I wrote an artice about this subject a bit more than one year ago.
My thoughts on this have not changed ... rather, they are reinforced. Every now and then I end up using the FontAwesome 4.7.0 CDN as a quick development shortcut. I usually just need a few icons for a navbar or social media bar and the CDN serves that narrow purpose.
That's a mistake, of course. I occasionally forget to replace the CDN with the custom Fontello version I created.
I'm up to 102 icons now. My first article on this said I was at 99 icons. I ended up with three more, two are actually duplicates – but colorized versions (for a dark/light toggle switch).
FontAwesome 4.7.0 is an older version of FontAwesome. I think they are now up to version 7.0.1. FontAwesome versions 5, 6, and 7 are dual licensed, and some of the components of those have up to three different license versions. FontAwesome version 4.7.0 is licensed SIL OFL 1.1 License which allows for redistribution and commercial use. Starting with version 5, the font license has changed to CC BY 4.0 License and requires attribution. Also starting with version 5, there is a license distinction between icons, fonts, code and documentation.
When FontAwesome version 5 was released, I really didn't have the time to delve deeply into the impact of those license changes. I needed simplicity and the license for FontAwesome 4.7.0 fit the bill. That remains true today.
Fontello is an amalgamator service with icons from a variety of sources, including FontAwesome. The FontAwesome icons used in Fontello are from version 4.7.0 ... and any icons I need that are not in FontAwesome are covered quite well by the other icon providers offered by Fontello.
Here's a list of all the libraries amalgamated into Fontello's offering:
- Fontelico, SIL licensed
- FontAwesome (v4.7.0), SIL licensed
- Entypo (v2.0), SIL licensed
- Typicons (v2.0.2), SIL licensed
- Iconic (v1.0), SIL licensed
- Modern Pictograms, SIL licensed
- Meteocons, SIL licensed
- MFC Labs, SIL licensed
- Maki, BSD licensed
- Zocial, MIT licensed
- Brandico, SIL licensed
- Elusive, SIL licensed
- Linecons, CC BY licensed
- Web Symbols, SIL licensed
Quite extensive with thousands (I believe) of icons that you can pick from.
Fontello is free. While there are other similar services available, I found Fontello the easiest to use and most simple to modify as I needed. Why load the entire FontAwesome library (even by CDN) when you can pick and choose the icons you need and only load those. The difference is striking.
The FontAwesome 4.7.0 library is a staggering 1033Kb in its minified version.
The 102 icons I selected from Fontello are a whopping 24Kb minified. That's 97% less.
Doesn't that make the argument for you? It did for me.