Pyyan / Compare / RF-DETR vs YOLO-World
RF-DETR vs YOLO-World
2 of 5Object Detection · verified 13 Aug 2026
RF-DETRRoboflowcurrent
YOLO-WorldTencentcurrent| Specification | RF-DETR | YOLO-World |
|---|---|---|
| Summary | First real-time detector past 60 mAP on COCO. | Open-vocabulary detection at YOLO speed. |
| COCO mAP | 60.5 | ~46 zero-shot |
| Speed | Real time | High |
| Licence | Apache 2.0 | GPL-3.0 |
| Family | Transformer, set prediction | Open vocabulary |
| Open vocabulary | No | Yes |
| Released | 2025 | 2024 |
| Category | Object Detection | Object Detection |
| Official | Roboflow ↗ | Tencent ↗ |
Highlighted rows are where these differ.
RF-DETR
- Leads the RF100-VL domain-transfer benchmark
- DINOv2 backbone, markedly better on occluded objects
- Apache 2.0, which YOLO is not
Best for most custom detection tasks.
YOLO-World
- The speed of YOLO with text-defined classes
- Weaker than Grounding DINO on hard prompts
Best for prompted detection that has to be fast.