Install FontSwap
“Garamond” isn’t one typeface. Claude Garamond cut his romans in sixteenth-century Paris, and the name has since been attached to dozens of interpretations — Adobe Garamond, Garamond Premier, ITC Garamond, Stempel Garamond, Monotype Garamond, and the one bundled with Microsoft Office that isn’t really a Garamond at all.
Which means “a free Garamond alternative” depends on which Garamond you had in mind. Here’s the ranking, then the disambiguation.
The ranking
| # | Font | Similarity | Weights | Variable |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | EB Garamond | 92% | 400–800 | Yes |
| 2 | Cormorant Garamond | 85% | 300–700 | No |
| 3 | Crimson Pro | 78% | 200–900 | Yes |
| 4 | Source Serif Pro | 65% | 200–900 | Yes |
| 5 | Newsreader | 62% | 200–800 | Yes |
| 6 | Noto Serif | 60% | 100–900 | Yes |
#1 — EB Garamond is the real revival
EB Garamond is not a lookalike. Georg Duffner built it directly from the 1592 Egenolff-Berner specimen sheet — the same source document that Adobe and others worked from. The “EB” is the specimen, not a style.
That provenance is the whole argument. You get the genuine old-style characteristics: a small x-height, a strongly angled stress, the low contrast between thick and thin strokes, and the slightly irregular rhythm that makes Renaissance romans pleasant to read for hours. Duffner’s italic in particular is drawn from period sources rather than sloped from the roman.
Its limits are honest ones. The weight range starts at Regular and runs to 800 — there is no Light, so if your layout depends on a hairline serif for large display settings, look elsewhere. And the small x-height that makes it beautiful in a book makes it demanding on screen: set it at 18–20px minimum for body copy, not the 16px you’d use for a sans.
#2 — Cormorant Garamond, for display
Cormorant Garamond is Christian Thalmann’s interpretation, and it is a display face wearing a text face’s name. The contrast is higher than a true Garamond, the serifs finer, the whole thing more delicate.
At 40px and up it is arguably more beautiful than EB Garamond. At 14px it disintegrates — the thin strokes drop below a pixel and the letterforms go patchy. The right use is a masthead, a chapter opener, a title card, with something sturdier underneath.
Not variable, and the 300–700 range is spread across separate files.
#3 — Crimson Pro, the screen compromise
Crimson Pro descends from Sebastian Kosch’s Crimson Text, drawn in the old-style tradition with an explicit debt to Garamond and Minion. Jacques Le Bailly’s Pro revision made it variable across 200–900.
It is the pick when the text has to survive a screen. Larger x-height than EB Garamond, sturdier serifs, a wider weight range including genuine Light cuts. You lose some of the Renaissance irregularity — Crimson Pro is more even, more modern, more obviously a twenty-first-century font. For a long-form reading site, that’s a trade worth making.
The rest
Source Serif Pro (65%) is Frank Grießhammer’s Adobe family, rooted in Fournier rather than Garamond. Transitional rather than old-style: more vertical stress, more contrast, cleaner. Excellent typeface, adjacent tradition.
Newsreader (62%) was drawn for screen reading with an optical size axis, which is a genuinely useful feature nothing else on this list offers. It shares Garamond’s warmth without the historical specificity.
Noto Serif (60%) is here for one reason: script coverage. If your Garamond has to sit beside Cyrillic, Greek, Devanagari or Arabic and stay visually consistent, nothing else free comes close. It also carries a width axis (62.5–100), which none of the others do.
Which Garamond did you mean?
The Microsoft Office one. That’s Monotype Garamond, which is drawn from Jean Jannon’s seventeenth-century types, not Claude Garamond’s. It’s narrower and tighter than a true Garamond. EB Garamond will look noticeably wider and more open; expect your line counts to change.
Adobe Garamond. Robert Slimbach’s, and the closest commercial relative to EB Garamond — both work from the Egenolff-Berner specimen. This is the cleanest swap on the list.
ITC Garamond. Tony Stan’s 1975 interpretation, with a much larger x-height and shorter extenders. Famous as the Apple logotype font for years. Nothing free is close; it’s a distinctly 1970s reading of Garamond and none of the open revivals went that direction.
Garamond in a book. EB Garamond at 10–11pt. This is what it was built for.
Setting it properly
Old-style serifs need more line height than sans-serifs and more than most people give them:
body {
font-family: "EB Garamond", Garamond, "Times New Roman", serif;
font-size: 20px;
line-height: 1.6;
font-variant-numeric: oldstyle-nums;
}That last line matters. Garamond and its descendants have text figures (old-style numerals, which sit on the baseline with ascenders and descenders) and they are the historically correct default for running text. Lining figures in a Garamond paragraph look like an import from a different century — because they are.
FAQ
Is EB Garamond free for commercial use? Yes, OFL-1.1 — commercial use, modification and embedding are all permitted.
Which is best for a long-form reading site? Crimson Pro for screens, on x-height and weight range. EB Garamond if you can commit to setting it at 18–20px and your readers are on decent displays.
Why is Cormorant Garamond ranked above Crimson Pro if it breaks at small sizes? The ranking measures similarity to Garamond, not general usefulness. Cormorant is the closer visual relative; Crimson Pro is the more practical font. Rank order and recommendation aren’t the same question.
Do any of these have true italics? EB Garamond, Crimson Pro, Source Serif Pro and Newsreader all ship drawn italics rather than obliques. For a Garamond that’s essential — the italic is half the design.