Material Symbols 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 Symbols | Carbon Icons | |
|---|---|---|
| Icons | 18,547 | 2,644 |
| Visual variants per concept | 4 — variable weight, fill, grade and optical size axes | 1 — outline only |
| Design grid | 24×24 | 32×32 |
| License | Apache 2.0 | Apache 2.0 |
| Attribution required | No | No |
| Official React package | @material-symbols/svg-400 | @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 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.
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 Symbols contains 18,547 icons and Carbon Icons contains 2,644. 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.
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 Symbols 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 Symbols or Carbon Icons, or browse every library comparison.
Both have first-party React packages: @material-symbols/svg-400 and @carbon/icons-react. 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 Carbon Icons has 2,644. Material Symbols is larger by about 601%. 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 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 Symbols 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 Symbols offers variable weight, fill, grade and optical size axes; 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 Symbols 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.