Heroicons and Feather 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.
| Heroicons | Feather Icons | |
|---|---|---|
| Icons | 1,297 | 286 |
| Visual variants per concept | 2 — outline and solid | 1 — outline only |
| Design grid | 16/20/24 | 24×24 |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Attribution required | No | No |
| Official React package | @heroicons/react | react-feather |
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.
Tailwind CSS projects of any size, and teams that want their icons styled with the same utilities as the rest of their markup. The three drawn sizes also make Heroicons a good fit for interfaces with a strict type and spacing scale.
Consider otherwise if: Outside the Tailwind ecosystem the utility-class ergonomics matter less, and Lucide or Tabler give you more icons. For dense 15px-scale interfaces, Radix Icons is drawn specifically for that.
Landing pages, portfolios, marketing sites, and small apps where you need perhaps thirty icons and want them to look calm and deliberate. Feather is also a good teaching reference for icon grid discipline.
Consider otherwise if: For an actively maintained superset with the same aesthetic, use Lucide — it began as a Feather fork and now has 1,979 icons. Iconoir is another minimalist option with far more coverage.
Heroicons contains 1,297 icons and Feather Icons contains 286. Heroicons is made by the team behind Tailwind CSS, and it is designed to drop straight into Tailwind projects. The 1,297 icons ship in outline and solid variants, each available at 16px, 20px, and 24px — three sizes that are drawn separately rather than scaled, so optical weight stays correct at each one.
Feather Icons is the library that defined the modern minimal outline icon. Created by Cole Bemis in 2017, its 286 icons are drawn on a 24×24 grid with a 2px stroke, rounded joins, and no fill — a formula that an entire generation of icon libraries has since copied.
Heroicons is released under MIT. Commercial use, modification and redistribution with no attribution required.
Feather 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 Heroicons or Feather Icons, or browse every library comparison.
Both have first-party React packages: @heroicons/react and react-feather. Heroicons 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.
Heroicons has 1,297 icons and Feather Icons has 286. Heroicons is larger by about 353%. 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 — Heroicons uses 16/20/24 and Feather 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.
Heroicons is MIT: Commercial use, modification and redistribution with no attribution required. Feather 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.
Heroicons offers outline and solid; Feather 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. Heroicons draws on a 16/20/24 grid and Feather 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.