Why working with SVGs is still painful in 2026

Denys Nyzhehorodtsev — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 15:59:32 +0000

Working with SVGs should be simple.

But somehow, it’s still a mess in 2026.

If you’ve ever exported icons from Figma (or any design tool), you probably know what I mean.

Here’s what I usually get:

random inline styles
hardcoded fill colors
inconsistent or missing viewBox
unnecessary groups and attributes
SVGs that don’t scale properly
completely different structure for every icon

And every time, before I can even use them in a React project, I have to clean them manually.

Again. And again. And again.

The “manual cleanup” problem

A typical workflow looks like this:

Open SVG file
Remove inline styles
Replace fills with currentColor
Fix the viewBox
Remove unnecessary nodes
Convert attributes to camelCase (for React)
Wrap everything into a component

It doesn’t take hours… but it’s repetitive, boring, and easy to mess up.

Especially when you have dozens (or hundreds) of icons.
In one of my recent projects, I had to clean ~80 SVGs manually. That’s when it really started to annoy me.
And I kept thinking: why am I still doing this in 2026?

Why existing tools don’t fully solve it

Yes, tools like SVGO help.

But:

they don’t prepare SVGs for frameworks like React or React Native
they don’t handle multicolor icons well
they don’t give you ready-to-use components
they still require manual adjustments

So you end up with a “half-clean” SVG that still needs work.

What I actually wanted

At some point I realized I don’t want to think about SVG cleanup at all. I just want this:

drop SVGs in
get clean, consistent output
use it directly in my project

No manual fixes. No repetitive steps.

So I built a small tool for myself

I ended up building a tool that:

cleans SVGs automatically
converts them into React / React Native components
supports multicolor icons
keeps gradients
removes unnecessary attributes
normalizes structure

Basically — it turns messy SVGs into something you can actually use in production.

I’ve been using it in my own workflow, and it saves a lot of time.

Curious how others handle this

I’m genuinely interested:

How do you deal with SVGs in your projects?

Do you clean them manually?
Use scripts?
Or just live with the mess?

If you're curious, the tool is called SVGForce — I built it mainly for my own workflow, but maybe it’s useful for you too.