Material Symbols and Bootstrap 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 Symbols | Bootstrap Icons | |
|---|---|---|
| Icons | 18,547 | 2,090 |
| Visual variants per concept | 4 — variable weight, fill, grade and optical size axes | 3 — outline, filled and more |
| Design grid | 24×24 | 16×16 |
| License | Apache 2.0 | MIT |
| Attribution required | No | No |
| Official React package | @material-symbols/svg-400 | bootstrap-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.
Products that want continuous control over icon weight and fill state, and teams that would rather ship one font file than manage five icon sets.
Consider otherwise if: If you need individually imported SVG components with tree-shaking, the older Material Icons set or Lucide is a better fit — a variable font loads all 18,547 glyphs even if you use thirty of them.
Bootstrap-based projects, admin templates, and compact interfaces where icons sit next to 14px text and need to hold their own at 16px.
Consider otherwise if: If you need strict visual consistency, the mixed fill and stroke treatment can look uneven next to Lucide or Feather. For a larger set with similar small-size optimisation, compare Octicons.
Material Symbols contains 18,547 icons and Bootstrap Icons contains 2,090. Material Symbols is Google's current icon format and the successor to Material Icons. It is built on variable font technology: all 18,547 icons live in a single font file, and four axes — Weight, Fill, Grade, and Optical Size — can be adjusted continuously rather than by swapping between five static themes.
Bootstrap Icons is the official icon set for the Bootstrap framework, built by the Bootstrap team. The 2,090 icons are drawn on a 16×16 grid — tighter than the 24×24 used by most libraries — which makes them pair naturally with Bootstrap's default typography and compact control sizing.
Material Symbols is released under Apache 2.0. No attribution required, but carries an explicit patent grant and requires notice for modified files.
Bootstrap 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 Material Symbols or Bootstrap Icons, or browse every library comparison.
Both have first-party React packages: @material-symbols/svg-400 and bootstrap-icons. Material Symbols 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 Symbols has 18,547 icons and Bootstrap Icons has 2,090. Material Symbols is larger by about 787%. 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 Symbols uses 24×24 and Bootstrap uses 16×16 — 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 Symbols is Apache 2.0: No attribution required, but carries an explicit patent grant and requires notice for modified files. Bootstrap 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.
Material Symbols offers variable weight, fill, grade and optical size axes; Bootstrap Icons offers outline, filled and more. 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 Symbols draws on a 24×24 grid and Bootstrap on 16×16. 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.