IcoMoon vs Fontello: Two Free Font Builders, One Workflow Test

The workflow, side by side

Importing your own SVGs

This is where the two philosophies split. In the IcoMoon app, Import Icons drops your files into an "Untitled Set" where you can rename every glyph, reassign unicode code points, and change the class prefix before generating — the names you fix here become your CSS classes forever. On fontello.com you drag SVGs onto the page and they simply appear in a Custom Icons block, ready to select. That is genuinely faster, and for a throwaway font it is the whole appeal. Both are single-color tools, so multi-color artwork gets flattened either way; the difference is how much you can clean up before export. The full import walkthrough lives in our step-by-step tutorial.

What lands in the export zip

An IcoMoon download contains a fonts/ folder (TTF, WOFF, WOFF2), one style.css, a demo.html sanity-check page, and selection.json. It stays small: the full 491-icon free set we host on our download page is a 455 KB zip, with the WOFF2 at just 49 KB. Fontello's bundle has a font/ folder in the standard webfont formats, a demo.html, config.json, and a css/ folder split into several stylesheets — codes-only and embedded variants included. Credit where due: that CSS split is handy when you want to trim the payload, where IcoMoon gives you a single stylesheet to prune by hand. Beyond fonts, though, only one of the two also outputs standalone SVG and PNG assets from the same selection — Fontello is a font generator, full stop.

Project archives: selection.json vs config.json

Both tools solve the "how do I edit this font next month?" problem the same way: a JSON file in every export that restores the whole session when you re-import it. IcoMoon's selection.json carries glyph names, code points and your generator preferences; Fontello's config.json does the equivalent job. Commit whichever one you use to your repo — losing it means rebuilding the selection by hand. One real Fontello advantage here: it exposes a small HTTP API that tools like fontello-cli script against, so a build step can regenerate the font from config.json without a browser. IcoMoon has no public API; the app is the only interface.

Maintenance: the uncomfortable question

Fontello's development is largely dormant. The source is on GitHub and the hosted service still works, and because it is open source you could self-host it if the site ever vanished — a real safety net, but one that puts the ops burden on you. The IcoMoon app is a maintained commercial product whose free tier is funded by paid packs, so the tool holding your project archive has an obvious reason to stay online. When a JSON file is the only editable copy of your icon set, that difference matters more than any feature checkbox.

Where Fontello genuinely wins

• Completely free and open source
• Very fast, minimal workflow for building icon fonts
• Aggregates several open icon sets in one place
• Scriptable via its HTTP API and fontello-cli — no browser needed for rebuilds