When comparing Font Awesome vs Inkscape, the Slant community recommends Font Awesome for most people. In the question“What are the best web design tools?” Font Awesome is ranked 6th while Inkscape is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose Font Awesome is:
Font Awesome 5.1 offers 1264 free and 2068 payed icons.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro 3332 icons to choose from
Font Awesome 5.1 offers 1264 free and 2068 payed icons.
Pro Large variety of icons
There is a wide range of web-related icons to choose from. Categories include web-application, directional, transportation and brand icons. See the full list of icons here.
Pro Easy to use
Pro MIT licence for the code
Pro Font Aweseome 5 is here with over 929 icons and counting
The Pro version is very reasonable and gives you access to 2316 icons and counting. Across 3 weights! Very Nice!
Pro Screen reader compatible
Other font icons have been known to have issues with this.
Pro Designed to be used with Bootstrap
Font Awesome can be used with any framework, however it's especially easy to use with Bootstrap.
Pro Continuously updated
Pro Can employ tree shaking to not bundle unused icons
Pro IE7 support with older versions
IE7 support has been removed from Font Awesome 4.4.0. However you can still use an older version for IE7 support.
Pro Customizable icons through stacking
Icons in Font Awesome can be restyled by stacking different borders and background to modify their meaning. For example, any icon can be turned into a bullet point by stacking it on a circle, or converted into its negative by stacking a red cancel icon on top of it.
Pro Free and open source
Inkscape is GPL-licensed and maintains public repositories.
Pro Opens lots of file types
Inkscape supports many common formats for import (including SVG, Photoshop and Illustrator) and its plugin architecture allows more to be added.
Pro Export to different file types
Files can be exported and saved as a "normal" svg, png, jpg, bmp etc. file.
Pro Cross-platform
Pre-built binaries are available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Inkscape can be built from source on additional platforms.
Pro Integrates well into a X11-System
Its uses the X11 icon theme and desktop theme(GTK).
Pro It can do anything
A very powerful software that can do pretty match anything!
Pro Measurement Tool
This tool is extremely handy and can not be found in any other vector graphics programs out there.
Pro Live Path Effects
Extremely powerful menu that offers more than 30 powerful Live Path Effects to apply to paths vastly enhancing the application functionality.
Pro Guides, Grids, and Canvas Rotation
Extremely handy features when building complex graphics using Inkscape.
Pro Dark Theme Support
The new 1.0 beta 2 version finally got support for dark theme which normally is only available for commercial software like Affinity Serif, Adobe Illustrator.
Pro The new version 1.1 is looks and feels fantastic
Inskape got UI update: new dockable dialogs.
Pro Interface is available in 29 languages
Basque, British English, Brazilian, Portuguese, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Latvian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Swedish.
Pro It's really easy and fun
Vector graphics can be created and edited with Inkscape.
Cons
Con Too expensive
The icons I need are in the pay plan.
Con You will never use all icons
This means you'll have a lot of useless data (unused icons) being load into your application.
Con Font Awesome slows webpages
Con Very slow startup on some systems
Depending on factors like how many fonts you have installed, Inkscape can take upwards of 30 seconds to launch.
Con Uses its own SVG-format by default
Inkscape might use SVG as its default format, however this SVG's contains some additional SodiPodi/Inkscape additions that can be troublesome if you want to import the SVG into some other application.
Con 1.0 is sluggish
Inkscape 1.0 uses GTK 3 which is sluggish and slow for low spec systems( eg. ARM, Celeron, Pentium, Core-i3, Ryzen 3 or Athlon ) compared to previous versions.
Con Buggy
Application is often buggy so it happens from time to time that the popup / right-click menu won't close and stays open. It crashes also sometimes randomly. This makes it almost unusable for productive / business use.
Con Crashes very often
Inkscape encountered an internal error and will close now - is one of its standard messages.
Con Since 0.91 the gradient editor is gone
It is now only possible to edit a gradient on screen. but you can't set a stop to a specific percentage anymore.
Con Limited work with ICC CMYK color scheme
Support for ICC color profiles only in SVG files.
Con Y-axis inverted
0,0 coordinates begin in lower left corner, not upper left corner as SVG standards define in Inkscape 0.92.x.
It seems this is now fixed in the 1.0 beta 2 version of the program.
Con Uses GTK
It looks an feels like an alien. It also uses now touch-based widgets instead of professional widgets.
Con A toy for facebook-ist enthusiasts, not for professionals
It's a Linux niche mumbo-jumbo, same as GIMP for raster edit .
Con Based on the GTK widget toolkit
Software is based on GTK, so it might not integrate well in non-GTK environments. It also requires many dependencies on those non-GTK desktops. It also adds dependencies to GTK-environments since it is written in C++ which requires the gtkmm wrapper/interface.
Con Mac version does not look as polished as its versions for Windows/Linux version for the 0.92.x version
It seems that Inkscape 1.0 beta 2 for Mac got some needed attention and it looks a lot better with dark theme support. native DMG installer and they got rid of X11 which is great.
Con Incompatible with previous versions
Sometimes backward compatibility breaks. For example, pre 0.92 SVGs are incompatible with later releases (due different default resolutions).
Con No support for large printing machine system
No support for large printing machine environment, except exporting the resulting artwork to PDF.
Con Under GNU GPL
It is released under GNU GPL which one of the restricted open source license.