Carlito
Łukasz DziedzicSphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Sans-serif · 2 weights · OFL · Türkçe
Free Calibri alternatives
Luc(as) de Groot for Microsoft, 2007, and the default in Office for over a decade.
Why people look for a Calibri alternative
Calibri was Microsoft Office's default for fifteen years, so more documents are set in it than in almost any other typeface alive. It ships with Office and is not licensed for redistribution, which means the moment one of those documents becomes a web page or a PDF for someone without Office, the text reflows into something else and the layout breaks.
What a Calibri substitute has to get right
Metric-compatible widths, so a document keeps its line breaks and its page count, plus the softly rounded stem ends that are the only thing most people would name about it.
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.
Calibri and its free alternatives, at a glance
- How you get it
- Installed with Windows 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
Calibri
| Property | Carlito |
|---|---|
| Licence | OFL-1.1 — free, commercial use allowed |
| Weights | 400, 700 |
| Variable | No |
| Italic | Yes |
| Türkçe | Yes |
| Other alphabets | Cyrillic, Cyrillic Extended, Greek, Greek Extended, Vietnamese |
| Glyphs | 2,783 |
| Web font | 90 KB Latin cut |
Questions
- What is the best free alternative to Calibri?
- Carlito — 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 Calibri 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 Calibri 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 Calibri 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.