Same font from google and fontsquirrel appears differently

Question

I use the font Montserrat on my website. I normally use the one from Google Fonts available here. It has only two styles available: normal and bold.

I recently discovered that there exist two other styles for this font, available on Font Squirrel: hairline and light. I would need these two too and since they are not present on Google Fonts I thought to download them from Font Squirrel and then use their webfont generator.

I noticed, though, that the same font, with same style and weight, looks slightly different. Here's a screenshot to compare the bold version:

On top is the one from Font Squirrel and the other is from Google Fonts. I'm using the same font size and bold. It's evident that besides the slightly different letter spacing also the single letters are different.

When you create a webfont on Font Squirrel there lot of options, but not being an expert it's unclear what they do. Is it possible that they could make the font to look the same as the Google one?

Answer 1

FontSquirrel is mostly about hosting and webfont conversion, so if it has a font that looks wrong, that's something they'll need to fix. In terms of "which one is right", so that we know whether fontsquirrel is wrong, or google fonts is wrong, it's trivial to find this font's author and real project page: http://montserrat.zkysky.com.ar/en

On the font's own website, the font's creator links to the Google webfont version as the "download the font" option, so we can safely assume that's the typeface they intended for people to use.

Of course where FontSquirrel then got the other font faces from is a mystery you should probably ask them about, and get them to change, since they're clearly not serving the right font.