Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Heroicons VS React Icons

Compare Heroicons VS React Icons and see what are their differences

Heroicons logo Heroicons

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

React Icons logo React Icons

Include popular icons in your React projects easly with react-icons.
  • Heroicons Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-02-25
  • React Icons Landing page
    Landing page //
    2024-05-21

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.

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.

Heroicons videos

The Perfect Icons for Tailwind CSS: Heroicons

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 Heroicons and React Icons)
Web Icons
91 91%
9% 9
Vector Icons
100 100%
0% 0
Developer Tools
83 83%
17% 17
Design Tools
92 92%
8% 8

User comments

Share your experience with using Heroicons 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 Heroicons and React Icons

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, Heroicons should be more popular than React Icons. It has been mentiond 72 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.

Heroicons mentions (72)

  • 2024 Nuxt3 Annual Ecosystem Summary🚀
    Document Address: Heroicons Official Document. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Day 11: There's a Hero! 🦸
    Today I'd like to share with you a beautiful icon library: Heroicons. - Source: dev.to / 5 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 / 7 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 / 7 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 / 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 / 6 days ago
  • Top 10 NextJS Icons Library Options for 2025
    2. React Icons Website: https://react-icons.github.io/react-icons/. - Source: dev.to / about 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 / 3 months ago
  • Top 20 Modern React Libraries To Supercharge Your Next Big Project
    Resource: React Icons Documentation. - Source: dev.to / 2 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 / 3 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

Feather Icons - Simply beautiful open source icons

Bootstrap Icons - Official open source SVG icon library for Bootstrap

Tabler Icons - 550+ free fully customizable SVG icons

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!

Flaticon - A database of free vector icons.

Icons8 - Free app for Mac & Windows already containing 39,800 icons. Allows to search and import icons…