BioRender is unbeatable when it comes to scientific visualization… or is it? Here are some open-sourse alternatives. In general open source icons are free to use but licensed under creative commons licencing, which may require acknowledgement. While BioRender employs professional artists to create their artwork, most open-source projects allow the community to submit icons. For this reason, the quality may not be as high, but the cost is much lower.
Bioicons is a library of free open-source icons in biology and chemistry and consists of over 2700 icons in around 30 different categories. Each icon has a license; many are CCO or BSD. For some licenses, the creator must be attributed in the figure caption or the acknowledgements. Many are in the public domain and for these, attribution or credit is not required, but is appreciated. This project seems to be created by Simon Duerr.
Open Science Art offers a comprehensive, open-access library of icons, 3D models, and illustrations for many scientific disciplines including biology, chemistry, physics and space science.
From their website: SciDraw is the work of Federico Claudi and Alex Harston. “SciDraw is a free repository of high quality drawings of animals, scientific setups, and anything that might be useful for scientific presentations and posters.” Users are not required to sign up to post a drawing, so submissions undergo a review and approval process before being published. Users are free to download, modify and use all drawings on the website, acknowledgment of the drawings’ authors and of Scidraw.io are appreciated. Each drawing has a DOI, many in Zenodo.”
Simplifed Science Publishing allows you to create your own professional scientific graphics with online courses and templates or you can buy banks of icons. They offer hundreds of vector graphics to create professional scientific designs using fully customizable templates. This service is not free but costs far less than BioRender.
Reactome is an open-source, open access, manually curated and peer-reviewed pathway database that includes an icon bank with around 1600 icons.
| Product | Vector Graphics | Number of icons (Jan 2025) | Allows submissions | Cost |
| Biorender | yes | > 50,000 | no | $79/month |
| Bioicons | yes | 2735 | yes | free |
| Open Science Art | yes | 138 | yes | free |
| SciDraw | yes | 640 | yes | free |
| Simplified Science Publishing | yes | hundreds | yes | 59$/year |
| Reactome | yes | ~2500 | yes | free |