Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Heroicons VS Animate.css

Compare Heroicons VS Animate.css and see what are their differences

Heroicons logo Heroicons

Beautiful, free SVG icons from the makers of Tailwind CSS.

Animate.css logo Animate.css

Animate.css is a cross-browser library of CSS animations.
  • Heroicons Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-02-25
  • Animate.css Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-02-06

Heroicons features and specs

  • Open Source
    Heroicons is an open-source project, which means it is free to use, modify, and distribute without licensing concerns.
  • Comprehensive Collection
    Heroicons offers a broad range of icons that cover many common use cases, providing designers and developers with a versatile set of tools.
  • High Quality
    The icons are meticulously designed, ensuring they are visually appealing and consistent. This enhances the overall aesthetic of any project they are used in.
  • Easy Integration
    Heroicons can be easily integrated into projects via SVG or as a React component, making it user-friendly for different development environments.
  • Regular Updates
    The project is actively maintained with regular updates and new icon additions, ensuring that users have access to the latest design trends and functionality.
  • Variety of Styles
    Heroicons comes in both outline and solid styles, giving users flexibility to choose the best fit for their design needs.

Possible disadvantages of Heroicons

  • Limited Customization
    While Heroicons provides high-quality icons, the customization options are limited compared to some premium icon libraries that offer extensive customization capabilities.
  • Performance Impact
    Depending on how they are implemented, using a large number of SVGs can have a performance impact on page load times, especially for resource-constrained devices.
  • Dependency on React
    For users who prefer using the icons as React components, there is a dependency on the React library, which might not be ideal for projects using other frameworks.
  • No Enterprise Support
    As an open-source project, Heroicons does not come with enterprise-level support, which may be a concern for larger organizations needing guaranteed assistance.
  • Icon Coverage Gaps
    Although Heroicons covers many common use cases, it might lack specific icons needed for niche industries or specialized applications.

Animate.css features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    Animate.css provides a wide range of preset animations that can be easily implemented by adding class names to HTML elements. This eliminates the need for custom CSS animations or JavaScript, thus saving time and effort.
  • Cross-Browser Compatibility
    The animations in Animate.css work across all modern browsers, ensuring a consistent and reliable experience for users regardless of the browser they use.
  • Open Source
    Animate.css is an open-source library, meaning it's free to use and contributions from the community help keep it updated and improve its functionality over time.
  • Lightweight
    The library is relatively lightweight, especially if you only include the specific animations you need, which helps keep page load times low.
  • Customizable
    Although it comes with a wide range of preset animations, Animate.css allows for customization. Developers can easily modify the CSS to fit their specific needs.

Possible disadvantages of Animate.css

  • Limited to CSS Animations
    Animate.css only includes CSS-based animations. For more complex interactions or animations that require JavaScript, another library or custom code would be necessary.
  • Overhead for Unused Animations
    By importing the entire library, you might include many animations that are not used, leading to unnecessary overhead. Selective imports or custom builds are required to avoid this.
  • Performance
    Frequent or complex animations can lead to performance issues, especially on lower-end devices. Developers need to be mindful of how often animations are triggered and their impact on performance.
  • Limited Control
    Using pre-defined animations means less control over specific nuances of the animations. For more intricate or highly customized animations, a more flexible solution may be needed.
  • Potential Conflicts
    There can be potential conflicts with existing CSS in your project, especially if the same class names are used, leading to unintended side effects.

Analysis of Heroicons

Overall verdict

  • Heroicons is a reliable and solid option for developers and designers looking for a modern, clean set of icons. Its free and open-source nature, combined with the quality and consistency of the icons, makes it a popular choice in the industry.

Why this product is good

  • Heroicons is considered a good choice for icons due to its simplicity, scalability, and open-source nature. It offers a variety of well-designed, consistent icons that can integrate easily into web and mobile projects. The icons are available in several styles, including outline and solid versions, which provide flexibility depending on the design needs. Additionally, Heroicons is maintained by the makers of Tailwind CSS, ensuring that the icons are continuously updated and compatible with modern development practices.

Recommended for

    Heroicons is recommended for web developers and designers using frameworks like Tailwind CSS, but it is also suitable for any project requiring consistent and scalable icons. It is particularly useful for those building modern, minimalist interfaces or who prioritize integration with Tailwind CSS.

Analysis of Animate.css

Overall verdict

  • Animate.css is generally considered a good tool for adding animations to web projects. It is reliable, simple to use, and widely supported by the development community. However, for highly customized animations or when trying to minimize the performance footprint, custom solutions may be more appropriate.

Why this product is good

  • Animate.css is a well-known library for CSS animations. It is widely used due to its ease of integration, comprehensive collection of animations, and minimal overhead. It allows developers to quickly incorporate animations into their projects without having to write complex CSS from scratch.

Recommended for

  • Web developers looking for quick, easy-to-use animation solutions.
  • Projects that need standard animations with minimal setup.
  • Developers who prefer using established libraries with active community support.
  • Designers who want to add basic animations without deep CSS knowledge.

Heroicons videos

The Perfect Icons for Tailwind CSS: Heroicons

Animate.css videos

No Animate.css videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Heroicons and Animate.css)
Web Icons
100 100%
0% 0
Design Tools
64 64%
36% 36
Vector Icons
100 100%
0% 0
Developer Tools
52 52%
48% 48

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Heroicons and Animate.css

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Heroicons seems to be a lot more popular than Animate.css. While we know about 72 links to Heroicons, we've tracked only 1 mention of Animate.css. 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.

Heroicons mentions (72)

  • 2024 Nuxt3 Annual Ecosystem Summary🚀
    Document Address: Heroicons Official Document. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • Day 11: There's a Hero! 🦸
    Today I'd like to share with you a beautiful icon library: Heroicons. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • 10 game-changing tools that level up Svelte developers in 2025 💪
    Svelte Heros is a collection of free, open-source SVG icons built specifically for Svelte. It’s based on Heroicons and is incredibly easy to integrate into your Svelte projects. With over 200 icons, Svelte Heros offers easy access to a wide range of icons while keeping your app lightweight and performant. Github repository →. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Marrying Tailwind with Jekyll
    Surprisingly, in many projects, I don't really need more than what Jekyll can offer. So, I remain a loyal user. Until recently, I didn't have much to complain about, not until I decided to rebuild poshtui.com with Tailwind CSS. The only way to add Tailwind and Heroicons was through a JavaScript bundler, and I'm no longer used to that approach. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Icons gem for Phlex
    When it comes to building sleek, interactive UIs, having access to a robust set of icons is essential. Over the last few weeks, I've been migrating one of my projects from ERBs to Phlex. During this process, I found myself frequently reaching for SVG icons from popular libraries like Heroicons, Bootstrap icons, and Flag icons. After some frustration with manual integration into a Shared::Icon Phlex component, I... - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
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Animate.css mentions (1)

  • 3 Easy Ways to Add Animation to your Angular Applications
    An advantage of this approach is that it lets us utilize any CSS animation library that works off of the same concept of adding and removing classes. Some of the more popular libraries that work this way are animate.css and magic.css. Chris Coyier has an amazing article on CSS Tricks that lists more of these if you are interested. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Heroicons and Animate.css, you can also consider the following products

Tabler Icons - 550+ free fully customizable SVG icons

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

Feather Icons - Simply beautiful open source icons

Bootstrap - Simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and JS for popular UI components and interactions

Font Awesome - Font Awesome makes it easy to add vector icons and social logos to your website. And version 5 is redesigned and built from the ground up!

PostCSS - Increase code readability. Add vendor prefixes to CSS rules using values from Can I Use. Autoprefixer will use the data based on current browser popularity and property support to apply prefixes for you.