Phosphor Icons and Material Symbols 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.
| Phosphor Icons | Material Symbols | |
|---|---|---|
| Icons | 9,198 | 18,547 |
| Visual variants per concept | 6 — thin, light, regular, bold, fill and duotone | 4 — variable weight, fill, grade and optical size axes |
| Design grid | 24×24 | 24×24 |
| License | MIT | Apache 2.0 |
| Attribution required | No | No |
| Official React package | phosphor-react | @material-symbols/svg-400 |
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.
Design systems, products with strong visual hierarchy, and teams that want one library to cover every context. The weight range also solves the common problem of outline icons disappearing on coloured or photographic backgrounds.
Consider otherwise if: If you only need one weight, the six-weight structure is overhead you will not use — Lucide or Tabler are simpler. If you want duotone plus a premium aesthetic, compare Solar and Huge Icons.
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.
Phosphor Icons contains 9,198 icons and Material Symbols contains 18,547. Phosphor is built around a single idea: one icon family that works at every weight. Each of its 9,198 icons is available in six weights — Thin, Light, Regular, Bold, Fill, and Duotone — so you can express hierarchy, hover state, and emphasis without ever leaving the library.
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.
Phosphor Icons is released under MIT. Commercial use, modification and redistribution with no attribution required.
Material Symbols 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 Phosphor Icons or Material Symbols, or browse every library comparison.
Both have first-party React packages: phosphor-react and @material-symbols/svg-400. Phosphor 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.
Phosphor Icons has 9,198 icons and Material Symbols has 18,547. Material Symbols is larger by about 102%. 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 — Phosphor uses 24×24 and Material Symbols 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.
Phosphor Icons is MIT: Commercial use, modification and redistribution with no attribution required. Material Symbols 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.
Phosphor Icons offers thin, light, regular, bold, fill and duotone; Material Symbols offers variable weight, fill, grade and optical size axes. 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. Phosphor draws on a 24×24 grid and Material Symbols 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.