Design Resources

5 open source tools compared. Sorted by stars — scroll down for our analysis.

Tool	Stars	Velocity	Language	License	Score
Tabler Icons Free and open source icons for web design	20.5k	+27/wk	JavaScript	MIT License	79
Inter The Inter font family for UI	19.4k	+7/wk	Python	SIL Open Font License 1.1	77
JetBrains Mono Developer-optimized monospace typeface	12.6k	+21/wk	Shell	SIL Open Font License 1.1	77
beautiful-web-type	7.3k	+3/wk	CSS	MIT	73
vscode-codicons The icon font for Visual Studio Code	1.1k	+3/wk	Handlebars	Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International	69

Our Analysis

Tabler Icons20.5k★

Tabler Icons gives you 5,000+ SVG icons with consistent style, customizable stroke width, free for commercial use. They look clean, modern, and work everywhere: React, Vue, Svelte, Figma, or raw SVGs. MIT. Every icon is a single SVG with configurable stroke width (1-3px), size, and color. The set covers the usual suspects (arrows, devices, social media, files, weather) plus less common categories like math symbols and cryptocurrency logos. Official packages for React, Vue, Preact, Svelte, Angular, and web components. Fully free. Every icon, every format, every framework integration. MIT license means commercial use with no attribution required. Solo to large teams: zero cost. The Figma plugin makes handoff between design and development seamless. The catch: 5,000+ icons sounds like a lot until you need a very specific one and it's not there. The style is distinctly Tabler (rounded, friendly, consistent stroke width), which is great for coherence but means they won't match every design system. If you need a different aesthetic (sharp corners, filled icons, brand-specific), you'll want to look elsewhere. And unlike Lucide, Tabler doesn't have as strong a community contribution pipeline for new icons.

Inter19.4k★

It's optimized for legibility at small sizes on computer screens, with features like tabular numbers, contextual alternates, and a massive character set covering 100+ languages. SIL Open Font License (fully free for everything). Created by Rasmus Andersson (former Spotify designer). The font family includes weights from Thin to Black with matching italics. Variable font version available for fine-grained weight control. Fully free. Use it in any project: commercial, open source, personal. No attribution required. Available on Google Fonts, npm via Fontsource, or direct download. Inter is everywhere. GitHub uses it. Figma uses it. Thousands of web apps use it. It's become the default "safe, good" UI font choice, and that's both its strength and the only real criticism. The catch: Inter is so widely used that it can make your app look like every other modern web app. If you want your product to have a distinct typographic identity, Inter won't give you that; it's designed to be invisible and functional, not distinctive. For dashboards, admin panels, and developer tools, that's exactly right. For a brand that needs personality, consider something with more character.

JetBrains Mono12.6k★

A monospace font designed by the JetBrains team specifically for staring at code all day. If you spend 8+ hours reading code and haven't thought about your font choice, this might be the easiest quality-of-life upgrade you can make. JetBrains Mono is optimized for code readability: increased letter height, distinct characters (zero vs O, one vs lowercase L), and functional ligatures that turn common code symbols into single glyphs (!=, =>, ->, ===). The ligatures are the standout feature. Instead of two characters side by side, you see a single visual symbol. Some developers love this, some hate it. Try it for a week before deciding. Every major editor supports it: VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, Sublime, Vim, Emacs. Completely free under SIL Open Font License. Use it anywhere: personal, commercial, modified, redistributed. No restrictions. If ligatures annoy you, Fira Code offers similar features with a different aesthetic. If you want something with no ligatures and maximum readability, IBM Plex Mono or Berkeley Mono (paid, $75 one-time) are excellent. Inter Mono is a newer option gaining traction for its clean modern look. The catch: font preference is deeply personal, and ligatures aren't for everyone. It's a font. Install it, try it, keep it or don't. Zero risk.

beautiful-web-type7.3k★

Beautiful Web Type shows you. It's a curated gallery of the best open source typefaces with real typographic layouts: pairings, sizing, spacing, the stuff that matters when you're actually designing a page. MIT license, CSS-based. The site showcases roughly 40 hand-picked typefaces from Google Fonts with beautiful specimen pages. Each font gets a real design layout, not just "The quick brown fox" in different sizes. It shows you how a font breathes in context. Fully free. It's a static website and a curated list. No paid tier, no service. The fonts featured are all free via Google Fonts. This is a reference tool, not something you install. Bookmark it. Open it when you're choosing fonts. Use it alongside Google Fonts' own interface to make better typographic decisions. The catch: the collection is small and curated, which is both the point and the limitation. If you need comprehensive coverage of all 1,500+ Google Fonts, this isn't it. And the project hasn't been updated frequently. Some newer excellent typefaces aren't represented. It's a snapshot of good taste, not a living catalog.

vscode-codicons1.1k★

This is the actual icon font that powers VS Code itself. Every icon you see in the sidebar, tabs, and status bar comes from this package. You get 400+ icons designed specifically for code editors and dev tooling, available as a font or individual SVGs. Drop it into any web app or Electron project and your UI instantly looks like it belongs in the VS Code ecosystem. It's fully free under CC-BY-4.0. No paid tier, no catches on usage. You can use it in commercial projects as long as you include attribution. The catch: this is a design asset, not a general-purpose icon library. If you need icons for e-commerce, social media, or marketing pages, look elsewhere. It's laser-focused on developer tooling iconography. Also, the Handlebars build tooling is a bit dated. You'll likely just grab the compiled font or SVGs directly. If you need a broader icon set, Lucide (lucide-icons/lucide) covers general-purpose use cases. Heroicons is another solid option for UI work. But for anything dev-tool adjacent, Codicons is the standard.