# Fonts Like Helvetica

12 open fonts whose letters are closest to Helvetica, ranked by a glyph comparison. All free for commercial use.

## Quick Answer

The closest open font to Helvetica is Almarai (similarity 92), then Zalando Sans and Funnel Sans. Almarai is released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 and is free for commercial use.

## Reference Font Profile

- **Family**: Helvetica
- **Kind**: stand-in font (no preview: commercial font, described from its sources)
- **Licence**: unknown
- **Stand-in Comparison**: We compared against TeX Gyre Heros, which CTAN describes: "may be used as a substitute for Adobe Helvetica in documents."
- **Sources**:
  - [why the stand-in, original designers](https://ctan.org/pkg/tex-gyre-heros) (read 2026-10-22)

### Fallback CSS Stack

```css
font-family: "Helvetica", "Almarai", sans-serif;
```

## Ranked Open Lookalikes (12 Fonts)

| Rank | Font | Similarity Score | Licence | Details |
| :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- |
| #1 | **Almarai** | 92 / 100 | OFL-1.1 | [/fonts/almarai/](/fonts/almarai.md) |
| #2 | **Zalando Sans** | 88 / 100 | OFL-1.1 | [/fonts/zalando-sans/](/fonts/zalando-sans.md) |
| #3 | **Funnel Sans** | 85 / 100 | OFL-1.1 | [/fonts/funnel-sans/](/fonts/funnel-sans.md) |
| #4 | **Pretendard** | 85 / 100 | OFL-1.1 | [/fonts/pretendard/](/fonts/pretendard.md) |
| #5 | **Inter** | 85 / 100 | OFL-1.1 | [/fonts/inter/](/fonts/inter.md) |
| #6 | **Geist** | 84 / 100 | OFL-1.1 | [/fonts/geist/](/fonts/geist.md) |
| #7 | **Mona Sans** | 84 / 100 | OFL-1.1 | [/fonts/mona-sans/](/fonts/mona-sans.md) |
| #8 | **Istok Web** | 83 / 100 | OFL-1.1 | [/fonts/istok-web/](/fonts/istok-web.md) |
| #9 | **Liter** | 83 / 100 | OFL-1.1 | [/fonts/liter/](/fonts/liter.md) |
| #10 | **Open Sauce One** | 83 / 100 | OFL-1.1 | [/fonts/open-sauce-one/](/fonts/open-sauce-one.md) |
| #11 | **Hedvig Letters Sans** | 83 / 100 | OFL-1.1 | [/fonts/hedvig-letters-sans/](/fonts/hedvig-letters-sans.md) |
| #12 | **Yantramanav** | 83 / 100 | OFL-1.1 | [/fonts/yantramanav/](/fonts/yantramanav.md) |

## Other Scripts With Similar Latin Letters

- **Mingzat** (Lepc): Similarity 83, licence OFL-1.1 - [/fonts/mingzat/](/fonts/mingzat.md)

## Scoring Method

62 letters and digits (A-Z a-z 0-9) rendered at 160px cap height on a 32x32 grid with 3px gaussian blur, combined with edge-orientation texture (15% weight). Scores are normalized so that 0 represents an average pair of fonts across the 1571 compared fonts, and 100 represents identical letter shapes. Computed on 2026-10-22 using glyph-shape + edge-texture v2.

## Machine API

JSON representation available at [/api/fonts-like/helvetica.json](/api/fonts-like/helvetica.json).