Best Google Fonts to use for your next SaaS project

5 min readJan 8, 2022

Probably you have heard a lot about Google Fonts. You may even use them every day. Google Fonts is a font embedding library that contains thousands of licensed font families. All the fonts are free and open source. Google Fonts also provides an API to use the fonts for free on your next project. Some of the most known font families in the Google Fonts library are Open Sans, Roboto, Lato, PT Sans, etc.

Google Fonts library provides a versatile of typefaces. You will find in the Google Fonts library serif, sans serifs, and display fonts. There are a lot of font families that sometimes you can spend hours browsing and still don’t know what would be best for your next web application project.

What typeface is suitable for a SaaS application?

Most of the time, we simplify our work by using Open Sans. The default font in Figma is Roboto, and it is the same for Android apps. Both Open Sans and Roboto are great typefaces to use on the web & mobile app. However, some apps are heavy in tables, columns, and tabs.

I invite you to do a small experiment in Figma. Create a file and add two paragraphs next to each other. Set the font of paragraph one to Open Sans font family, and paragraph two to Source Sans Pro. Make sure both the paragraphs have the same size, for example, 16px. Do you notice anything when you compare these two paragraphs?

Many differences exist between Open Sans and Source Sans Pro, and the most obvious one is the scaling. In the picture above, you can see that both paragraphs are the same size (16px). However, Source Sans Pro has a smaller scale than Open Sans. Hence Source Sans Pro is a better font than Open Sans for use in SaaS applications.

I created a Pen on Codepen, so you can compare them yourself on the browser as well.

Open Sans vs Source Sans Pro (codepen.io)

My list of font families from Google Font Library

I created a list of typefaces from Google Font Library that I believe are more suitable for a SaaS app. All of them share the same scaling as Source Sans Pro. Design is about what works the best. Don’t get upset if you see that your favorite font family is not on the list. The following font list is not the ultimate list. I created it to give you a hand when you are confused about what font to use on your next SaaS project.