Heroicons 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.
| Heroicons | Solar Icons | |
|---|---|---|
| Icons | 1,297 | 7,410 |
| Visual variants per concept | 2 — outline and solid | 6 — six coordinated styles |
| Design grid | 16/20/24 | 24×24 |
| License | MIT | CC BY 4.0 |
| Attribution required | No | Yes |
| Official React package | @heroicons/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.
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.
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.
Heroicons contains 1,297 icons and Solar Icons contains 7,410. 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.
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.
Heroicons is released under MIT. Commercial use, modification and redistribution with no attribution required.
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 Heroicons or Solar Icons, or browse every library comparison.
Both have first-party React packages: @heroicons/react and solar-icon-set. 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 Solar Icons has 7,410. Solar Icons is larger by about 471%. 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 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.
Heroicons is MIT: Commercial use, modification and redistribution with no attribution required. 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.
Heroicons offers outline and solid; 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. Heroicons draws on a 16/20/24 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.