Ionicons and Radix 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.
| Ionicons | Radix Icons | |
|---|---|---|
| Icons | 2,607 | 345 |
| Visual variants per concept | 3 — outline, filled and sharp | 1 — outline only |
| Design grid | 24×24 | 15×15 |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Attribution required | No | No |
| Official React package | ionicons | @radix-ui/react-icons |
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.
Mobile and hybrid apps, cross-platform products, and interfaces that want three clear icon variants from one consistent source.
Consider otherwise if: For a more modern, minimal aesthetic, Lucide and Heroicons are the current defaults. Material Design Icons offers five themes if you need more range.
Dense product UI: data tables, command palettes, context menus, settings panels, and anywhere you need an icon to occupy as little space as possible while staying legible.
Consider otherwise if: The 345-icon count is small, so you will hit gaps quickly in a large product. Heroicons also ships a drawn 16px size with many more icons; Lucide covers far more concepts at 24×24.
Ionicons contains 2,607 icons and Radix Icons contains 345. Ionicons was built for the Ionic Framework and has been refined since 2013, which makes it one of the longest-maintained icon sets here. The 2,607 icons ship in three variants — Outline, Filled, and Sharp — each drawn on a 24×24 grid.
Radix Icons is a deliberately small set of 345 icons from the Radix UI team, drawn on a 15×15 grid. That grid is the whole point: Radix icons are designed to sit inside dense product interfaces — tables, toolbars, context menus, and form controls — where a 24×24 icon would force you to loosen your spacing.
Ionicons is released under MIT. Commercial use, modification and redistribution with no attribution required.
Radix Icons is released under MIT. Commercial use, modification and redistribution with no attribution required.
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 Ionicons or Radix Icons, or browse every library comparison.
Both have first-party React packages: ionicons and @radix-ui/react-icons. Ionicons has the larger 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.
Ionicons has 2,607 icons and Radix Icons has 345. Ionicons is larger by about 656%. 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 — Ionicons uses 24×24 and Radix uses 15×15 — 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.
Ionicons is MIT: Commercial use, modification and redistribution with no attribution required. Radix Icons is MIT: Commercial use, modification and redistribution with no attribution required. Neither requires payment, but attribution rules differ, so check before shipping in a product where credit is inconvenient.
Ionicons offers outline, filled and sharp; Radix Icons offers outline only. 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. Ionicons draws on a 24×24 grid and Radix on 15×15. 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.