Material Symbols 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.
| Material Symbols | Ionicons | |
|---|---|---|
| Icons | 18,547 | 2,607 |
| Visual variants per concept | 4 — variable weight, fill, grade and optical size axes | 3 — outline, filled and sharp |
| Design grid | 24×24 | 24×24 |
| License | Apache 2.0 | MIT |
| Attribution required | No | No |
| Official React package | @material-symbols/svg-400 | 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.
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.
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.
Material Symbols contains 18,547 icons and Ionicons contains 2,607. 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.
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.
Material Symbols is released under Apache 2.0. No attribution required, but carries an explicit patent grant and requires notice for modified files.
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 Material Symbols or Ionicons, or browse every library comparison.
Both have first-party React packages: @material-symbols/svg-400 and ionicons. 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 Ionicons has 2,607. Material Symbols is larger by about 611%. 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 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.
Material Symbols is Apache 2.0: No attribution required, but carries an explicit patent grant and requires notice for modified files. 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.
Material Symbols offers variable weight, fill, grade and optical size axes; 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. Material Symbols 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.