Carbon Icons and Solar Icons are two of the most widely used open-source icon sets. Both are free, both ship framework packages, and both will look perfectly reasonable in a product UI — which is exactly why the choice is annoying. This page puts the two side by side using the actual artwork and the real numbers.
| Carbon Icons | Solar Icons | |
|---|---|---|
| Icons | 2,644 | 7,410 |
| Visual variants per concept | 1 — outline only | 6 — six coordinated styles |
| Design grid | 32×32 | 24×24 |
| License | Apache 2.0 | CC BY 4.0 |
| Attribution required | No | Yes |
| Official React package | @carbon/icons-react | solar-icon-set |
Every pair below is the same concept rendered from each library's own source files. This is the part you cannot get from a written review — the difference in stroke weight, corner rounding and optical size is the thing you will actually notice in your interface.
Enterprise software, data and analytics platforms, and products that need to satisfy accessibility review and ship in multiple locales.
Consider otherwise if: For a lighter, more contemporary feel, Lucide and Tabler are easier to work with. Fluent UI is the other major enterprise set, with far more icons.
SaaS dashboards, admin templates, and marketing sites that want a premium, contemporary look rather than a neutral system feel. Duotone styles work especially well in empty states and feature cards.
Consider otherwise if: Solar is CC BY 4.0, so it requires attribution — if that is a problem, Phosphor (MIT) offers a comparable six-weight range and Huge Icons (MIT) offers six styles of its own.
Carbon Icons contains 2,644 icons and Solar Icons contains 7,410. Carbon Icons is IBM's open-source icon library, built as part of the Carbon Design System. The 2,644 icons are drawn on a 32×32 grid — significantly larger than the 24×24 most libraries use — which gives the set a slightly more generous, open feel and room for finer internal detail.
Solar is a premium-feeling icon pack of 7,410 icons from 480 Design, and it is one of the most widely used sets in SaaS and mobile product design. Every icon comes in six styles: Linear, Outline, Bold, Duotone, Broken, and Bold Duotone.
Carbon Icons is released under Apache 2.0. No attribution required, but carries an explicit patent grant and requires notice for modified files.
Solar Icons is released under CC BY 4.0. Requires visible attribution wherever the icons appear.
One of these two requires attribution. If the icons will appear somewhere a credit line is impractical — an app icon, a hardware label, a slide deck template — that alone may settle the decision.
You do not have to commit to one. IconStash indexes both libraries, so you can search a concept once and see how each set drew it, then export SVG or PNG at any size and colour. Start with Carbon Icons or Solar Icons, or browse every library comparison.
Both have first-party React packages: @carbon/icons-react and solar-icon-set. Carbon has the smaller catalogue, so for a React app the practical difference is coverage and visual style rather than integration effort. Both tree-shake, so bundle size tracks the number of icons you import, not the size of the library.
Carbon Icons has 2,644 icons and Solar Icons has 7,410. Solar Icons is larger by about 180%. Raw count is not the whole story though — a 20,000-icon set with many near-duplicate variants can be slower to search than a tightly edited 2,000-icon set.
You can, but it usually looks wrong. Each library draws to its own grid and stroke weight — Carbon uses 32×32 and Solar uses 24×24 — so icons from both sit slightly differently next to each other. If you must mix them, keep each library to a distinct area of the interface rather than interleaving them in the same toolbar.
Carbon Icons is Apache 2.0: No attribution required, but carries an explicit patent grant and requires notice for modified files. Solar Icons is CC BY 4.0: Requires visible attribution wherever the icons appear. Neither requires payment, but attribution rules differ, so check before shipping in a product where credit is inconvenient.
Carbon Icons offers outline only; Solar Icons offers six coordinated styles. If you need to express selected and unselected states with the same glyph, the library with more variants saves you from importing a second set.
At 16px, stroke weight and counter size matter more than coverage. Carbon draws on a 32×32 grid and Solar on 24×24. Libraries that redraw per size rather than scaling — such as Fluent UI — generally hold up best. The reliable test is to preview both at your actual render size, which you can do on any icon page on IconStash.