It is cross-platform, officially running on Windows, macOS, Linux and Windows CE and due to its open nature ports to other systems are available, including FreeBSD, Xbox (up to Irrlicht version 1.8.1), PlayStation Portable,[1] Symbian,[2] iPhone,[3] AmigaOS 4,[4] Sailfish OS via a Qt/QML wrapper, [5] and Google Native Client.

[6] Irrlicht is known for its small size and compatibility with new and older hardware alike, ease of learning, and a large friendly community.

Other I/O features include an XML reader and writer, the ability to take screenshots, manipulate images and meshes and then save them in several different file formats.

Irrlicht provides support for simple collision detection including mouse picking, but users are advised that this is not intended as a replacement for a full featured physics engine.

Irrlicht was designed to be able to load and save the current scene to an XML file; this combined with the engine's open-source licensing model has attracted various programmers and developers to create world editors for Irrlicht to simplify the world-creation process.

One such example is the irrEdit world editor, developed by Nikolaus Gebhardt and other members of the company Ambiera.

Many physics libraries have had plugins and wrappers written for Irrlicht, including Nvidia PhysX, Bullet, and Open Dynamics Engine.