A website with just text belongs to the pre Web 2.0 era. A modern site will have different icons appearing on different places on the site. This will give the visitor a better visual feeling. But to have a set of consistent and well crafted icons is not an easy task. It may even require a dedicated icon designer to design them. Fortunately, we now can use font icons provided by many people around the web. Today we will introduce some of them.

Font Awesome

Font Awesome is an open source font icon collection. It contains over 500 free icons with different sizes and it is open sourced under GPL license. It doesn't have any dependency on external JavaScript library. Since it is open sourced, people from all around the world can contribute to it and it will gather more and more font icons in the future.

The best part about Font Awesome is that it is free and it has abundant font icons to meet your needs.

Glyphicons

GLYPHICONS is a library of precisely prepared monochromatic icons and symbols, created with an emphasis on simplicity and easy orientation. It provides a free version to the users under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0). This version provides a limited number of icons.

It is also bundled with Twitter Bootstrap to provide the bootstrap users a free set of icons to use. This set of icons also has a limited number of icons compared to other libraries. To meet all your needs, you may choose a commercial version of the GLYPHICONS. Currently it provides a $25 version and a $59 version.

The best part about GLYPHICONS is that it provides over 1000 icons with commercial version and it has different formats and sizes.

Symbolset

Symbolset provides the capability of turning text into image. The icons in this library are well crafted. But the price is a burden for many people. The number of icons available are also limited. Even the community version contains only 296 icons and you need to pay $40 for it. So this is not a good option for users with a low budget.

IcoMoon

IcoMoon is striving to build and provide the best iconography and icon management tool for perfectionists. It is trusted by many big companies including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo etc. It provides a free version of its icon collections with 490 icons. If you want more icons, you can purchase a commercial version which contains 1600 icons. 

Also IcoMoon provide the capability of creating your own customized icons with their IconMoon App. So this provides your the flexibility of creating your own set of fancy font icons.