Arimo
Steve MattesonSphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Sans-serif · Variable · 4 weights · OFL · Türkçe
Free Arial alternatives
Drawn for Monotype in 1982 by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders, and on essentially every computer sold since.
Why people look for a Arial alternative
Arial is bundled with Windows and Office rather than licensed for redistribution, so it cannot be embedded in an app, packaged with a template, or self-hosted on a website. That catches people at exactly the wrong moment: a document that looked right for years is suddenly being turned into a web page or a PDF for a client, and the font cannot come with it.
What a Arial substitute has to get right
Widths, before shapes. Arial is what documents are laid out in, so a substitute that is not metric-compatible will reflow a file and change its page count even when it looks close.
The one in this archive
One entry, because one is the honest answer. A face is listed here only if the substitution would survive a designer looking at both.
Arial and its free alternatives, at a glance
- How you get it
- Installed with Windows, macOS and Microsoft Office
- Pass it on, embed it or self-host it
- Not permitted by its licence
- On a website
- Only as a system font, on machines that already have it
Arial
| Property | Arimo |
|---|---|
| Licence | OFL-1.1 — free, commercial use allowed |
| Weights | 400, 500, 600, 700 |
| Variable | Yes |
| Italic | Yes |
| Türkçe | Yes |
| Other alphabets | Cyrillic, Cyrillic Extended, Greek, Greek Extended, Vietnamese, Hebrew |
| Glyphs | 3,301 |
| Web font | 68 KB Latin cut |
Questions
- What is the best free alternative to Arial?
- Arimo — it is the closest match in this archive, and the page above says which shapes the substitution turns on. It is the only one listed, because one honest match is a better answer than a longer list of near misses.
- Are these Arial alternatives free for commercial use?
- Yes. Every font on this site is under a licence that permits commercial use with no fee and no attribution requirement, mostly the SIL Open Font License. That covers paid client work, products you sell, self-hosting on a website, and embedding in an application. The licence file is inside every download.
- Can I use a Arial alternative in a logo?
- Yes. An open font licence covers the font software rather than the shapes you set with it, so a logo made with one of these can be trademarked like any other. What you cannot do is claim rights over the typeface itself.
- Will a Arial substitute keep my layout the same?
- Only if it is metrically compatible — drawn so every character occupies the same width as the original, which makes a document reflow identically. Very few faces are, and where one is, this site says so on its page. Everything else will look similar and set differently, so a layout built to the original's widths needs checking rather than assuming.