PyyanThe AI Index

Pyyan / Compare / YOLO26 vs RF-DETR vs YOLOv12

YOLO26 vs RF-DETR vs YOLOv12

3 of 5

Object Detection · verified 13 Aug 2026

×YOLO26Ultralyticscurrent
×RF-DETRRoboflowcurrent
×YOLOv12Ultralyticscurrent
2 slots left
SpecificationYOLO26RF-DETRYOLOv12
SummaryThe latest in the line most people mean by object detection.First real-time detector past 60 mAP on COCO.Attention-centric YOLO, still widely deployed.
COCO mAP~5560.5~55
SpeedVery highReal timeVery high
LicenceAGPL-3.0Apache 2.0AGPL-3.0
FamilySingle stageTransformer, set predictionSingle stage
Open vocabularyNoNoNo
Released202620252025
CategoryObject DetectionObject DetectionObject Detection
OfficialUltralytics ↗Roboflow ↗Ultralytics ↗

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.

Full spec sheet →

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.

Full spec sheet →

YOLOv12

  • Attention added to the classic single-stage design
  • Same licensing consideration as YOLO26

Best for teams already on the YOLO toolchain.

Full spec sheet →