The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Calibri vs Consolas
Two siblings from the same hand: Lucas de Groot designed both Calibri and Consolas for Microsoft's 2007 ClearType font collection, and both ship with Windows and Office rather than as standalone purchases. Calibri is a soft, humanist sans-serif built for long reading and became Office's default text face; Consolas is a monospaced face built for code, with every character the same width.
Calibri is a commercial font, so it is shown here in Carlito, its closest free alternative. All free alternatives to Calibri → Consolas is a commercial font, so it is shown here in Source Code Pro, its closest free alternative. All free alternatives to Consolas →
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
- Calibri is proportionally spaced with rounded stroke ends and traditional letter shapes, which gives it a warm, friendly feel in running text; Consolas is fixed-pitch, so every glyph sits in an identical cell like a typewriter face.
- Consolas was drawn so that capital I, lowercase l, and the numeral 1 are clearly distinct, and it offers slashed, dotted, and plain zeros through OpenType features; Calibri has no such code-oriented distinctions.
- Calibri ships in three weights (Light, Regular, Bold) each with an italic, while Consolas comes only in Regular and Bold with their italics.
- Calibri covers Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Armenian, and Georgian; Consolas covers Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, and Armenian plus a long list of OEM/DOS code pages.
- Both are commercial fonts bundled exclusively with Microsoft products, so using either on the web or in redistributed software means buying a license through Microsoft's font licensing partner.
Calibri
Reach for Calibri for documents, slides, and long-form body text, where its humanist forms and multiple weights make it comfortable to read on screen and in print.
Consolas
Reach for Consolas for code editors, terminals, and anything that needs column alignment, where its monospaced cells and unambiguous I/l/1 and zero shapes earn their keep.