Microduck vs Reachy Mini
Same makers, same open-source DNA, different animals: Reachy Mini ($299–449, shipping now) is the expressive desk companion with the mature app ecosystem; Microduck ($399, preorder, ships pre-Christmas 2026) is the walking, skating locomotion platform. Builders who want to train gaits pick the duck; builders who want a programmable desk presence today pick Reachy Mini.
| Field | Microduck | Reachy Mini |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $399 (preorder) | $449 Wireless / $299 Lite |
| Form | 25 cm biped duck — walks, kicks, skates | 28 cm desk robot — expressive 6-DoF neck, no locomotion |
| Compute | onboard | Raspberry Pi 5 onboard (Wireless) or your computer (Lite) |
| Sensors | camera, LiDAR, 2× IMU | camera, microphones (per configuration) |
| Openness | Apache-2.0 — SDK, sim, full RL training stack | Apache-2.0 — Python SDK, HF Hub app ecosystem |
| Simulation | MuJoCo, policies retrainable | LeRobot ecosystem |
| Subscription | none | none |
| Availability | preorder — ships pre-Christmas 2026 | shipping in batches since late 2025 |
| Community | forming (Pollen Discord + LeRobot) | established — large app-sharing community |
The verdict, at more length
The fork is maturity versus motion. Reachy Mini has shipped in batches for most of a year: its Python SDK is exercised, its Hugging Face Hub ecosystem means a new owner inherits working apps on day one, and its failure modes are documented by a real community. Microduck, two days into preorders as we write this, offers something Reachy Mini structurally cannot — legs, a beak, and the full sim-to-real reinforcement-learning pipeline as the product's center of gravity.
For a first open robot in the household, Reachy Mini is the lower-risk admission. For an owner who wants to retrain a walking policy in MuJoCo and watch it survive contact with a hardwood floor, the duck is the only specimen in the registry that does it at this price. Owning both is, we acknowledge, the ecosystem's obvious endgame — they share tooling, and the makers know exactly what they're doing.