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Ball bearings, as shown to the left, are the most common type by far. They are found in everything from skate boards to washing machines to PC hard drives. These bearings are capable of taking both radial and thrust loads, and are usually found in applications where the load is light to medium and is constant in nature (ie not shock loading). The bearing shown here has the outer ring cut away revealing the balls and ball retainer.

Roller bearings like the one shown to the left are normally used in heavy duty applications such as conveyer belt rollers, where they must hold heavy radial loads. In these bearings the roller is a cylinder, so the contact between the inner and outer race is not a point (like the ball bearing above) but a line. This spreads the load out over a larger area, allowing the roller bearing to handle much greater loads than a ball bearing. However, this type of bearing cannot handle thrust loads to any significant degree. A variation of this bearing design is called the needle bearing. The needle roller bearing uses cylindrical rollers like those above but with a very small diameter. This allows the skf bearing to fit into tight places such as gear boxes that rotate at higher speeds.

Roller thrust bearings like the one illustrated to the left can support very large thrust loads. They are often found in gearsets like car transmissions between gear sprockets, and between the housing and the rotating shafts. The helical gears used in most transmissions have angled teeth, this can causes a high thrust load that must be supported by this type of bearing.

The above bearing types are some of the most common. There are thousands of other designs, some standard and some specific applications but all perform the same basic function. Essentially further types of bearings usually take all or some of the characteristics of the above bearings and blend them into one design. Through the use of careful material selection and applying the correct degree of machining precision, a successful iko bearing solution can usually be found.

Each bearings types displays characteristic properties, based on its design, which makes it more, or less, appropriate for a given application. For example, deep groove ball bearings can accommodate moderate radial loads as well as axial loads. They have low friction and can be produced with high precision and in quiet running variants. Therefore they are preferred for small and medium-sized electric motors.

Spherical and toroidal roller bearings can carry very heavy loads and are self-aligning. These properties make them popular for example for heavy engineering applications, where there are heavy loads, shaft deflections and misalignments.In many cases, however, several factors have to be considered and weighted against each other when selecting bearings types, so that no general rules can be given.The information provided here should serve to indicate which are the most important factors to be considered when selecting a standard [bearings types]  and thus facilitate an appropriate choice