IcoMoon Review: We Tested the Full Export Pipeline
Short verdict first: IcoMoon is still the tool we reach for when a project needs a custom icon font, and this is a hands-on review, not a spec-sheet rewrite — building this site's icon mirror meant working through the full 491-icon set file by file. The 130 KB TTF compresses to a 49 KB WOFF2 without a single broken glyph, and the whole free tier costs nothing. The honest counterweight: the interface looks dated, free projects never leave your browser, and the built-in library is small next to Font Awesome's. Evidence, scores, pros and cons below.
How we tested it
Our test bench is the file pipeline behind this very site. We took the official 491-icon set, ran the font conversions ourselves and packaged the downloads we now serve — measuring a 130 KB TTF compressing to a 61 KB WOFF and a 49 KB WOFF2 (62% smaller), plus a generated 22 KB stylesheet mapping all 491 code points, 455 KB zipped. Those are our measurements of our own build output, published verbatim on the download page — not numbers copied from a spec sheet. Every glyph and code point survived the round trip intact.
The generator app itself — select icons at icomoon.io/app, generate, download — is documented screen by screen in our step-by-step tutorial. Its selection.json project file is the app's de-facto save format: it records every glyph name, unicode code point and preference, re-importing it restores the project, and it versions cleanly in git. Crude next to cloud sync, but dependable. The underlying free set is open source on GitHub (© Keyamoon, GPL / CC BY 4.0), so you can audit what you are shipping.
Scorecard: five dimensions in plain text
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Ease of use — 9/10
From opening the app to a working zip takes minutes — no account, no install, no build step.
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Export quality — 9/10
All 491 glyphs compressed into a 49 KB WOFF2 with zero broken code points; app exports also bundle a ready stylesheet and a demo page for sanity checks.
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Icon library — 7/10
The free set covers most product UI, but it trails Font Awesome's 2,000+ free icons; the Ultimate pack's 1,500+ icons close the gap for $59.
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Interface — 6/10
Everything works, nothing looks modern. Expect utilitarian toolbars and dense menus rather than polish.
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Value — 9/10
A genuinely useful free tier plus a one-time $59 flagship pack, against subscription-only rivals from $99/yr.
Pros and cons after real use
Pros
- The generator app is free with no sign-up: select icons, generate a font, download the zip.
- Builds fonts from your own SVGs at no cost — a workflow Font Awesome reserves for paid kits.
- Exports are compact and complete: fonts, CSS and a demo page in one archive, WOFF2 62% smaller than the TTF.
- selection.json makes every project reproducible — commit it to git, re-import it later, and names, code points and settings come back intact.
- The flagship paid pack is $59 once, with lifetime access — no subscription required.
Cons
- The interface looks dated and takes a few minutes to decode on first visit.
- No cloud storage or sync on the free tier — projects live in your browser, and losing selection.json means starting over.
- 491 free icons is well behind Font Awesome's 2,000+ free set.
- No official React/Vue packages and no first-party CDN — you self-host whatever you export.
- Cloud project storage sits behind subscriptions that reach $199/365 days on the Unlimited plan.
How it stacks up against the alternatives
If ecosystem is your priority, Font Awesome is objectively stronger: official React, Vue and Angular packages, CDN kits, and a consistent design language across its 2,000+ free icons — our side-by-side comparison runs the numbers. If you want a completely free generator with a faster, more minimal workflow, Fontello does that admirably, though its development is largely dormant — see the Fontello breakdown or the wider alternatives survey. Where IcoMoon wins is the middle ground: custom fonts built from your own artwork at no cost, with a one-time paid upgrade instead of rent.
Verdict: who should pay $59
Stay on the free tier if a few hundred general-purpose glyphs cover your project — browse the whole set in our icon library and grab the ready-made files without touching the generator. Buy the Ultimate pack if you want one consistent visual language across 1,500+ icons with SVG sources, and you refuse to add another subscription: $59 one-time undercuts a single year of most competitors, with the full tier math on our pricing breakdown. Skip it if your team already lives inside the Font Awesome ecosystem — the switching cost would eat the savings.
Prices verified against the official store in July 2026.