How to Find Free Alternatives to Premium Fonts You See Online
PB
Patrick Bushe
April 25, 2025 · 5 min read
You spot a beautiful font on a website, then find it costs hundreds of dollars to license. Often there's a free font that gets you most of the way there. Here's how to find one and use it legally.
1. Identify the font
- Font Detector shows the font family, size, weight and line height of any text you click.
- In Chrome DevTools, inspect the text and look at "Rendered Fonts" at the bottom of the Computed tab.
- For text in images, logos or screenshots, upload a clear crop to an identifier such as WhatTheFont.
See finding what font a site uses.
2. Note what makes it distinctive
Look at the details you'd want to match:
- Serif or sans-serif; geometric, humanist or grotesque.
- Letter shapes: single- or double-story a and g, the leg of R, the tail of Q.
- Width and x-height (how tall lowercase letters are).
- Contrast between thick and thin strokes.
3. Search for similar free fonts
- Google Fonts: search by category and filter by properties. Every font there is free for commercial use.
- Font Squirrel: free commercial-use fonts, plus a matcher for identifying fonts from images.
- Search "free alternative to" plus the font name; designers have compiled many lists.
Well-known free alternatives
- Futura: Jost, which was inspired by it.
- Gotham: Montserrat has a similar geometric feel.
- Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New: Arimo, Tinos and Cousine match their letter widths exactly, so text reflows the same way.
- Garamond: EB Garamond, an open-source revival.
- Helvetica-style sans-serifs: Inter is a popular free choice for screens.
4. Compare properly
Type the same sentence, including the brand name and numbers, in the original and the alternatives, at the sizes you'll use. Check the weights you need exist, and look at the free font in bold and italic too.
5. Check the license
- Fonts under the SIL Open Font License, like most on Google Fonts, can be used in websites, apps and print, including commercially.
- "Free for personal use" fonts aren't free for business use.
- Never download a paid font from an unofficial "free download" site. It's piracy, and such files sometimes carry malware.
When to pay
If the font is central to a brand, or nothing free comes close, the license may be worth it. Many foundries offer cheaper web-only or startup licenses.
See also Google Fonts pairings and variable fonts.
