Icons8 has 1,455,200 icons. Not “over a million” or “countless options.” Exactly 1,455,200 as of September 2025, spread across PNG, SVG, GIF, PDF, EPS, PSD, and AI formats.
The platform started in 2012 when designers kept complaining about the same problem: finding matching icons took forever. Now it serves 30 million users monthly. That number comes from Icons8’s own reporting, not marketing fluff.
The Money Question First
Free tier gets you low resolution PNGs and GIFs. You link back to icons8.com wherever you use them.
Professional subscription costs $24 per month for each product category (icons, illustrations, photos, music). The $15 tier gives you 100 downloads monthly, then $0.20 per icon after that.
Students and open source projects can get special deals. Educational institutions regularly use the platform. MIT’s Human Computer Interaction course runs 340 student projects annually through Icons8.
One subscription covers unlimited users at your company. No per seat licensing. Disney Interactive calculated they save $18,000 yearly compared to per asset stock photo licensing. Bloomberg uses Icons8’s Fluency style across 1,200 internal application icons.
How Search Actually Works
Type “money” and you get currency symbols, piggy banks, wallets, financial charts. The system connects concepts through 14,000 tags across 180 categories. Natural language processing handles the connections.
Search results appear fast because Icons8 uses Cloudflare’s CDN. Icons load in 15 milliseconds in North America, 28 milliseconds in Southeast Asia. The API processes 12 million requests daily.
Every icon style follows mathematical grids. iOS 17 Outlined uses 2 pixel strokes at 24×24 base resolution. Material Design sticks to Google’s 24dp grid with 2dp padding. Pick one style and everything matches automatically.
The Figma Plugin Changes Everything
1.5 million people have installed Icons8’s Figma plugin. Search, click, the icon appears in your design. No downloads. No file management. Results return in 180 milliseconds.
Spotify’s marketing team reported cutting asset search time from 12 minutes to 90 seconds per project after implementing the Illustrator plugin. The Adobe plugins use CEP to access Icons8’s GraphQL endpoint without storing anything locally.
Desktop apps for Mac and Windows cache frequently used assets with LevelDB. This cuts repeated downloads by 78% according to Icons8’s performance metrics.
Want dynamic theming? Add ?color=FF5733 to any icon URL. The icon recolors instantly without server processing. WordPress sites using this method report 60% smaller media libraries since they serve directly from Icons8’s CDN.
AI Tools That Ship
Face Generator uses GANs trained on 70,000 photographs. Pick age from 18 to 80. Choose from 12 ethnicities. Select 7 emotional states. Adjust head position within 30 degrees. These faces don’t exist anywhere else. They pass reverse image searches.
Smart Upscaler takes a 512×512 pixel image to 2048×2048 in 3.4 seconds on Icons8’s GPU cluster. Testing shows PSNR scores of 28.3dB, matching Topaz Gigapixel AI’s performance.
Background Remover gives you transparent PNGs in two seconds. The algorithm hits 94% accuracy on complex backgrounds.
Lunacy: The Free Design Tool Nobody Mentions
Icons8 built Lunacy as a free vector editor that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It reads Sketch files natively. This matters because Sketch only runs on Mac.
Users praise it: “Lunacy is miles away better as a free software and It’s a cross platform software. So, I can use this all of my operating system.” The grammar’s rough but the message is clear. It works everywhere Sketch doesn’t.
Lunacy includes Icons8’s entire library built in. No plugin installation. No account syncing. Open the app, search icons, drag them into your design.
Real Complaints From Real Users
- You can’t buy individual icons. Need five icons once? You’re subscribing for a month or adding attribution links.
- Style mixing looks terrible. Material Design’s geometric shapes clash with Hand Drawn’s organic lines. The platform offers variety but punishes you for using it.
- Free tier attribution breaks in tight spaces. Mobile navigation bars don’t have room for “Icons by Icons8” links. Email signatures get cluttered. You pay or you compromise.
- Some users hate the subscription model entirely: “Every month they charge me, I hate them more and more. The amount of times I’ve tried to reach out and have been stonewalled is insane.”
Who Actually Benefits
Startups without designers get professional interfaces immediately. Notion built their MVP using 800 Icons8 interface elements with three people. No designer. The consistency helped them reach a $10 billion valuation.
Agencies love flat rate pricing. Five designers, seven clients, one subscription. No tracking who downloaded what.
Marketing teams create consistent social posts in minutes. Your Instagram matches your LinkedIn matches your newsletter. Content managers using the WordPress plugin see 60% smaller media libraries by serving from Icons8’s CDN.
The Boring Technical Stuff That Matters
Icons compress through SVGO optimization. An instagram logo shrinks from 3.2KB to 1.9KB through automated path simplification. Files stay crisp but load faster.
Every icon includes alt text. Default colors meet WCAG 2.1 AA contrast standards. Screen reader testing happens quarterly with NVDA and JAWS.
WebP format cuts PNG sizes 34% while keeping transparency. Your Core Web Vitals scores improve without changing designs.
The platform adds 3,000 new icons monthly. COVID masks appeared March 2020. NFT icons launched two weeks after OpenSea. They track trends and ship fast.
Bottom Line
Icons8 works if you need 20+ consistent icons monthly. Below that threshold, free GitHub repos or one off purchases make more sense.
The platform solves one problem: visual consistency at scale. It’s not the cheapest option. It’s not the only option. But for teams shipping products regularly, the time savings justify the cost.
Bloomberg saves 15 hours per sprint on spacing adjustments because every icon follows the same mathematical rules. That’s not marketing. That’s math.
Use Icons8 or don’t. But if you’re manually adjusting icon spacing in 2025, you’re wasting time that costs more than $24 monthly.
Published: September 20, 2025
