Bootstrap Icons

Bootstrap Icons wins on the two questions that decide most icon choices in real projects: can we use it anywhere, and will it still look right at 16 pixels? The license answer is the shortest in this category. The set is MIT-licensed, with the LICENSE file in the twbs/icons repository, so the icons can ship in commercial products, client work, and templates you sell, with the copyright notice kept in the files rather than credited on the page. There is no attribution line to negotiate into a footer and no per-project fee.

The drawing answer comes from the construction. New glyphs are designed in Figma on a 16 by 16 grid and exported as flattened SVGs with fill and no stroke, per the project's own contributing notes. Fill construction is unfashionable next to the stroke sets, but it is why these icons survive the sizes product UI actually uses. A filled arrow, gear, or person reads at 14 to 16 pixels on a low-density screen where a 1.5px stroke icon can fall apart. Color comes from currentColor, so an icon inherits the text color of its button or link and themes itself in dark mode without extra assets.

Coverage is the third strength. The official site counts over 2,078 icons, spanning interface actions, files, devices, communication, commerce, and a long tail of domain glyphs, each in outline and filled variants for many entries. Delivery is equally flexible: individual SVGs to inline, one sprite file, or an icon font loaded from the bootstrap-icons npm package or a CDN stylesheet. The project is explicit that Bootstrap itself is not required, and in practice the set drops into any stack, including the Astro, plain HTML, and design-tool workflows this directory covers elsewhere.

The trade-offs are character and control. These are deliberately plain glyphs drawn to disappear into an interface, so a brand that wants its icons to be noticed should pair them with a more distinctive set for marketing surfaces, or draw its own. Fill-only artwork also cannot match a stroke set's weight by changing one CSS value; mixing Bootstrap Icons with Lucide or Tabler on the same screen needs size and optical checks, not just a shared color. And the logo glyphs in the set depict real brands: MIT covers the drawing, not the trademark, so a company logo icon still follows that company's brand rules.

Bottom line: when a project needs icons today, with commercial rights nobody has to re-check next quarter, Bootstrap Icons is the default we reach for first. Reach past it only when the iconography itself has to carry brand character.