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Material Icons VS React Icons

Compare Material Icons VS React Icons and see what are their differences

Material Icons logo Material Icons

Google Fonts now supports icons

React Icons logo React Icons

Include popular icons in your React projects easly with react-icons.
  • Material Icons Landing page
    Landing page //
    2024-05-22
  • React Icons Landing page
    Landing page //
    2024-05-21

Material Icons features and specs

  • Extensive Collection
    Material Icons offer a comprehensive set of over 2,000 icons, covering a wide range of use cases and design needs.
  • Consistency
    The icons are designed following Google's Material Design guidelines, ensuring visual and functional consistency across different platforms and applications.
  • Scalability
    Being vector-based, these icons can be scaled to any size without losing quality, making them versatile for various screen resolutions.
  • Ease of Integration
    Material Icons are easy to integrate into projects through the use of the Google Fonts API, CSS, or direct downloading and inclusion in codebases.
  • Customizability
    Icons can be customized in terms of color, size, and other styles to fit the specific needs of a project.
  • Free and Open Source
    Material Icons are free to use under the Apache License 2.0, making them accessible for both personal and commercial projects.

Possible disadvantages of Material Icons

  • Steep Learning Curve
    For designers not familiar with Material Design, there may be a learning curve to understanding and effectively implementing the design principles.
  • Design Limitations
    While Material Icons are highly versatile, their design is rooted in Material Design principles, which may not fit every brand or aesthetic.
  • Performance Overhead
    Including a large number of icons through the Google Fonts API can result in additional HTTP requests, potentially affecting page load times.
  • Less Unique
    Given their popularity, Material Icons are widely used, which may lead to a lack of uniqueness in the design of applications using them.
  • Inconsistent Updates
    While Google does update the icon set, updates can be infrequent or may not include all needed icons for newer features or design trends.

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.

Material Icons videos

NOU - Icon Pack Review Material Icons Best Icon Pack

React Icons videos

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

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Material Icons and React Icons)
Web Icons
82 82%
18% 18
Design Tools
90 90%
10% 10
Developer Tools
0 0%
100% 100
Photos & Graphics
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

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

Material Icons Reviews

10 Best Fontello Alternatives 2021
Fontello doesn’t have this capability so this makes Material Icons the more superior tool. Also, the Material Icons font catalog supports over 135 languages—a feature most of its rivals including Fontello cannot do.
Top FontAwesome alternatives to use on your websites
If you are familiar with Google Fonts already, then you will be familiar with Google's Material Icons. You can include Material Icons in the exact same way that you would include a Google Font family on your webpage.

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, Material Icons should be more popular than React Icons. It has been mentiond 67 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.

Material Icons mentions (67)

  • Best Icon Font Libraries for Developers
    By adding Material Design Icons to your project, you can have a clean and professional look that is in line with current design standards. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Best Flutter Icon Libraries in 2025
    It is a collection of icons provided by Google Fonts, available on their website. This set is the go-to for developers who want to maintain consistency with Google’s Material Design principles. With a wide range of icons, this library is perfect for creating a polished, cohesive app interface. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • The Best 100 Free UI/UX Resources for Every Designer & Developer
    Material Icons Fonts.google.com/icons Google’s open-source icon set for Material Design. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • ✨10 Stunning Icon Libraries to Check Out (That Are Free and Open-Source) 🚀
    Website: Material Symbols GitHub Repo: GitHub Repo. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Ask HN: Which SVG icon library are you using and why?
    Https://fonts.google.com/icons My preference for new projects is currently swaying towards Google's Material library as its just so easy and fast to use. Nevertheless Fontawesome has been a staple for me for the last several years! - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
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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 / 9 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 / 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 / 3 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Material Icons 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

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!

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

Flaticon - A database of free vector icons.

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