include every icon a developer might need, potentially necessitating additional icon resources.
  • Bundle Size
    Including a large number of icons could increase the bundle size of the application. Developers need to be careful to import only the icons they need.
  • Lack of Advanced Features
    React Icons focuses on basic icon rendering and does not offer more advanced icon management features that some complex applications might require.
  • Potential Overhead
    For projects that only require a few icons, using React Icons might introduce unnecessary overhead compared to importing individual SVGs directly.

Analysis of Ant Design

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Ant Design is considered good for developing modern, responsive web applications, especially if you value consistency and need a robust component library with a professional look.

Why this product is good

  • Ant Design is a popular design system and React UI library widely recognized for its comprehensive set of high-quality components, elegant design, and ease of use. It provides a unified design language that helps developers build user interfaces quickly and consistently. Ant Design is well-documented, actively maintained, and has a large community, making it easier to find support and resources.

Recommended for

  • Developers working on enterprise-level applications that require a consistent design system.
  • Teams looking for a comprehensive set of customizable React components.
  • Projects that benefit from a large community and extensive documentation.

Ant Design videos

Setup Ant Design - Tutorial to Install Ant Design library / Antd with Create React App

More videos:

  • Review - Coding React Form with Formik and Ant Design - Part 3

React Icons videos

No React Icons videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Ant Design and React Icons)
Design Tools
97 97%
3% 3
Web Icons
0 0%
100% 100
Development Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Developer Tools
94 94%
6% 6

User comments

Share your experience with using Ant Design and React Icons. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Ant Design and React Icons

Ant Design Reviews

10 Best Free React UI Libraries in 2023
Ant Design is a UI library that is used to build enterprise-level interfaces for web applications. It has its own design language that is used extensively in the products of Ant Financial.
11 Best Material UI Alternatives
The Ant Design library is a comprehensive UI component library developed by Ant Design that offers a wide range of reusable and well-documented components for building high-quality applications. It follows the principles of the Ant Design system, emphasizing a clean and minimalist design aesthetic with a focus on usability and accessibility.
Source: www.uxpin.com
React UI Components Libraries: Our Top Picks for 2023
Ant Design Pro: AntD’s other variant Ant Design Pro comes with features like templates and a design kit apart from components to help you design your applications.
Source: kinsta.com
Top React component libraries (2021 edition)
AntD offers Ant Design Pro, an out-of-box UI solution for enterprise applications. Ant Design Pro comes equipped with templates, components, and a corresponding design kit.
Source: retool.com
Comparing popular React component libraries
Unlike Ant Design, Material-UI offers built-in methods to style components. makeStyles() is useful, especially when your code starts to get big; it helps you find the element to style more quickly and makes the code more readable. The downside is that readability may degrade as a component grows. But overall, Material-UI is a strong, highly customizable library.

React Icons Reviews

7 Best Free Icon Libraries
@import url("https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap-icons@1.9.1/font/bootstrap-icons.css");An usage example
Source: www.atatus.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Ant Design should be more popular than React Icons. It has been mentiond 107 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Ant Design mentions (107)

  • How to Create a Blog with React and ButterCMS
    One of the key concepts of React is components. Components enable us to break down a user interface (UI) into independent pieces that can be used in different parts of an application. Utilizing components for a blog, the blog postcard, header, footer, custom button, etc., can be created separately and used through the blog application. This can improve productivity by enabling the reuse of said components.... - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • React UI Component Libraries in 2025
    Ant Design's React implementation continues to be a favorite for enterprise applications, with its extensive component set and advanced theming capabilities. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • React libraries for building forms and surveys
    Library Documentation Community Updates Performance-focused Notes SurveyJS Easy to follow and concise Large and growing Updates frequently No [Paid tier](https://surveyjs.io/pricing) for large projects, [part of a form library ecosystem](https://surveyjs.io/try/reactjs) React Hook Form Easy to follow and concise Extremely large and rapidly growing Updates... - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Ask HN: How do I find UI/UX design systems for my app?
    Personally I like https://mui.com/ a lot. There's also https://www.chakra-ui.com/ and https://ant.design/ (but Ant is Chinese, if that matters). I think those are the big 3. There might be directories of smaller ones but I dunno any offhand. - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago
  • How to Use Ant Design with Next.js: A Complete Guide
    One of the things each web developer should see is how easy it may be to create user experience as well as visual appeal. Two very powerful tools to assist in this regard are Next.js and Ant Design. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
View more

React Icons mentions (11)

  • IcôNES
    Great resource. Has anyone come across a semantic search to navigate these icon libraries? I want to be able to search for “Industry” and get icons returned that show factory, cogs etc. I’ve been using https://react-icons.github.io/react-icons but the same problem there, you search for a string and it just greps across the official icon name. If you don’t know the name you’re not going to find it. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago
  • Top 10 NextJS Icons Library Options for 2025
    2. React Icons Website: https://react-icons.github.io/react-icons/. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • How to Build a Portfolio Website with React
    React Icons: A portfolio needs visual elements to engage visitors. React Icons gives us access to social media icons for your profiles, tech stack icons for your skills section, and UI icons for navigation and interaction. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Top 20 Modern React Libraries To Supercharge Your Next Big Project
    Resource: React Icons Documentation. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • First sprint.
    This was just a tiny change but I did discover something that is really neat from working on this. I found out, from looking into how the other items on the menu has icons, that its using icons from react-icons. Where you can easily import the icons and implement them as components. They also work light and dark mode, where they change automatically when the user change color modes. If it weren't for this, I would... - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Ant Design and React Icons, you can also consider the following products

Material UI - A CSS Framework and a Set of React Components that Implement Google's Material Design

The Noun Project - Creating, Sharing and Celebrating the World's Visual Language

Chakra UI - Simple, modular and accessible UI components for your React applications.

Flaticon - A database of free vector icons.

Tailwind CSS - A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom user interfaces.

Rafty UI - Radix UI + Tailwind CSS - React Component Lib