Pyyan / Compare / YOLO26 vs RF-DETR vs RTMDet
YOLO26 vs RF-DETR vs RTMDet
3 of 5Object Detection · verified 13 Aug 2026
| Specification | YOLO26 | RF-DETR | RTMDet |
|---|---|---|---|
| Summary | The latest in the line most people mean by object detection. | First real-time detector past 60 mAP on COCO. | Pure throughput, and an MIT licence. |
| COCO mAP | ~55 | 60.5 | ~52 |
| Speed | Very high | Real time | 300+ |
| Licence | AGPL-3.0 | Apache 2.0 | MIT |
| Family | Single stage | Transformer, set prediction | Single stage |
| Open vocabulary | No | No | No |
| Released | 2026 | 2025 | 2022 |
| Category | Object Detection | Object Detection | Object Detection |
| Official | Ultralytics ↗ | Roboflow ↗ | OpenMMLab ↗ |
Highlighted rows are where these differ.
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.
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.
RTMDet
- Wins on raw speed where accuracy is sufficient
- MIT, so no derivative-work obligation
Best for high frame-rate video.