Flaticon vs The Noun Project Comparison 2026
Both cover design & graphics. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
Icons free with credit, or paid without
Icons on a licence that never expires
At a glance
- The Noun Project starts cheaper, at $3.33.
- Both have a genuinely free tier.
Side by side
Flaticon | The Noun Project | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price (they differ) | From $8.25 | From $3.33 |
| Pricing model | Free plan, paid tiers | Free plan, paid tiers |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Billing | Monthly or annual | Not stated |
| Free trial | Not stated | Not stated |
| API | Not stated | Yes |
| Data export |
Shaded rows are where the two answers disagree and both listings have answered. A row where one side has not stated a fact is left plain, because silence is not a difference.
Flaticon
Icons free with credit, or paid without
Flaticon is an icon and sticker library where the free tier is genuinely usable and the paid one removes the credit line. Free downloads arrive as PNG and require attribution; paying opens SVG, EPS, PSD and base64, which is what matters when an icon has to be recoloured or scaled rather than pasted. An editor in the browser handles the recolouring without a round trip to another application. Collections are capped at three on the free tier, so anybody organising a large set will hit that before they hit a download limit.
Our note
Take the twelve-month plan if you expect to need icons more than four times in a year, because the break-even against the monthly price arrives that quickly. Compare against The Noun Project if the licence matters more than the volume, since that one states its licences never expire and this one is a subscription you keep paying to stay clear of attribution.
The Noun Project
Icons on a licence that never expires
The Noun Project sells icons and photos on a royalty-free worldwide licence that the page says never expires, which is the part that matters for work shipped once and left alone for years. Contributors are paid from subscriptions, and the library is moderated rather than open, so quality is more even than an open marketplace. Plugins for Figma, Adobe and Office plus a Mac application mean an icon can be dropped in without a download step. A single icon can be bought outright for those who need one thing and not a subscription.
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.