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.
SAM 3 vs YOLOv8 Comparison Table
| 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) |
| COCO Benchmark object detection, mAP 50:95 on COCO val2017 | ||
| Best size | Not benchmarked | 52.9XL · 68.2M params |
| Smallest size | Not benchmarked | 36.5Nano · 3.2M params |
| mAP range | Not benchmarked | 36.5–52.9across 5 sizes |
| Model Sizes COCO mAP 50:95, tested resolution and params per size | ||
| Nano | Not available | 36.5640×640 · 3.2M params |
| Small | Not available | 44.1640×640 · 11.2M params |
| Medium | Not available | 49.2640×640 · 25.9M params |
| Large | Not available | 51.8640×640 · 43.7M params |
| XL | Not available | 52.9640×640 · 68.2M params |
| COCO val2017 mAP 50:95 and parameter counts from leaderboard.roboflow.com. Size names don't line up across model families, so compare sizes with similar parameter counts. The live demo runs some of these sizes at other resolutions, which were not benchmarked. | ||
| 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.
