Radix Icons and Solar 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.
| Radix Icons | Solar Icons | |
|---|---|---|
| Icons | 345 | 7,410 |
| Visual variants per concept | 1 — outline only | 6 — six coordinated styles |
| Design grid | 15×15 | 24×24 |
| License | MIT | CC BY 4.0 |
| Attribution required | No | Yes |
| Official React package | @radix-ui/react-icons | solar-icon-set |
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.
Dense product UI: data tables, command palettes, context menus, settings panels, and anywhere you need an icon to occupy as little space as possible while staying legible.
Consider otherwise if: The 345-icon count is small, so you will hit gaps quickly in a large product. Heroicons also ships a drawn 16px size with many more icons; Lucide covers far more concepts at 24×24.
SaaS dashboards, admin templates, and marketing sites that want a premium, contemporary look rather than a neutral system feel. Duotone styles work especially well in empty states and feature cards.
Consider otherwise if: Solar is CC BY 4.0, so it requires attribution — if that is a problem, Phosphor (MIT) offers a comparable six-weight range and Huge Icons (MIT) offers six styles of its own.
Radix Icons contains 345 icons and Solar Icons contains 7,410. Radix Icons is a deliberately small set of 345 icons from the Radix UI team, drawn on a 15×15 grid. That grid is the whole point: Radix icons are designed to sit inside dense product interfaces — tables, toolbars, context menus, and form controls — where a 24×24 icon would force you to loosen your spacing.
Solar is a premium-feeling icon pack of 7,410 icons from 480 Design, and it is one of the most widely used sets in SaaS and mobile product design. Every icon comes in six styles: Linear, Outline, Bold, Duotone, Broken, and Bold Duotone.
Radix Icons is released under MIT. Commercial use, modification and redistribution with no attribution required.
Solar Icons is released under CC BY 4.0. Requires visible attribution wherever the icons appear.
One of these two requires attribution. If the icons will appear somewhere a credit line is impractical — an app icon, a hardware label, a slide deck template — that alone may settle the decision.
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 Radix Icons or Solar Icons, or browse every library comparison.
Both have first-party React packages: @radix-ui/react-icons and solar-icon-set. Radix has the smaller 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.
Radix Icons has 345 icons and Solar Icons has 7,410. Solar Icons is larger by about 2048%. 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 — Radix uses 15×15 and Solar 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.
Radix Icons is MIT: Commercial use, modification and redistribution with no attribution required. Solar Icons is CC BY 4.0: Requires visible attribution wherever the icons appear. Neither requires payment, but attribution rules differ, so check before shipping in a product where credit is inconvenient.
Radix Icons offers outline only; Solar Icons offers six coordinated styles. 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. Radix draws on a 15×15 grid and Solar 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.