JetBrains Mono
Philipp Nurullin, Konstantin BulenkovSphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Monospace · Variable · 8 weights · OFL · Türkçe
Free SF Mono alternatives
Apple’s fixed-width face, shipped with Xcode and Terminal since 2016.
Why people look for a SF Mono alternative
SF Mono is Apple's monospace and is licensed for Apple platforms only, with no web font available at all. Anyone building a documentation site, a code sample, or a cross-platform editor that wants that particular look has to find it somewhere else.
What a SF Mono substitute has to get right
The same unambiguous 0, 1, l and I, plus weights light enough to hold up as pale text on a dark terminal, which is where most of its use actually is.
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.
SF Mono and its free alternatives, at a glance
- How you get it
- Licensed for software on Apple platforms only
- Pass it on, embed it or self-host it
- Not permitted by its licence
- On a website
- No web font is offered
SF Mono
| Property | JetBrains Mono |
|---|---|
| Licence | OFL-1.1 — free, commercial use allowed |
| Weights | 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800 |
| Variable | Yes |
| Italic | Yes |
| Türkçe | Yes |
| Other alphabets | Cyrillic, Cyrillic Extended, Greek, Vietnamese |
| Glyphs | 1,179 |
| Web font | 51 KB Latin cut |
Questions
- What is the best free alternative to SF Mono?
- JetBrains Mono — 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 SF Mono 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 SF Mono 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 SF Mono 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.