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React Icons VS Font Awesome

Compare React Icons VS Font Awesome and see what are their differences

React Icons logo React Icons

Include popular icons in your React projects easly with react-icons.

Font Awesome logo 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!
  • React Icons Landing page
    Landing page //
    2024-05-21
  • Font Awesome Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-02-09

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.

Font Awesome features and specs

  • Comprehensive Icon Library
    Font Awesome offers a vast collection of icons, providing a wide range of options for different use cases and making it easier for developers to find the perfect icon to fit their needs.
  • Easy Integration
    Font Awesome can be easily integrated into web projects using either a CDN link or by downloading the icon set. This makes it convenient for developers to start using icons quickly without extensive setup.
  • Scalability
    Since Font Awesome icons are vector-based, they are infinitely scalable without losing quality. This ensures that icons look sharp on all devices and screen resolutions.
  • Customizable
    Font Awesome icons can be customized easily with CSS, allowing developers to change colors, sizes, and even create animations to match the design of their projects.
  • Consistent Design
    The icons in Font Awesome are designed to be consistent with each other in terms of style, line weight, and aesthetic, which helps in maintaining a uniform look across a web project.
  • Accessibility
    Font Awesome includes ARIA attributes and support for screen readers, ensuring that icons can be interpreted correctly by assistive technologies for better accessibility.

Possible disadvantages of Font Awesome

  • File Size
    Font Awesome can add substantial size to web projects, particularly if the entire library is imported. This can slow down load times, especially on mobile devices or slower internet connections.
  • Dependence on External Resources
    Using a CDN for Font Awesome can create a dependency on external resources. If the CDN is down or blocked, the icons will not display correctly.
  • License Fees
    While Font Awesome offers a free version, the Pro version with more icons and features requires a subscription. This can be a limitation for projects with tight budgets.
  • Overhead for Simple Projects
    For small projects that only require a few icons, using Font Awesome can be overkill. The overhead of including the entire library may not be justified when only a handful of icons are needed.
  • Potential for Version Conflicts
    Using Font Awesome alongside other libraries or different versions of Font Awesome can sometimes lead to conflicts, resulting in icons not displaying correctly or styling issues.
  • Limited to Available Icons
    Despite its large collection, users are restricted to the icons available in Font Awesome. Custom or niche icons that aren't included in the library will need to be sourced or created elsewhere.

React Icons videos

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

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Font Awesome videos

Star Ratings With JavaScript & Font Awesome

More videos:

  • Review - Add Font Awesome Icons to our Buttons, freeCodeCamp Bootstrap Review, lesson 13
  • Review - Add Font Awesome Icons to all of our Buttons, freeCodeCamp Bootstrap Review, lesson 14

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to React Icons and Font Awesome)
Web Icons
5 5%
95% 95
Developer Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Vector Icons
0 0%
100% 100
Design Resources
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 React Icons and Font Awesome

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

Font Awesome Reviews

Revolutionize Your Icon Collection: 5 CSS Icon Sites to Boost Your Web Designs
Font Awesome is one of the most comprehensive libraries of CSS icons available, with over 1,500 scalable vector icons that can be customized using CSS classes.
7 Best Free Icon Libraries
While Font Awesome was a font-based asset library i.e font icon library, Bootstrap chose to use SVG-based icons. At this time, Bootstrap Icons consists of over 1,000 ready-to-use library icons in the alpha version.
Source: www.atatus.com
The Best Free And Paid Icon Fonts - Font Awesome Alternatives
On the Internet, you can easily find many services that give everyone thousands of beautiful icons for free or for a fee. With their help, you can design a website or a page on a social network. There are many alternatives to Font Awesome, but, unfortunately, there are few Russian-language sites. Although, even without translation, it is clear how to find the desired icon...
Source: www.wcido.com
9 FontAwesome Alternatives That Are Equally As Good
FontAwesome is by far one of the most popular source for font icons, with a huge collection of icons. But it is highly unnecessary to download the whole collection when you need to use just a few.
10 Best Fontello Alternatives 2021
Similar to other vector makers and Fontello, you can use Font Awesome to create custom icons of your own using a variety of colors, shapes, and font styles. When you’re done, you can share your newly minted icons with others or save them directly on your computer.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Font Awesome seems to be a lot more popular than React Icons. While we know about 130 links to Font Awesome, we've tracked only 11 mentions of React Icons. 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.

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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Font Awesome mentions (130)

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What are some alternatives?

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

Bootstrap Icons - Official open source SVG icon library for Bootstrap

Flaticon - A database of free vector icons.

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

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

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

Google Fonts - Making the web more beautiful, fast, and open through great typography