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YOLOv4-tiny vs YOLOv8

We don't benchmark YOLOv4-tiny or YOLOv8 on Vision Evals. YOLOv4-tiny is open-weight under Custom. YOLOv8 is open-weight under AGPL 3.0: commercial use needs a license (included on Roboflow cloud).

Compare YOLOv4-tiny 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-tiny vs YOLOv8 Comparison Table

PropertyYOLOv4-tinyYOLOv8
OrganizationAcademia SinicaUltralytics
Categoryopenopen
Modalityvisionvision
Release DateNov 2020Jan 2023
Context Window——
ParametersUnknown3.2M-68.2M
LicenseCustomAGPL 3.0
Commercial useSee license termscommercial use needs a license (included on Roboflow cloud)
COCO Benchmark object detection, mAP 50:95 on COCO val2017
Best sizeNot benchmarked52.9XL · 68.2M params
Smallest sizeNot benchmarked36.5Nano · 3.2M params
mAP rangeNot benchmarked36.5–52.9across 5 sizes
Model Sizes COCO mAP 50:95, tested resolution and params per size
NanoNot available36.5640×640 · 3.2M params
SmallNot available44.1640×640 · 11.2M params
MediumNot available49.2640×640 · 25.9M params
LargeNot available51.8640×640 · 43.7M params
XLNot available52.9640×640 · 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 DetectionSupportedDemo (COCO)
Model Features
Real-Time VisionNot listedSupported

YOLOv4-tiny vs YOLOv8: Overview

YOLOv4-tiny

YOLOv4-tiny is a lightweight variant of YOLOv4 developed by Academia Sinica, released in November 2020. It retains the core YOLOv4 design principles while significantly reducing the number of convolutional layers and feature map channels to produce a model suitable for inference on devices with limited compute, including embedded hardware and mobile CPUs. It uses a simplified CSP backbone with fewer layers and two detection scales rather than three.

YOLOv4-tiny is optimized for scenarios where inference speed is prioritized over peak accuracy, achieving substantially higher FPS than full YOLOv4 at the cost of reduced AP on standard benchmarks. It is commonly used in robotics, embedded vision systems, and applications where real-time detection is required without GPU acceleration.

YOLOv8

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.