Pyyan / Compare / YOLO-World vs YOLO26 vs YOLOv12
YOLO-World vs YOLO26 vs YOLOv12
3 of 5Object Detection · verified 13 Aug 2026
| Specification | YOLO-World | YOLO26 | YOLOv12 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Summary | Open-vocabulary detection at YOLO speed. | The latest in the line most people mean by object detection. | Attention-centric YOLO, still widely deployed. |
| COCO mAP | ~46 zero-shot | ~55 | ~55 |
| Speed | High | Very high | Very high |
| Licence | GPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Family | Open vocabulary | Single stage | Single stage |
| Open vocabulary | Yes | No | No |
| Released | 2024 | 2026 | 2025 |
| Category | Object Detection | Object Detection | Object Detection |
| Official | Tencent ↗ | Ultralytics ↗ | Ultralytics ↗ |
Highlighted rows are where these differ.
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.
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.