Choose the right and the best icon library for React, save time and effort. This will ensure your website has a consistent, professional look and feel with icons designed for clarity and visual appeal.

By choosing the best free icon library or a beautiful premium icon library, you get access to huge collections of high-quality open-source icons that can be easily integrated into your projects. If you use different libraries for your SaaS, mobile apps, or website icons, you will have different designs, styles, and weights. Icons will become more and more inconsistent and messy as your icon collection grows, even to an untrained eye.

Also, poorly designed icons can be hard to distinguish. Users will get confused or frustrated when they see the same interface with different styles of icons. This can lead to decreased user engagement and satisfaction, which will affect your business.

In this blog, we will go through the 10 best React icon libraries.

Here are some of the top React icon libraries, including their features and benefits:

1. Hugeicons

Website: https://hugeicons.com/

One of the most complete React icon libraries, Hugeicons offers 37,000+ beautiful icons in 9 styles. It's built for modern web apps, SaaS platforms, and UI/UX designers. The library categorises icons into semantic icons and decorative icons to improve accessibility for visually impaired users. Check out the Hugeicons website for more information. Additionally, Hugeicons allows developers to import icons individually, which helps keep the bundle size small and optimises application performance.

What is Hugeicons ?

Hugeicons is a popular React icon library that offers a huge collection of high-quality vector icons suitable for various themes and applications. Designed to meet the demands of professional design projects and commercial use, Hugeicons icons can be nicely customised to fit the design of your application. Whether you're working on a web project, mobile app, or admin dashboard, Hugeicons ensures you have the right icons to enhance your design aesthetics and overall user experience.

Why Choose Hugeicons ?

If you're looking for the best icon library for react, Hugeicons takes pride in being more than just an icon library. We are a dynamic platform that stands out from the crowd, offering unparalleled benefits to icon designers and creators. Here's what sets Hugeicons apart:

• Massive icon collection: 37,000+ react icons across 59 categories.
• Free icons: 4,000+ free react icons for personal and commercial use (no limit).
• Multiple styles: Includes rounded (stroke, two-tone, solid, bulk, duotone), sharp (stroke, solid), and standard (stroke, solid) styles for versatile design options.
• Optimised formats: SVGs & web fonts.
• Multi-platform support: Compatible with React, Next.js, Vue, Svelte, Angular, and more.
• Optimised performance: Tree-shakable, reducing unused icons for faster loading times.
• Figma plugin & web app: Quickly search, customise, and export react icons.

Visit Hugeicons website: https://hugeicons.com/

Installation and Integration

The @hugeicons/react package is freely available on the public npm registry. To use HugeIcons in your React project, you'll need to install both the React component package and at least one icon package of your choice. This modular approach allows you to keep your bundle size minimal by including only the icons you plan to use.

Check out the docs for more guidance: https://docs.hugeicons.com/

Use Cases

Hugeicons is suitable for various use cases, including web and mobile applications, personal and commercial projects, and admin dashboards. Its extensive collection of icons makes it a popular choice for designers and developers who need a wide range of icons for their projects. Whether you're building a sleek mobile app or a comprehensive admin dashboard, Hugeicons provides the versatility and quality you need to bring your design vision to life.

2. Material UI Icons

Material-UI brings together 2,100 Material icons in 5 styles so you can easily customize colors and sizes.
With the default React wrapper you can integrate custom font and SVG, ensuring a flexible and cohesive default project visual language that matches Material Design principles.
This package strikes the perfect balance between versatility and adhering to established design and code standards, making it the go-to package for developers as their project grows.

Features

• Access a diverse array of 2,100 MUI in five distinct styles.
• Leverage the convenience of the React wrapper for a user-friendly integration experience.
• Easily incorporate font and SVG , providing flexibility in design implementation.

Preview site : https://mui.com/material-ui/material-icons/

3. React-Icons

React-Icons, a versatile library that combines popular icons with React applications, offers a collection of popular icons from sets like Font Awesome and Material Design. Adding icons selectively from these libraries is crucial to keep your project efficient. No login required.

It simplifies integration with React components, and you can do pull requests. It uses ES6 imports so you can import only the icons your project is using.

Why Choose React Icons?

• Includes Font Awesome, Material Design, Bootstrap, and more.
• ES6 imports: Import only the icons you need for better performance.
• Lightweight & optimized: Keeps apps fast and efficient.

Features

• Integrate React-Icons with React components, speed up development.
• Be versatile in design by easily adding variety of icons to your React applications.

Preview site: https://react-icons.github.io/react-icons/

4. Heroicons

Heroicons are beautifully designed set of icons for simplicity, style and versatility, with clean and readable designs. Perfect icons for both clarity and visual appeal. This popular icons library offers flexibility with both outline and solid styles so any version of it is suitable for your design needs as your project grows.

Features

• 292 SVG icons, a rich collection for your design projects.
• Customise colours easily by adjusting the color CSS property and flexibility in design choices.
• Use Tailwind CSS utility classes for easy color customisation, more flexibility in your design process.

Preview site: https://heroicons.com/

5. Unicons

Unicons, an open-source library by IconScout. Sizes and colours are customisable to your design style and preference. Unicons also integrates with popular design tools through IconScout's platform, so it's accessible.
Check out the Unicons documentation for detailed installation instructions and implementation details.

Features

• 4,500+ icons across 4 styles, 27 categories.
• Free icons: 1,200+ line icons
• Diverse styles: Includes Line, Solid, Monochrome, and Thin Line icons.
• Resource with web font and SVG formats based on your project requirements.
• Seamless Integration: Works with React, Vue, Figma, SVG, and web projects via IconScout CDN.
• Performance optimized: Lightweight SVGs and web fonts ensure fast loading times.
• Figma plugin: Directly access Unicons in Figma for a smoother design experience.
• Customise sizes and colours to your design .

Preview site: https://iconscout.com/unicons

6. Feather Icons React

This library focus only on feather icons and has quick install and straightforward React integration, so it's elegant for applications. Configure const app features like color and size to customise your design. Makes it lightweight and fast-loading for your React projects. No login required.

Features

• 287 open-source icons, plenty of choices for your design needs.
• Easy integration into React applications.

Preview site: https://feathericons.com

7. Font Awesome

Font Awesome React, an extension of Font Awesome icon set itself, is an icon set designed for easy integration with React applications. Developers love the huge collection of icons in Font Awesome. This library has a huge collection of icons, so many options for users. They provide SVG to wrap within a component.

Benefits

• Free access to over 2,000 icons. and more than 50,000 total icons.
• Specialized for React applications, so smooth and optimised integration.

Preview site: https://fontawesome.com/

8. Iconify

Iconify is called a "universal framework stars" because it can provide one syntax for multiple open-source icon sets. To get started with Iconify in your projects, you can follow the initial steps of installing Iconify library and importing the icons you need. Rendered in SVG file format, these can be customised.

Features

• 200,000+ icons from 100+ sets, plenty of options for your design projects.
• Rendered in SVG format to fit your design needs.
• Open srouce: Iconify is an open source project.
• Customise each easily by adjusting size, width and rotation, tailored design approach.

Preview site: https://iconify.design/

9. Styled Icons

StyledIcons allows you to import and include from well-known style component libraries like Bootstrap, Feather, Font Awesome, Material Design, Remix, and more by using them as const app styled component components.
When you use Styled Icons, amazing things happen, especially for designers and React.js developers.

Features

• Explore a collection of over 20,000 icons from popular icon packs.
• Easily import as styled components.
• Effortlessly customize features, including color and size.

Preview site: https://styled-icons.dev/ #Note: This deployment is temporarily paused.

10. Ant Design

Ant Design is a library only for icons, designed to integrate seamlessly with Ant Design, a popular React UI library. The effect of applying props to icons in Ant Design is huge, so users can see the changes in the component in real time, making it more usable and visually impactful. This library offers a set of semantic vector icons and also allows you to import, install and use independently without importing and installing any other Ant Design components.

Features

• A large collection
• Integrate only the Ant Design icons into your React projects.
• Customise icons to your application's colour scheme, size, and design.

Preview site: https://ant.design/

Conclusion: Which Icon Library is Best for You?

The best React icon library depends on your project's needs:

• Need a beautiful, consistent and premium react icon library? → Hugeicons 
• Looking for free, open-source icons? → Hugeicons, Feather Icons & Unicons, and others.

By choosing the best icon library for react, you can make a big difference in your web applications. These libraries cater to different preferences, with features from simplicity and performance to customization and animation. The integration process is simple, designed for minimal effort. Choosing the icon libraries is key to success in your next project. Utilizing the right react icons can significantly improve navigation and user experience.