Compare YOLOv4 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.
YOLOv4 vs YOLOv8 Comparison Table
| Property | YOLOv4 | YOLOv8 |
|---|---|---|
| Organization | Academia Sinica | Ultralytics |
| Category | open | open |
| Modality | vision | vision |
| Release Date | Apr 2020 | 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 | Supported | Demo (COCO) |
| Model Features | ||
| Real-Time Vision | Not listed | Supported |
YOLOv4 vs YOLOv8: Overview
YOLOv4 is an object detection model developed by Alexey Bochkovskiy, Chien-Yao Wang, and Hong-Yuan Mark Liao at Academia Sinica, released in April 2020 via the Darknet framework. It combines a CSPDarknet53 backbone, PANet neck, and YOLOv3 detection head with a large set of training improvements — Bag of Freebies and Bag of Specials — that improve accuracy with minimal inference cost increase.
YOLOv4 achieves 43.5% AP on COCO at 65 FPS on a Tesla V100 GPU. The Darknet implementation is the original version, distinguishing it from subsequent PyTorch-based reimplementations. It remains a widely referenced detection architecture and a supported training target in Roboflow Inference.
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.
