Pyyan / Compare / RTMDet vs RF-DETR vs YOLO26 vs YOLOv12
RTMDet vs RF-DETR vs YOLO26 vs YOLOv12
4 of 5Object Detection · verified 13 Aug 2026
| Specification | RTMDet | RF-DETR | YOLO26 | YOLOv12 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Summary | Pure throughput, and an MIT licence. | First real-time detector past 60 mAP on COCO. | The latest in the line most people mean by object detection. | Attention-centric YOLO, still widely deployed. |
| COCO mAP | ~52 | 60.5 | ~55 | ~55 |
| Speed | 300+ | Real time | Very high | Very high |
| Licence | MIT | Apache 2.0 | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Family | Single stage | Transformer, set prediction | Single stage | Single stage |
| Open vocabulary | No | No | No | No |
| Released | 2022 | 2025 | 2026 | 2025 |
| Category | Object Detection | Object Detection | Object Detection | Object Detection |
| Official | OpenMMLab ↗ | Roboflow ↗ | Ultralytics ↗ | Ultralytics ↗ |
Highlighted rows are where these differ.
RTMDet
- Wins on raw speed where accuracy is sufficient
- MIT, so no derivative-work obligation
Best for high frame-rate video.
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.
YOLO26
- Strong on Jetson, Snapdragon and ARM CPUs
- AGPL-3.0: open-source your derivative work or buy a licence
Best for edge and mobile deployment.
YOLOv12
- Attention added to the classic single-stage design
- Same licensing consideration as YOLO26
Best for teams already on the YOLO toolchain.