SAM 3 vs YOLOv8
Compare SAM 3 and YOLOv8 side-by-side.
Compare SAM 3 vs YOLOv8 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 YOLOv8 Comparison Table
Evals updated October 13, 2026Pricing updated October 16, 2026
| Property | SAM 3 | YOLOv8 |
|---|---|---|
| Organization | Meta | Ultralytics |
| Category | open | open |
| Modality | multimodal | vision |
| Release Date | Nov 2025 | Jan 2023 |
| Context Window | — | — |
| Parameters | Unknown | 3.2M-68.2M |
| 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 | 1280×1280, 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 | ||
| Object Detection | Demo | Demo (COCO) |
| Instance Segmentation | Supported | Not listed |
| 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 YOLOv8: 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.
YOLOv8 is an object detection and multi-task vision model developed by Ultralytics, released in January 2023 under the AGPL-3.0 license. It succeeds YOLOv5 and introduces an anchor-free detection head, a new C2f module for improved gradient flow, and a decoupled head that separates classification and regression tasks. These changes improve both accuracy and training efficiency compared to earlier Ultralytics models.
YOLOv8 supports object detection, instance segmentation, image classification, pose estimation, and oriented bounding box detection within a unified codebase. It is available in five sizes from Nano to Extra Large and exports to ONNX, TensorRT, CoreML, and other formats. YOLOv8 is one of the most widely adopted detection models in production and is directly supported by Roboflow Inference for custom model training and deployment.
