DEV Community

Rails Designer
Rails Designer

Posted on • Originally published at railsdesigner.com

3 1 1 1 1

6 Free Icon Libraries for Rails Apps

This article was originally published on Rails Designer


Icons are a must in any software app. They will help guide your users quicker through your app. They also might help clean up your UI. Instead of “Open Menu” and “Close Menu” you can use - and × (the “hamburger” is probably the most-known icon on the internet).

Luckily, in 2025, you don't have to create any icons anymore, because along side many great, commercial libraries there are some truly amazing libraries that are completely free.

I want to list some of them here to list, highlight, and thank them for their existence. Our apps look and work better because of them. ❤️

Hericons (300+ icons)

Image description

A carefully crafted icon set, with variants from outline to mini and even micro. This smaller variant shows the care they put in for details. The least number of icons, but should match most of your general SaaS needs.

Feather (280+ icons)

Image description

An outline-only set of icons. But with around 280 of them it's a solid collection.

Lucide (1500+ icons)

Image description

Started as a fork of Feather mentioned earlier. As can see from the icon count has been growing steadily since.

Phosphor (9000+ icons)

Image description

A massive number of icons! Granted four variants are stroke-widths (and I couldn't easily detect any manual tweaks between them). But even without the semi-duplicates ones, it's still an awesome ~1500 icons per variant.

Radix (300+ icons)

Image description

An icon library by WorkOS. They mix a few solid icons with an other outline variant. It's a pretty vast icon set, but designed to be used at fairly small size (which is usually fine for software apps).

Tabler (5700+ icons)

Image description

This huge icon set had two variants (for most icons): solid and outline.

The icon count is the total between all their variants. Most of these libraries provide the same icons in multiple variants, like solid, outline or fill. This is nice, because, for example, if you need to display some icons fairly small, an outline icon becomes less legible, than say a filled icon.

Let's go over some more best practices.

Best practices

To keep things professional and good-looking there are a few things to keep in mind when using icons.

  • stay consistent; ideally stick to one icon library;
  • when using icon-only button (without a label); make sure to a aria-label="Search";
  • Not every icon can increase or decrease in size without consequence; typically outlined icons work less when really small (< 14px);

How to add these icons to your app

All these mentioned icon libraries are open-source, meaning you can download them and use them in your app. Maybe following this article about inline svg. Also most have their own, dedicated gem you can pull into your app.

All great. But early last year, I wanted something better. One API for all these icon libraries. That's when I created and published Rails Icons. It's a simple gem that let's you pull in the icons you want from their respective GitHub libraries, keeping the gem light-weight.

AWS Security LIVE!

Join us for AWS Security LIVE!

Discover the future of cloud security. Tune in live for trends, tips, and solutions from AWS and AWS Partners.

Learn More

Top comments (1)

Collapse
 
railsdesigner profile image
Rails Designer

Is there one library missing from this page (and in Rails Icons)? Let me know here. 🛎️

Image of Timescale

Timescale – the developer's data platform for modern apps, built on PostgreSQL

Timescale Cloud is PostgreSQL optimized for speed, scale, and performance. Over 3 million IoT, AI, crypto, and dev tool apps are powered by Timescale. Try it free today! No credit card required.

Try free

👋 Kindness is contagious

Please leave a ❤️ or a friendly comment on this post if you found it helpful!

Okay