Material Design Icons and Remix Icon 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 | Remix Icon | |
|---|---|---|
| Icons | 14,001 | 3,244 |
| Visual variants per concept | 5 — outlined, rounded, sharp, two-tone and filled | 2 — line and fill |
| Design grid | 24×24 | 24×24 |
| License | Apache 2.0 | Apache 2.0 |
| Attribution required | No | No |
| Official React package | @mui/icons-material | remixicon |
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.
Products that already have a strong visual identity and need icons that adapt to it. The lighter stroke and neutral construction make Remix easy to pair with custom typography and colour systems.
Consider otherwise if: If you want a heavier, more characterful outline, Lucide and Tabler read bolder. For more than two variants per icon, Phosphor and Solar go further.
Material Design Icons contains 14,001 icons and Remix Icon contains 3,244. 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.
Remix Icon is a neutral-style system icon set maintained by Remix Design, organised across 25 categories. Its 3,244 icons are drawn on a 24×24 grid with a 1.5px stroke — noticeably lighter than the 2px default of Lucide or Tabler, which gives the set a more refined, technical feel.
Material Design Icons is released under Apache 2.0. No attribution required, but carries an explicit patent grant and requires notice for modified files.
Remix Icon 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 Remix Icon, or browse every library comparison.
Both have first-party React packages: @mui/icons-material and remixicon. 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 Remix Icon has 3,244. Material Design Icons is larger by about 332%. 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 Remix 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.
Material Design Icons is Apache 2.0: No attribution required, but carries an explicit patent grant and requires notice for modified files. Remix Icon 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; Remix Icon offers line and fill. 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 Remix 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.