SAM 3 vs YOLO11
Compare SAM 3 and YOLO11 side-by-side.
Compare SAM 3 vs YOLO11 live
Run the same image across every model that supports a task and compare their outputs side-by-side.
These models don't share enough common tasks for a side-by-side demo. See the comparison table below for their capabilities.
Models in this comparison
SAM 3 vs YOLO11 Comparison Table
Evals updated October 13, 2026Pricing updated October 18, 2026
| Property | SAM 3 | YOLO11 |
|---|---|---|
| Organization | Meta | Ultralytics |
| Category | open | open |
| Modality | multimodal | vision |
| Release Date | Nov 2025 | Sep 2024 |
| Context Window | — | — |
| Parameters | Unknown | 2.6M-56.9M |
| License | Custom | AGPL 3.0 |
| Commercial use | See license terms | commercial use needs a license (included on Roboflow cloud) |
| Model Sizes input resolution per size variant | ||
| Nano | Not available | 640×640 |
| Small | Not available | 1280×1280, 640×640 |
| Medium | Not available | 1280×1280, 640×640 |
| Large | Not available | 1280×1280, 640×640 |
| XL | Not available | 1280×1280, 640×640 |
| Vision Tasks | ||
| Instance Segmentation | Supported | Demo (COCO) |
| Object Detection | Demo | Demo (COCO) |
| Open Vocabulary Object Detection | Supported | Not listed |
| Promptable Concept Segmentation | Demo | Not listed |
| Video Object Tracking | Supported | Not listed |
| Zero Shot Segmentation | Supported | Not listed |
| Model Features | ||
| Foundation Vision | Supported | Not listed |
| Multimodal Vision | Supported | Not listed |
| Real-Time Vision | Not listed | Supported |
| Zero-shot Detection | Supported | Not listed |
SAM 3 vs YOLO11: Overview
Released on November 19th, 2025, Segment Anything 3 (SAM 3) is a zero-shot image segmentation model that “detects, segments, and tracks objects in images and videos based on concept prompts.” This model was developed by Meta as the third model in the Segment Anything series.
Unlike its previous SAM models (Segment Anything and Segment Anything 2), you can provide SAM 3 with the prompt “shipping container” and it will generate precise segmentation masks for all shipping containers in an image. SAM 3 generates segmentation masks that correspond to the location of the objects found with a text prompt.
YOLO11 is an object detection and multi-task vision model developed by Ultralytics, released in September 2024 under the AGPL-3.0 license. It is the latest generation in the Ultralytics YOLO series and supports object detection, instance segmentation, image classification, pose estimation, and oriented bounding box detection within a single unified framework. YOLO11 introduces architectural refinements that improve accuracy while reducing parameter count compared to YOLOv8 at equivalent model sizes.
YOLO11 is available in five model sizes from Nano to Extra Large and is deployable through the Ultralytics Python package, Roboflow Inference, and export formats including ONNX, TensorRT, and CoreML. It supports fine-tuning on custom datasets through the standard Ultralytics training API.
