Tabler vs Lucide – Two Massive Open-Source Icon Sets Compared
Tabler Icons vs Lucide: stroke weight, icon count, tree-shaking, and framework packages compared for developers choosing a primary icon set.
Tabler and Lucide are both large, MIT-licensed, outline-only icon sets built for product UI, and both are popular defaults for developers who don’t want to think about icons twice. The real difference shows up in scale and stroke consistency once you’re deep into a project.
Stroke style and grid
Lucide draws every icon on a strict 24px grid with a 2px stroke and rounded caps/joins. It’s a fork of Feather Icons, so the DNA is minimal, geometric, and slightly rounded, icons look like a matched family even when combined from very different categories.
Tabler Icons also uses a 24px grid but a lighter 2px stroke with sharper corners by default (each icon also ships a -filled variant). Tabler’s icons read a touch more technical and angular next to Lucide’s softer geometry.
Icon count
Tabler ships 5,900+ icons, nearly 4x Lucide’s 1,700+. Tabler’s size comes from covering deep, specific categories: dev tooling, brand logos, medical, currencies, and dozens of niche domains most sets skip.
If you need “the icon for X” to already exist, a specific brand logo, a niche unit of measurement, an obscure file type, Tabler is more likely to have it. Lucide’s smaller set stays tighter and more consistent stylistically.
Developer/brand icons (Tabler’s edge)
Lucide intentionally excludes brand/logo icons from its core set, for those, pair it with Simple Icons.
Framework packages & tree-shaking
Both ship first-party packages with named exports, so bundlers only include the icons you actually import:
npm install @tabler/icons-react
npm install lucide-react// Tabler
import { IconHome, IconSearch } from "@tabler/icons-react";
<IconHome size={20} stroke={1.5} />;
// Lucide
import { Home, Search } from "lucide-react";
<Home size={20} strokeWidth={1.5} />;Both packages tree-shake cleanly in Vite, Webpack 5+, and Next.js, a single imported icon costs roughly 1-2KB regardless of which library you pick. Tabler also publishes Vue, Svelte, Solid, and Angular packages; Lucide covers the same framework spread plus a vanilla web-component build.
Consistency vs coverage
Lucide’s smaller, hand-curated set means near-zero visual drift between icons designed years apart. Tabler’s larger set occasionally shows subtle weight differences between older and newer additions, worth a visual pass if you’re picking icons across very different categories.
When to choose each
| Use case | Pick |
|---|---|
| Need 3,000+ distinct icon concepts | Tabler |
| Want the tightest visual consistency | Lucide |
| Dev tool / admin panel with brand logos | Tabler |
| Consumer product, minimal UI | Lucide |
| Filled + outline variants for every icon | Tabler |
| Fastest path to “it just matches shadcn” | Lucide |