What Can I Use Heroicons For?

Updated

Heroicons is a collection of MIT-licensed interface icons for web and app development. You can use it for any project that needs clean, consistent UI icons — buttons, navigation, forms, empty states, dashboards, and mobile app screens. The icons are free to use and require no attribution, so they fit both personal and commercial work.

Where Heroicons Fits

Heroicons is an interface icon set, not a full UI framework or component library. That distinction matters when deciding whether it belongs in your stack.

You need Heroicons is a fit?
Icons for buttons, menus, nav bars Yes
Icons for web pages and web apps Yes
Icons for mobile/native app interfaces Yes
Prebuilt UI components (buttons, modals, forms) No — use a component library
Full layout or design system No — icons are one piece of it
Illustrations or brand artwork No — these are UI icons

If you are choosing between an icon set and a UI framework, they solve different problems. A framework gives you components and structure; Heroicons gives you the icon layer you drop into whatever structure you already have.

Common Use Cases

Web development

  • Navigation and menu icons (hamburger, chevrons, arrows)
  • Action icons in buttons and toolbars (plus, trash, pencil, download)
  • Status and feedback icons (check, warning, info, error)
  • Form field icons (search, calendar, eye for password visibility)

App development

  • Tab bar and bottom navigation icons
  • Settings and profile screens
  • Empty states and onboarding steps
  • List item leading/trailing icons

Design and prototyping

  • Dropping icons into mockups before development
  • Keeping icon style consistent across a design system
  • Handing off to developers with a shared icon vocabulary

Why It Works for These Scenarios

  • MIT open source — permissive license, so you can use icons in commercial products.
  • No attribution required — you do not need to credit the author in your app or site.
  • Free — no cost to use the set.
  • Consistent style — icons are drawn as a coherent family, which keeps interfaces visually uniform.

The combination of a permissive license and no attribution requirement is what makes Heroicons practical for client work and shipped products, not just side projects.

What It Is Not

Heroicons will not give you:

  • Layout components, grids, or page templates
  • Interactive components like dropdowns or date pickers
  • Theming or design tokens beyond the icons themselves

For those, pair Heroicons with a UI framework or component library and use Heroicons purely as the icon source.

Quick Decision Guide

  • Building a web or app UI and need icons? Heroicons works.
  • Need a full component system? Use a framework, and add Heroicons for icons.
  • Worried about licensing for commercial use? MIT with no attribution required covers it.
  • Need illustrations or logos? Look elsewhere — Heroicons is for interface icons.

In short: reach for Heroicons whenever your project needs a free, consistent, commercially usable set of UI icons for the web or an app.