There are 100s of icon libraries for React JS or Next JS, and choosing the right icon library for your project can make a significant impact on your project’s aesthetics and performance.
Factors to look at while choosing an icon library.
- Style: Choose a library that aligns with your project’s aesthetic.
- Size of Library: Do you need a massive selection or just a small set of core icons?
- Customization: How important is precise styling control?
- Performance: Consider bundle size, SVG icons are more lightweight and are performant.
Let’s check out some of the most popular and useful icon libraries in the React ecosystem.
#1. React Icons
React Icons are probably the most popular among libraries for using icons in React or React-based projects.
The core react-icons library gives you the power to integrate and use icons from multiple other icon libraries like Font Awesome, Material UI icons, Ant Icons, and many more.
React Icons uses the ES6 approach of importing Icons so you only need to import the elements or icons that you need in your project, which enhances the performance of the application.
Features
- Customizable SVG icons
- Multiple packages support, adding more to it.
Follow the official documentation to use it in your React or Nextjs app.
#2. Feather Icons
Feather Icons is a minimalistic open-source icons library and is available for various frameworks and platforms.
Feather Icons is a collection of simply beautiful open-source icons. Each icon is designed on a 24×24 grid with an emphasis on simplicity, consistency, and flexibility.
The React Feather is the package to use Feather Icons in React Js or Nextjs projects.
#3. Material Icons
Material Icons is a part of Material UI ( UI library by Google ). Material UI has over 2100 free icons available and has more than 80K stars on GitHub.
#Good about Material Icons
- More than 2100 free icons
- 90K+ stars on GitHub
- Almost a million downloads per week on NPM
You can use @material-ui/icons package to use Material Icons in React Js or Nextjs projects.
#4. Ant Design Icons
Just like Material Icons, Ant Design Icons are part of Ant Design ( An UI Library ),
#Good about Ant Design Icons
- About 1.4 million downloads per week on NPM
- More than 780 icons
- Easily Customizable
- Ant Design icons are optimized for web performance.
- They use SVG format, ensuring scalability without sacrificing image quality.
Follow Official documentation to use it.
@ant-design/icons is the package to use Ant design Icons in React js or Next js projects.
#5. Fontawesome Icons
Fontawesome Icons is a versatile freemium icons library, but still you can use about 2000 icons for free but if you pay for the subscription you can get up to 30,000 icons.
React Fontawesome is the package you can utilize to use Fontaswesome Icons in your React or Nextjs projects.
Follow this tutorial to know more.
or Follow the official documentation here.
#6. Styled Icons
styled-icons provides over 20,000 icons from the different icon packages as Styled Components, with full support for TypeScript types and tree-shaking / ES modules
These are different icon packages that are supported in styled icons.
Bootstrap, Boxicons, Crypto Icons, Entypo, Eva Icons, Evil Icons, Feather, FluentUI System, Font Awesome, Foundation, Heroicons, Icomoon, Ionicons, Material Design, Octicons, Open Iconic, Remix, Simple Icons, Typicons, Zondicons
#7. React Bootstrap icons
Bootstrap Icons is a Free, high-quality, open-source icon library with over 2,000 icons. Include them any way you like—SVGs, SVG sprite, or web fonts.
You can use react-bootstrap-icons to use Bootstrap Icons in your React or Nextjs projects.
#8. Lucide Icons
Lucide offers a sleek and versatile icon library that seamlessly integrates with your Next.js or React applications. Let’s explore how to leverage Lucide for beautiful, customizable icons:
Lucide can be used in any app, it has an npm package, especially for React i.e, lucide-react that can be used in React applications as well as Nextjs apps.
Learn to use lucide icons in React / Next.js Apps.
#Conclusion
Although there are 100s of Icons libraries above are popular ones that you might also find helpful.
If you are not satisfied with the above libraries you can check more similar libraries like
Free and Open Source
- Remix Icon: A newer library with a growing selection of high-quality icons in line and fill styles.
- Boxicons: Versatile set with solid, regular, and logos variations.
- Tabler Icons: Open-source project with a focus on clarity and consistency.
- Eva Icons: Open-source with both outline and fill styles, and customizable animations.
Premium (with Free Options)
- Heroicons: Beautifully crafted icons from the makers of Tailwind CSS.
- Line Awesome: Extensive collection with a strong emphasis on line-style icons.
- Nucleo: A range of styles, including a free-to-use subset.
- Phosphor Icons: Unique and stylish icons in thin, light, regular, bold, and fill styles.
- Flaticon Huge marketplace for icons with free and paid options. Offers customization tools too.
Thanks for reading, hope you found this helpful. Consider checking out other tutorials as well.
