Font Helvetica
According to the Wikipedia entry on Liberation fonts, '.documents embedding these fonts do not automatically fall under the GNU GPL, but will still likely cause problems with commercial software.' I'm not a lawyer, but it seems that if you use Liberarion fonts in a software product, you may be obligated to apply a GPL license to that product, which may not be what you want. Again, stressing that I'm no expert in licensing, but I had to give up using Liberation on one project because of concerns over licensing.–May 19 '14 at 5:06. Is a good neo-grotesque sans that can replace Helvetica. Commissioned by Google and released for free.
Font Helvetica Family
Used as Android's default font.Google re-designed Roboto in July 2014. The above sample has now been updated.More about Roboto's (pre-redesign) similarity to Helvetica. I wouldn't overstate its similarity, but I would say it's a good free alternative. Since the 2014 redesign, some of its most Helvetica-like aspects have actually been removed.I also agree with Yisela's recommendation of Liberation Sans, which is also a good font albeit available in fewer weights. The closest open source licensed font to Helvetica Neue I have found is surprisingly GNU FreeSans.
Below is a sample from Inkscape, with FreeSans at the top and Helvetica Neue at the bottom. The glyphs are nearly identical, some are a little closer to original Helvetica. The spacing varies slightly (at least in Inkscape). The biggest difference I can see is FreeSans has ligatures between certain characters, note the 'fl' combination.It is an excellent font and is works well with the GNU font family of FreeSerif and FreeMono. Everyone's been giving you names of fonts that look similar to Helvetica (some more than others) but depending on what kind of project it is that you're working on you might not need any of those.Unless you need something that looks almost exactly like Helvetica, Arial might be an option you should consider. It comes pre-installed in (almost?) every Windows version and also Apple devices. Free puzzle vector.