Pyyan / Compare / YOLOv12 vs RF-DETR

YOLOv12 vs RF-DETR

2 of 5

Object Detection · verified 13 Aug 2026

YOLOv12Ultralyticscurrent
RF-DETRRoboflowcurrent
3 slots left
SpecificationYOLOv12RF-DETR
SummaryAttention-centric YOLO, still widely deployed.First real-time detector past 60 mAP on COCO.
COCO mAP~5560.5
SpeedVery highReal time
LicenceAGPL-3.0Apache 2.0
FamilySingle stageTransformer, set prediction
Open vocabularyNoNo
Released20252025
CategoryObject DetectionObject Detection
OfficialUltralyticsRoboflow

Highlighted rows are where these differ.

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 →

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 →