Remix Icon 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.
| Remix Icon | Solar Icons | |
|---|---|---|
| Icons | 3,244 | 7,410 |
| Visual variants per concept | 2 — line and fill | 6 — six coordinated styles |
| Design grid | 24×24 | 24×24 |
| License | Apache 2.0 | CC BY 4.0 |
| Attribution required | No | Yes |
| Official React package | remixicon | 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.
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.
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.
Remix Icon contains 3,244 icons and Solar Icons contains 7,410. 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.
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.
Remix Icon is released under Apache 2.0. No attribution required, but carries an explicit patent grant and requires notice for modified files.
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 Remix Icon or Solar Icons, or browse every library comparison.
Both have first-party React packages: remixicon and solar-icon-set. Remix 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.
Remix Icon has 3,244 icons and Solar Icons has 7,410. Solar Icons is larger by about 128%. 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 — Remix uses 24×24 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.
Remix Icon is Apache 2.0: No attribution required, but carries an explicit patent grant and requires notice for modified files. 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.
Remix Icon offers line and fill; 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. Remix draws on a 24×24 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.