Lucide vs Tabler vs Phosphor: Which Free Icon Set Fits Your UI?

Lucide, Tabler Icons, and Phosphor are three of the most recommended open-source icon libraries, and they come up together in almost every "which icon set should I use" thread. All three are permissively licensed, actively maintained upstream, and fully browsable on svgicons.com, so you can compare the actual vectors side by side before committing your project to one visual language. The numbers and license details below are read from the catalog database that powers this site, not copied from marketing pages. Where the sets differ upstream, the comparison sticks to what ships in the indexed releases. Quick comparison Set Icons here License Grid Drawing model Variants Lucide 1,778 ISC 24x24 2px stroke, currentColor One style; experimental icons live in Lucide Lab (373) Tabler Icons 6,143 MIT 24x24 2px stroke, currentColor Outline plus 1,087 -filled icons in the same set Phosphor 9,161 MIT 256x256 Filled paths, currentColor Six weights: Regular, Thin, Light, Bold, Fill, Duotone Three drawing philosophies Lucide and Tabler share a philosophy: a 24x24 grid, geometry drawn as strokes rather than filled shapes, and a default stroke width of 2. Lucide grew out of the Feather community and keeps that restrained, minimal feel. Tabler follows the same conventions but covers far more ground. Because both are stroke-based, an icon is literally a set of lines that inherit your text color: <!-- Lucide arrow-right, exactly as stored in the catalog --> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 24 24" width="24" height="24"> <path fill="none" stroke="currentColor" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" stroke-width="2" d="M5 12h14m-7-7l7 7l-7 7"/> </svg> Phosphor takes the opposite road. Its icons are filled paths on a 256x256 grid, so the shapes are solid geometry instead of outlined line work. The weight system replaces stroke-width tweaking: instead of making lines thicker, you switch to the Bold cut of the same icon. <!-- Phosphor arrow-right (Regular weight)