Material Design Icons and Carbon 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.
| Material Design Icons | Carbon Icons | |
|---|---|---|
| Icons | 14,001 | 2,644 |
| Visual variants per concept | 5 — outlined, rounded, sharp, two-tone and filled | 1 — outline only |
| Design grid | 24×24 | 32×32 |
| License | Apache 2.0 | Apache 2.0 |
| Attribution required | No | No |
| Official React package | @mui/icons-material | @carbon/icons-react |
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.
Products that follow Material Design, Android-adjacent apps, and any interface where recognition matters more than distinctiveness. If your users already use Gmail, Drive, or Android, these icons need no explanation.
Consider otherwise if: Google's newer Material Symbols supersedes this set with variable-font icons in a single file. For a less Google-flavoured look, Fluent UI and Carbon are the enterprise equivalents.
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.
Material Design Icons contains 14,001 icons and Carbon Icons contains 2,644. Material Design Icons is Google's official icon set, and it is the most widely deployed icon vocabulary on the web. The 14,001 icons follow the Material geometry rules — a 24×24 grid with 2px keypoint padding, straight edges softened by corner radii, and a deliberate, slightly geometric construction.
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.
Material Design Icons is released under Apache 2.0. No attribution required, but carries an explicit patent grant and requires notice for modified files.
Carbon Icons 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 Material Design Icons or Carbon Icons, or browse every library comparison.
Both have first-party React packages: @mui/icons-material and @carbon/icons-react. Material 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.
Material Design Icons has 14,001 icons and Carbon Icons has 2,644. Material Design Icons is larger by about 430%. 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 — Material uses 24×24 and Carbon uses 32×32 — 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.
Material Design Icons is Apache 2.0: No attribution required, but carries an explicit patent grant and requires notice for modified files. Carbon Icons 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.
Material Design Icons offers outlined, rounded, sharp, two-tone and filled; Carbon 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. Material draws on a 24×24 grid and Carbon on 32×32. 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.