If you are a website developer, you will know how important it is to choose a good looking and easy-to-read font for the text. There are many websites out there that use a bad font and give a poor user experience to its visitors. It is therefore important that you use a good web font. If you are a website developer or you are building your website, you might have already checked some sites to get inspiration. Once you have identified the font or if you have found out a premium font that you want to use, but do not want to spend money, here is how to find free alternatives to paid Fonts using Alternatype.
Alternatype is a free web app that helps people find out best possible alternatives to some popular commercial fonts. As it is illegal to use fonts downloaded from torrent sites, you may use a free alternative to paid fonts. This web tool gets you a download link for the free alternatives right on the result screen.
Find free alternatives to paid Fonts
It is very easy to use the tool, and you do not have to create any account to use it. Head over to the Alternatype website and enter a font name. If your desired font is in their database, you can find that in instant search result. Choose the font from the given list. If the font is not listed in the instant search result, too bad!
The result page looks like this-
From here, you can get the download link, or check a specimen.
It is as simple as that. The only problem with this tool is it has a minimal database. You may not find alternatives to some of latest fonts. However, if your desired font is very modern, there is a very high chance to get the result right away.
Tools to find similar Fonts
When it comes to finding a free alternative to paid fonts, Alternatype seems to be the only player in this business. However, if you want to find similar fonts – paid or free – you can use these following tools.
1] Identifont
Identifont is a great web app that allows people find similar fonts to paid commercial fonts. Talking about the database, the Identifont database is much bigger than Alternatype. You can find minimum thirty similar font suggestions based on your every query. On the other hand, using this tool is pretty easy as well.
Visit the Identifont website, enter your font name, and press the Enter button. You should find some similar font suggestions on your left-hand side. This list should contain paid as well as free font suggestions.
2] FontSquirrel Matcherator
This is another awesome tool to find the exact or similar font based on your image text. In other words, you need to upload an image containing your desired font. The FontSquirrel Matcherator will do some background check and let you find the font that you want to download or buy.
Go to the FontSquirrel website, upload your image, select the text, click on Matcherate it button. You will get all the similar font suggestions right away.