Icons have become an essantial design aspect for every Powerpoint designer. A few icons can make any slide look professional and convincing, and they also help people memorize your ideas more easily than if there is only raw text.
There are multiple websites on which you can find icons for your PowerPoint presentations with Microsoft 365, but here we list 7 that we believe are the best sources for professional icons.
1) Power-user: 7,000 high-quality vector icons directly insertable in PowerPoint
Power-user offers a library of 7,000 high-quality icons. All icons are vector shapes, i.e. you can edit them just like any PowerPoint object and there will be no loss of image resolution.
The icons are especially well suited for business purpose since you can find many icons about business optimization, people management, operations, digital technologies, but also marketing icons, strategy icons and a lot more.
But most importantly, there are at least 5 reasons why Power-user is probably the best website to get icons for PowerPoint.
Reason #1: you don't need to leave PowerPoint, you just click to immediately insert the icons.
This is something truely unique: Power-user works as an add-in to PowerPoint, Excel and Word. So you actually browse directly from PowerPoint and then just click to insert the icons on your slides!
This is way more efficient than leaving your application to go browse online, searching for icons, downloading them and then inserting them into PowerPoint, right?
Reason #2: you don't need to spend time on formatting, Power-user formats icons automatically for you.
When you insert an icon from Power-user, it automatically takes the theme color of your presentation. All icons also are shapes, i.e. you can recolor them like any drawing object in PowerPoint. It's far more efficient than pictures, and it also looks much more professional since it matches your theme color perfectly.
Furthermore, Power-user lets you apply various styles of icons. It would take some significant time to make this manually but Power-user lets you do it with just a click. Check it in action below:
Reason #3: it's quality icons only.
The 7,000 icons included in Power-user are of really high quality, allowing you to find in a matter of seconds the perfect icons that will make your presentation stand out. They are also of consistent design.
7,000 is a lot, and at the same time it's also a reasonable number of icons. So you can actually find the right set of icons for your slide by going straight to the best, without spending hours browsing into millions of garbage icons for the right candidate.
Reason #4: you can customize it and add your own icons
That's right, if you have some icons of your own, or a corporate set of icons that you frequently use, you can add it directly in the Power-user library. That way you can still browse your favourite icons but this time without leaving PowerPoint. Isn't that great?
Reason #5: it's not just icons, but a complete library of visual assets
Icons are just one of the many assets that Power-user brings to PowerPoint. Using the same add-in you can also:
Insert 700 beautiful templates,
Browse 1+ million high-quality pictures,
Create advanced charts like Waterfall, Mekko, Sankey, Tornado or Gantt charts,
Insert and edit Data maps to display geographical data in an amazing way,
Automate formatting tasks like building and updating the agenda of your presentation, harmonizing fonts, colors or slide titles, etc.
Link Excel to PowerPoint and automate presentations updates,
Automate tasks in Excel with advanced functions and macros,
Etc.
With everything packed in just 1 tool, Power-user is the greatest asset you can find to make your PowerPoint presentations stand out.
2) Shutterstock
Shutterstock is mostly famous as being a website for stock pictures, but it also has some nice looking icons that can look very profesional in a PowerPoint presentation.
To browse the icons, you will need to click the "Images" drop-down list on the top and choose "Vectors".
You can apply a number of filters to make your search more relevant, and also apply colors before downloading icons.
The big advantage of Shutterstock is that contrary to many resources, the icons here are of really good quality. And that's decisive to make a PowerPoint presentation look nice and clean.
Of course everything comes at a price, and the downside for Shutterstock is the pricing, which is probably the highest of these 7 websites.
3) Material.io
You may have heard of material Design. Well, Material.io is a website providing various material design resources, including icons.
The website only contains a small number of icons compared to other sources in this post. But is has the merit of being completely free with no attribution required, which is rare. And all icons are in .svg, meaning that with Microsoft 365 PowerPoint 2016 and higher you can resize, edit and recolor them just like any PowerPoint shape.
4) NounProject
The NounProject is a very well-known website that has offered one of the largest libraries of icons in the world since 2011.
There are about 3 millions icons on NounProject, which is a crazy number:
The positive side of the coin is that whatever icon you need, it HAS to exist somewhere on NounProject.
... but the negative side is that you may never find it! Indeed if you flip the coin, such a huge amount of icons makes it like finding a needle in a haystack.
Icons can be downloaded either in .png or .svg format:
.svg is of course better because it make the icons fully editable in PowerPoint.
.png icons cannot be customed and edited like shapes, meaning you will not be able to color them as you want and you will suffer a loss of quality if you resize them.
Unfortunately, if you don't have PowerPoint 2016 or later you won't be able to read .svg files, so you will have to go with .png.
The basic option lets you download icons only in black and you need to attribute the icon to credit the author. You can also purchase a pro download, and then it unlocks a few customization options such as changing the color of the icon and applying one of the 5 styles available. You also don't need to credit the author anymore.
There is also a Microsoft Office 365 plugin allowing you to access the icons directly in your application, however you will need to pay the Pro offer which starts at $19.98 per month per user.
5) IconFinder
IconFinder has many (too many?) icons: almost 4 millions!
With IconFinder, icons are organized in (many) sets. This is both a good and a bad thing:
The upside is that for a specific theme, there is a good chance you can find a set that will give you what you need.
The downside is that each set was made by a different designer, so there is no design consistency between one set and another. It means if you want to reuse icons in different situations, you will have a problem of consistency as your icons won't look the same.
Icons are available in many format, such as .png but also multiple vector format like .svg, .ai and .csh.
To remove the obligation to attribute the icons, you need a Pro license. That's $49 per month for up to 25 members for unlimited downloads.
6) Flaticon
With Flaticon, over 2 million icons are grouped in 47 000 packs.
Similarly to IconFinder, this can be positive if you only need a specific set for a specific need, or the source of design inconsistencies if you have a broader use for the icons.
7) Icons8
Our personal experience with Icon8 was not great, as many icons didn't show up properly on the website, even after several attempts. Also the icons we saw didn't look very professional, so probably not the best source for business presentations but it can fit just fine for a more private use.
On the positive side, the icons here have multiple designs but you can run searches for a specific style, for instance Material Filled or Material Outline. This helps reduce the risk of design inconsistencies as you pile up icons in your PowerPoint decks.
Icon8 has 91k icons in .png and .svg. Icons can also be recolored, and you can also apply Effects such as placing the icons in a circle on in a square before you download them. You can also save favorites, which can be useful if you come back frequently for the same icons.
There also are some other contents like pictures and music.
Like some of the other websites above, Icon8 requires attribution of any icon if you want to use it for free, and also if you want to download them as editable vectors. To choose the download format and lift the attribution obligation, you need a paying license which is $19.90 per month per user.
Conclusion
With those 7 websites you should be covered and find the icons you need to make appealing PowerPoint presentations!
If you liked this post, you will probably love our post about 10 websites for beautiful PowerPoint templates.