Free Icon Licenses Explained: MIT, Apache, CC BY, CC0 and OFL

Almost every free icon set you will find through Free Creative Assets is released under one of six open licenses. They are all "free", but they differ on one question that matters in client work: do you have to credit the author, and where?

The short table

License	Commercial use	Attribution	Modify	Examples
MIT	Yes	Keep the notice in source code only	Yes	Lucide, Heroicons, Tabler, Feather
Apache 2.0	Yes	Keep the notice in source; state changes	Yes	Material Symbols, Material Design Icons
ISC	Yes	Keep the notice in source	Yes	Lucide (dual), some Iconoir forks
CC0 1.0	Yes	None	Yes	Fluent Emoji, some Noun Project sets
CC BY 4.0	Yes	Visible credit required	Yes	Font Awesome Free (icons), Phosphor (MIT), Streamline free tiers
OFL 1.1	Yes	None in use; keep license with font files	Yes	Icon fonts and all Google Fonts

MIT, ISC and Apache: the "keep the notice" family

These are software licenses. Their attribution requirement is satisfied by keeping the license text somewhere in your source or documentation, for example in a LICENSES/ folder or a third-party notices page. Nothing has to appear in your UI, on the website footer or in a printed brochure. Apache 2.0 adds a clause: if you modify the files, note that you changed them. In practice a comment in your icon component is enough.

CC BY: visible credit

Creative Commons Attribution is different. The credit must be visible to the audience "in any reasonable manner": an About page, a footer line like "Icons by Font Awesome (CC BY 4.0)", or a credits screen in an app. If you cannot show credit (a logo, a favicon, packaging with no room), choose an MIT or CC0 set instead.

CC0 and public domain

CC0 waives all rights. You can do anything, including using the icon as part of a logo or trademark, without credit. It is the safest choice for brand assets.

Can I use a free icon in a logo?

Legally yes for MIT, Apache, ISC, CC0 and OFL. Practically it is a bad idea: a trademark built on an icon thousands of other companies can also use is hard to protect. Use free icons for UI and illustration, and commission a unique mark for the brand.

Can I sell products that contain free icons?

Yes, for all six licenses, as long as the icons are part of a larger work (a template, an app, a printed poster). What you cannot do is repackage the icon set itself and sell it as an icon pack.

How to check the license of an icon

Every icon set page on this site shows the license name and links to the license text. The Iconify collection metadata that powers the search includes the SPDX identifier, so the information comes straight from the set's repository.