Pyyan / Compare / YOLOv12 vs YOLO-World
YOLOv12 vs YOLO-World
2 of 5Object Detection · verified 13 Aug 2026
YOLOv12Ultralyticscurrent
YOLO-WorldTencentcurrent| Specification | YOLOv12 | YOLO-World |
|---|---|---|
| Summary | Attention-centric YOLO, still widely deployed. | Open-vocabulary detection at YOLO speed. |
| COCO mAP | ~55 | ~46 zero-shot |
| Speed | Very high | High |
| Licence | AGPL-3.0 | GPL-3.0 |
| Family | Single stage | Open vocabulary |
| Open vocabulary | No | Yes |
| Released | 2025 | 2024 |
| Category | Object Detection | Object Detection |
| Official | Ultralytics ↗ | Tencent ↗ |
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.
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.