Lucide Icons and Ionicons 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.
| Lucide Icons | Ionicons | |
|---|---|---|
| Icons | 1,979 | 2,607 |
| Visual variants per concept | 1 — outline only | 3 — outline, filled and sharp |
| Design grid | 24×24 | 24×24 |
| License | ISC | MIT |
| Attribution required | No | No |
| Official React package | lucide-react | ionicons |
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.
SaaS dashboards, developer tools, documentation sites, and any product that wants a calm, neutral, geometric icon language. Lucide is particularly strong in dense interfaces because its uniform stroke weight stays legible at 16px and 20px.
Consider otherwise if: If you need multiple weights from one library, Phosphor offers six. If you need filled icons, IconPark Solid or Material Design Icons are better choices, since Lucide is outline-only.
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.
Lucide Icons contains 1,979 icons and Ionicons contains 2,607. Lucide began as a fork of Feather Icons when Feather's release cadence slowed and community pull requests began to pile up. Rather than let the project stall, contributors created Lucide with an explicit commitment to community governance and regular releases. It has since grown well past its parent: 1,979 icons against Feather's 286.
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.
Lucide Icons is released under ISC. Functionally equivalent to MIT — no attribution required.
Ionicons 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 Lucide Icons or Ionicons, or browse every library comparison.
Both have first-party React packages: lucide-react and ionicons. Lucide 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.
Lucide Icons has 1,979 icons and Ionicons has 2,607. Ionicons is larger by about 32%. 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 — Lucide uses 24×24 and Ionicons 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.
Lucide Icons is ISC: Functionally equivalent to MIT — no attribution required. Ionicons 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.
Lucide Icons offers outline only; Ionicons offers outline, filled and sharp. 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. Lucide draws on a 24×24 grid and Ionicons 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.