TL;DR: Font Awesome Free is around 2,000 icons under combined open licenses (SIL OFL, CC BY 4.0, MIT), enough for most SMB websites. Pro ($60 to $600 USD/year after the 2025 price hike) unlocks tens of thousands of icons and extra styles (light, thin, duotone, sharp). Before pulling out the credit card, ask yourself two questions: do you actually need those specific styles, and would an open library like Phosphor or Tabler do the job for zero?
If you look at your SMB's website, chances are at least one icon comes from Font Awesome. The cart in the top right, the phone pictogram next to your number, the star in a testimonial, the envelope on the "Contact us" button: it's probably the most-used icon library on the web for the past ten years.
It's also the one that keeps showing up in website redesign quotes: "Font Awesome Pro, annual subscription, $120 USD." A line that looks harmless, except it renews every year, in foreign currency, for a library used to display 30 icons on a site.
Before signing, it's worth understanding what you're actually buying, and what you'd miss by not buying it.
In short: what is Font Awesome
Font Awesome is a vector icon library launched in 2012 by Dave Gandy, originally designed to integrate naturally with Bootstrap. The core idea: instead of using a PNG image per icon, you load a font (or an SVG) and call the icon with a CSS class, like <i class="fa-solid fa-envelope"></i>. The icon inherits the surrounding text color, scales without loss, and weighs a few kilobytes for hundreds of icons.
That approach worked so well that Font Awesome became a de facto standard. WordPress, Drupal, Odoo and most commercial themes bundle it by default. Worth noting: Bootstrap moved to its own Bootstrap Icons in 2020, and Tailwind ships Heroicons — but Font Awesome stays widely loaded out of integrator habit. When you install a new WordPress theme, chances are high it's already there in the background.
Version 7, released in the summer of 2025, redesigned the four existing families (Classic, Duotone, Sharp, Sharp Duotone — the angular "Sharp" family actually appeared back in FA6 in 2022), added 4,500+ new icons to the catalog, and introduced four new Pro+ packs with distinctive styles (Jelly, Whiteboard, Chisel, and a fourth).
Free vs Pro: what actually changes
The free version is not a crippled demo. It's a serious library, distributed under three combined licenses: SIL Open Font License 1.1 for the font files, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 for the icons themselves, and MIT for the CSS code. Commercial use allowed without restriction, modification allowed, redistribution allowed. The only catch: you have to credit Font Awesome somewhere (a comment in the source code is enough in most cases).
Here's what really separates Free from Pro:
| Criterion | Free | Pro Lite ($60 USD/yr) | Pro ($120 USD/yr) | Pro Max ($600 USD/yr) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Icon catalog | ~2,000 (Solid, Regular, Brands) | + Light style | + Thin, Duotone, Sharp, and new Pro+ packs | All Pro+ packs included |
| Pageviews/month on Kits | 10,000 | Intermediate quota | 1,000,000 | 10,000,000 |
| Support | Community forum | Priority email | Priority email |
The math gets clearer: if you need the "Light" style (thinner, airier icons) or "Duotone" (two colors per icon), Pro is the obvious path. If your 30 website icons are all standard Solid or Regular, you're mostly paying for the convenience of having everything on tap. Font Awesome also introduced more expensive Pro+ tiers in 2025 (Pro Lite+, Pro+, Pro Max+), which add the new signature visual packs of v7.
Where it pinches
A few traps to know before picking either route.
Free is not anonymous: the CC BY 4.0 license requires attribution. For a website, putting <!-- Font Awesome Free 7.x by @fontawesome - https://fontawesome.com - License - https://fontawesome.com/license/free --> in the source code is enough. For a printed product or a distributed PDF, it's trickier to integrate cleanly.
Hosted Kits have quotas: Free is capped at 10,000 pageviews per month on the Kit. For an SMB corporate site, that's usually plenty. For a high-traffic site, you either self-host the files (which is free and always allowed) or move up a tier.
Pro is not a one-time purchase: it's an annual subscription. If you stop paying, you keep the right to use the files you already downloaded (the versions you had access to), but you lose Kits, updates, and access to new icons. For a site that needs to evolve, it's a perpetual rent.
Visual consistency breaks fast: if you use Free for the website and your designer decides to use Pro Duotone icons in the annual report, the two don't harmonize. The one-icon-family-per-brand rule applies to Font Awesome too.
Pro pricing went up in 2025: Pro Lite jumped from $49 to $60 USD, Pro from $99 to $120 USD, Pro Max from $499 to $600 USD. And it's in US dollars: depending on the day's rate, expect 30 to 40% more for the real cost in Canadian dollars, plus bank conversion fees.
The real alternatives
Font Awesome hasn't been alone for a long time. Several modern open libraries match or exceed Pro in icon count, with no subscription and no attribution constraint.
Phosphor : 1,500+ unique icons in 6 styles (thin, light, regular, bold, fill, duotone), MIT. The most credible direct competitor to Font Awesome Pro for anyone who needs stylistic variants.
Tabler Icons : 6,000+ SVG icons under MIT, consistent 24x24 grid. More than Font Awesome Free in count, and widely used in dashboards and business apps.
Lucide : 1,700+ icons, community fork of Feather, ISC. Minimal, readable style, perfect for clean interfaces.
Heroicons : nearly 300 icons by the creators of Tailwind CSS, MIT. Limited catalog but surgical quality, available in outline, solid, mini and micro styles.
We covered this in more detail in our article on the license-free brand identity stack, which walks through the full ecosystem (fonts, photos, icons) for an SMB visual identity without paying a cent in license fees.
Our decision tree when a client asks which library to adopt:
- If your stack already runs on Font Awesome (WordPress theme, Bootstrap template, Odoo) and the Free icons cover your needs: stay on Free, self-host the files, attribute in the source code.
- If you need specific styles (Light, Thin, Duotone) and you're attached to the Font Awesome ecosystem: Pro Lite or Pro depending on traffic volume.
- If you're starting fresh or rebranding: look at Phosphor or Tabler first. You'll get more icons, more styles, and zero subscription to renew each year.
- For a brand that wants a distinctive long-term look: pick ONE library (open or Pro) and stick to it everywhere (site, emails, PDFs, presentations).
What we deploy at our clients
When we build an Odoo Community site for an SMB or non-profit, Font Awesome is already bundled in the base (Odoo historically ships version 4, which covers the essential icons). That covers everything Odoo displays by default: buttons, navigation, CMS blocks, transactional emails. We almost never need Pro for a standard corporate site.
When a client wants a more distinctive look for dashboards or internal tools, we lean toward Phosphor or Tabler, which we can self-host in the Brand folder on Nextcloud alongside the rest of the brand assets. The team has everything in one place: fonts, icons, palette, templates.
For the rare clients who insist on Font Awesome Pro (often by habit of a design team that already knows it well), we help set up the Kit, manage USD billing, and avoid auto-renewal surprises.
If you're building or redesigning a site and unsure which icon library to pick, we can take a look with you : what's already loaded, what you actually need, and what does or doesn't justify a recurring expense.
Let's talk about your icons?
Wavering between keeping your Pro subscription, switching to an open alternative, or simply understanding what's already loaded on your site? We can take a look together.