Heroicons and Material Symbols 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.
| Heroicons | Material Symbols | |
|---|---|---|
| Icons | 1,297 | 18,547 |
| Visual variants per concept | 2 — outline and solid | 4 — variable weight, fill, grade and optical size axes |
| Design grid | 16/20/24 | 24×24 |
| License | MIT | Apache 2.0 |
| Attribution required | No | No |
| Official React package | @heroicons/react | @material-symbols/svg-400 |
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.
Tailwind CSS projects of any size, and teams that want their icons styled with the same utilities as the rest of their markup. The three drawn sizes also make Heroicons a good fit for interfaces with a strict type and spacing scale.
Consider otherwise if: Outside the Tailwind ecosystem the utility-class ergonomics matter less, and Lucide or Tabler give you more icons. For dense 15px-scale interfaces, Radix Icons is drawn specifically for that.
Products that want continuous control over icon weight and fill state, and teams that would rather ship one font file than manage five icon sets.
Consider otherwise if: If you need individually imported SVG components with tree-shaking, the older Material Icons set or Lucide is a better fit — a variable font loads all 18,547 glyphs even if you use thirty of them.
Heroicons contains 1,297 icons and Material Symbols contains 18,547. Heroicons is made by the team behind Tailwind CSS, and it is designed to drop straight into Tailwind projects. The 1,297 icons ship in outline and solid variants, each available at 16px, 20px, and 24px — three sizes that are drawn separately rather than scaled, so optical weight stays correct at each one.
Material Symbols is Google's current icon format and the successor to Material Icons. It is built on variable font technology: all 18,547 icons live in a single font file, and four axes — Weight, Fill, Grade, and Optical Size — can be adjusted continuously rather than by swapping between five static themes.
Heroicons is released under MIT. Commercial use, modification and redistribution with no attribution required.
Material Symbols is released under Apache 2.0. No attribution required, but carries an explicit patent grant and requires notice for modified files.
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 Heroicons or Material Symbols, or browse every library comparison.
Both have first-party React packages: @heroicons/react and @material-symbols/svg-400. Heroicons 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.
Heroicons has 1,297 icons and Material Symbols has 18,547. Material Symbols is larger by about 1330%. 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 — Heroicons uses 16/20/24 and Material Symbols 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.
Heroicons is MIT: Commercial use, modification and redistribution with no attribution required. Material Symbols is Apache 2.0: No attribution required, but carries an explicit patent grant and requires notice for modified files. Neither requires payment, but attribution rules differ, so check before shipping in a product where credit is inconvenient.
Heroicons offers outline and solid; Material Symbols offers variable weight, fill, grade and optical size axes. 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. Heroicons draws on a 16/20/24 grid and Material Symbols 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.