Now Icons8 holds 1.4 million icons across 115 styles. Each style maintains its own visual logic. The Color collection alone contains 12,700 icons, which means you won’t get stuck missing that one checkout icon at 2 AM before launch.
Build Icons With URLs, Not Downloads
Here’s what changes everything: https://img.icons8.com/color/48/000000/python.png
That URL generates a Python icon. Change 48 to 256, you get a bigger icon. Swap the hex code, different color. Your app generates icons on demand. No asset folders. No version control nightmares. No designer handoff meetings about which icon version to use.
The omg-img feature takes this further. Hit https://img.icons8.com/search/twitter and Icons8 returns whatever currently best matches “twitter.” Your interface updates itself.
This isn’t just convenient. It’s infrastructure. Production apps generate thousands of icon variations based on user settings, device types, accessibility modes, all without storing a single file locally.
The Editor That Doesn’t Make You Want to Scream
WebGL acceleration keeps vector manipulation smooth. You’re editing actual vectors in your browser, not compressed previews that fall apart when you export.
The Subicon feature gets visual hierarchy. Slap a notification dot on a facebook icon and it automatically scales based on the base icon’s visual weight. No manual pixel pushing. The algorithm handles compound icon balance better than most designers would.
Export options cover every possible need: PNG up to 8192px, SVG (both simplified and editable), PDF, EPS, PSD, AI. Choose non-simplified SVG and you preserve every anchor point for Illustrator editing later.
Free tier gives you PNG up to 100px with attribution. Need SVG? That’s a paid feature, except for Popular, Characters, and Logos categories which stay free even in vector format.
Animation Without the Cheese
900 animated icons. Each runs 600 to 800 milliseconds. Consistent easing curves throughout.
Three formats cover every use case. GIF for email campaigns where nothing else works. Lottie JSON for React Native and Flutter apps that need smooth 60fps animation. After Effects compositions when you’re building video content.
The Lottie integration matters. Mobile developers embed these animations directly without video encoding. No quality loss at different pixel densities. A loading animation looks crisp on both a budget Android phone and an iPhone Pro Max.
Why Design Teams Actually Use This
Icons8 ships dedicated style sets matching Microsoft’s Fluent, Google’s Material, and Apple’s iOS guidelines. You don’t accidentally mix metaphors and create interfaces that feel subtly wrong.
Batch downloads save hours. Free tier handles 256 icons at once. Paid plans remove limits entirely. Every icon comes out with identical dimensions, format, visual weight. Your design system stays consistent without three days of manual cleanup.
The Figma plugin processes over one million requests monthly. Designers never leave their tool. Developers see the exact same assets during handoff. No more “find something that looks like this sketch” tickets.
Money Talk
Icons8 killed the $19.90 unlimited plan in April 2024. Here’s what you pay now:
Free tier works if you can handle attribution links. You get PNG exports up to 100px. Students use this. Open source projects use this. It’s genuinely functional for prototyping.
Individual subscriptions run $24 monthly for icons, photos, illustrations, or music separately. Most people don’t need everything.
Full suite costs $89 monthly. You get all assets plus tools like Lunacy Pro, Smart Upscaler, Face Generator. Annual payment saves 20%.
The company pulls in $4.6 million yearly with 55 employees according to Owler. Not massive. Not tiny. Sustainable.
Lunacy Started as a Hack
Windows designers couldn’t open Sketch files. Icons8 built Lunacy to fix that specific problem. Free vector editor that reads .sketch format.
Then they kept building. Now Lunacy runs on Windows, macOS, Linux. Works offline. Has Icons8’s entire library baked in. Completely free, no subscription needed.
Some designers switched from Sketch to Lunacy. Not because it’s better necessarily. Because it’s free and good enough for most work.
AI Tools That Solve Real Problems
Face Generator creates photorealistic faces. No model releases needed. No stock photo awkwardness. Marketing teams use this for personas, case studies, testimonials.
AI Anonymizer replaces real faces in photos while keeping everything else intact. Privacy compliance without destroying your case study visuals.
Smart Upscaler enhances resolution using actual machine learning, not just bicubic interpolation. That blurry client logo becomes usable.
What Sucks About Icons8
Too many options paralyze decision making. Search “arrow” and get 500 results. Which one fits your specific context? You’ll scroll. You’ll second-guess. You’ll waste time.
Pricing jumps hurt occasional users. Need three SVG icons for a one-off project? Either accept PNG with attribution or pay $24 for a month you won’t fully use. No day passes. No icon packs. Subscribe or accept limitations.
Search filters lack nuance. Can’t separate literal hammers from metaphorical “hammer out a deal” icons. Can’t filter by stroke weight or corner radius. Advanced users end up browsing manually.
The web interface occasionally lags with large collections. Bulk operations timeout. The desktop apps work better for heavy usage but require separate downloads.
Who Actually Needs This
Startups building MVPs save weeks not creating custom icons. Developers who hate design meetings can generate assets programmatically. Design systems teams get consistency without manual standardization.
Educational institutions leverage the free tier effectively. Students learn interface design without getting bogged down drawing arrows. Teachers build presentations that don’t look like 1995 clipart disasters.
Marketing teams recolor entire icon sets to match brand guidelines in minutes. Content creators get illustrations from actual Dribbble artists, not anonymous stock farms.
Solo designers juggling multiple clients appreciate having 1.4 million options that actually work together visually. Agencies bill for custom icon work while using Icons8 as their foundation.
The Reality Check
Icons8 works because Ivan Braun solved his own problem first. Needed Windows 8 icons. Built them. Others needed them too. Kept building. Kept listening.
Three million users shape the platform through actual usage, not focus groups. When developers complained about asset management, Icons8 built the API. When Windows designers couldn’t open Sketch files, they built Lunacy. When privacy laws tightened, they built AI Anonymizer.
The platform succeeds by being boring infrastructure that works. Not revolutionary. Not disruptive. Just 1.4 million icons that load fast, look consistent, and export cleanly. For $24 to $89 monthly depending on your needs, you stop thinking about icon procurement and start shipping products.
That’s the whole point. Icons8 removes friction from design production. Sometimes the best tools are the ones you forget you’re using.