The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Aptos vs Inter
Two neo-grotesque sans-serifs with very different homes. Aptos is the Microsoft font Steve Matteson drew to replace Calibri as the Office default in 2023, built for the austerity of everyday documents; Inter is Rasmus Andersson's free, open-source UI typeface, released in 2017 and tuned for interface text at small sizes.
Aptos is a commercial font, so it is shown here in Inter, its closest free alternative. All free alternatives to Aptos →
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
- Inter has a tall x-height, open apertures and a deep OpenType toolkit (tabular figures, slashed zero, contextual alternates, stylistic sets), engineered for dense product UI.
- Aptos is inspired by mid-20th-century Swiss type, with clear-cut horizontal and vertical stroke endings that evoke Helvetica and Arial, plus a double-story g and circular dots on i and j.
- Inter ships as a single variable font with weight (Thin to Black) and optical-size axes plus true italics; Aptos comes as static files in six weights with individually redrawn obliques, alongside Display, Narrow, Mono, Serif and Slab companions.
- Aptos is proprietary: it ships with Microsoft 365 and a desktop download, but webfont, redistribution and embedding rights are licensed separately through Microsoft, while Inter is free for any use under the SIL Open Font License.
Aptos
Reach for Aptos when your audience lives in Word, PowerPoint and Excel and you want the neutral house style of modern Office documents without installing anything.
Inter
Reach for Inter for websites, dashboards and app UI, where you need a self-hostable variable font with small-size legibility and no licensing cost.