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Bioicons Review

Worth it

Should I use Bioicons?

Bioicons contains free science illustrations for biologists, chemists, machine learning under permissive CC0, CC BY or MIT License. - bioicons.com

· 2 weeks ago

Use it if you make scientific figures, papers, or slides and want free, permissively licensed icons. Skip it if you need polished figure-building — that is BioRender territory.

Confidence

Medium. Based on ~20 public sources; mostly academic citations and directory listings, few in-depth reviews.

Ratings

  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Feature depth
  • Support qualityNot disclosed
  • Security posture

Pricing

$0

Everything

ModelNot disclosed
Monthly feesNot disclosed
HardwareNot disclosed
Free tierYes

Best for

  • Scientists building paper figures
  • Slide decks and conference posters
  • Open-science projects needing clean licensing
  • Anyone citing icons in publications

Not for

  • Teams wanting polished, end-to-end figure building — use BioRender
  • Anyone needing general-purpose UI or marketing icons
  • Enterprises requiring vendor security docs — none are published

Gotchas - check before you buy

medium

returns a 404 — no published security documentation at all

medium

Mixed licenses (CC0, CC BY, MIT) — check each icon's attribution before publishing

low

Not a drawing tool — you still need, Inkscape, or similar to assemble figures

low

Community project that solicits funding for new illustrations — support is best-effort

Pros and cons

Pros

  • 2,829 science icons under permissive CC0, CC BY, or MIT licenses
  • Entirely free with no registration required
  • Actually cited in peer-reviewed papers (PMC, PLOS, bioRxiv)
  • Covers biology, chemistry, and machine learning sets

Cons

  • Library only — no figure editor; pair with or Inkscape
  • Rival BioRender offers professionally curated illustrator-made science icons
  • Community-contributed icons suggest inconsistent styles across sets

Sources & method

- 10 sources - No known vulnerabilities found in the sources reviewed; the product's own security page is a dead link (404).

official x2review x6security x1news x1
  • Security page returns 404, serves a GitHub Pages 'file not found' error, so no security documentation exists for procurement review.

Key stats

  • Value for money: 5/5

    Rating

  • $0

    Starting price

  • 10

    Sources

  • Analyzed

  • Value for money: 5/5. Entirely free, permissive licenses
  • Ease of use: 4/5. Browse and download, no registration
  • Feature depth: 2/5. Icon library only; editing needs external tools
  • Security posture: 2/5. Own security page returns 404
  • 2,829 Icon library size searchable science illustrations
  • $0 Starting price entire library free
  • Yes Free tier no paid tiers exist
  • No Account required download without registration

Pricing

Everything

$0

  • All 2,829 icons
  • CC0, CC BY, or MIT licensing
  • No registration required

Security

No known vulnerabilities found in the sources reviewed; the product's own security page is a dead link (404).

  • Security page returns 404serves a GitHub Pages 'file not found' error, so no security documentation exists for procurement review.³

What users say

Scientists widely bookmark and cite Bioicons in academic work, though structured reviews and user chatter are sparse.

“Just came across this on twitter yesterday”
Facebook science group post
“I have shared several icons I made as well.”
Bluesky, botanist-brooke

Alternatives

Compare Bioicons with each alternative.

  • Guess: Noun Project

    Huge general icon library if science-specific sets aren't needed

Full analysis

Based on ~20 public sources; mostly academic citations and directory listings, few in-depth reviews.

Free, permissively licensed science icons. No cost, no signup — but no editor; pair with Draw.io or Inkscape.

Methodology

Based on ~20 public sources; mostly academic citations and directory listings, few in-depth reviews.

Read how a report is made.

Sources

  1. Bioicons - high quality science illustrationsbioicons.com
    official
  2. Bioicons extensionsbioicons.com
    official
  3. Product security page (404)bioicons.com
    security
  4. 6 Tools for illustrating your scientific work!medium.com
    review
  5. PMC article citing Bioiconspmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
    review
  6. PLOS NTDs article citing Bioiconsjournals.plos.org
    review
  7. Free Life Science Icons | BioRenderpinterest.com
    review
  8. Brooke Kern on Blueskybsky.app
    review
  9. Facebook science group postfacebook.com
    review
  10. bioRxiv preprint citing Bioiconsbiorxiv.org
    news

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