Microduck vs Reachy Mini: Which Robot to Buy

The Short Answer

Buy Microduck if you want to train locomotion, and buy Reachy Mini if you want to build interactive apps. These two are the clearest case we have covered of Hugging Face selling two robots that do not compete.

Microduck costs $399, stands 25 cm, and walks. Reachy Mini costs $399 for the Lite version and $499 for the Wireless, stays on a desk, and moves a head, torso, and two antennas expressively.

The mistake we see readers make is treating the price gap as a quality ladder. Reachy Mini Wireless is the most expensive of the three and the least mobile, because it is paying for onboard compute and a battery to run conversation apps untethered.

What Each Robot Is Built to Do

Microduck is built to leave the desk, fall over, and get back up. That design goal explains every choice in it. There are 15 motors and two inertial measurement units (IMUs), one in the body and one in the head. A lidar and an 8x8 time-of-flight matrix watch for obstacles, and a removable battery runs it for about an hour.

Reachy Mini is built to sit still and be expressive. It has six degrees of freedom in the head, one body rotation, and two antennas. That is the gestural range a conversation app needs. A walking robot has no use for it.

The published skill sets show the split plainly. Microduck ships walk, sit and stand, kick, grab, roller-skate with the $39 Accessory pack rollers, and self-recovery. Reachy Mini ships an app store built on Hugging Face Spaces, with a conversation app driven by language models, a radio app, and a hand tracker.

Reachy Mini has the longer track record. Hugging Face put its install base at nearly 10,000 units in the wild in May 2026. Its app ecosystem and community answers already exist. Microduck's are three days old.

Training and Software

The two robots teach you different skills. Microduck's stack is reinforcement learning for continuous control, and Reachy Mini's is application development against a robot API.

Microduck trains in mjlab on MuJoCo Warp using Proximal Policy Optimization, exports the policy to ONNX, and runs it under a Rust runtime at 50 Hz. The reported training time is roughly one to two hours on a CUDA graphics card for a usable gait.

Reachy Mini's recommended path is a web app that drives the robot over WebRTC from a browser, with a Python SDK available for on-robot control loops. There is no graphics card in that story, which lowers the cost of entry considerably.

Both are Apache-2.0 on the software side. On hardware they differ. Reachy Mini publishes its design files under a Creative Commons BY-SA-NC licence. Microduck publishes none. If you want to modify the physical robot, that difference decides it.

What Each Robot Can Perceive

Microduck senses the floor and Reachy Mini senses the room. That split follows directly from what each has to avoid running into.

Microduck carries a front camera, a compact lidar, and an 8x8 time-of-flight matrix, which together give it obstacle distance in a coarse grid ahead of it. Sixty-four depth readings is not a rich map, and it is enough to stop a small biped walking into a chair leg.

The two IMUs matter most for training. One sits in the body and one in the head, so the policy gets separate readings for torso attitude and head attitude instead of inferring one from the other. Separate readings make a self-recovery behaviour learnable.

Reachy Mini's sensing is built for people. Both versions carry a 120 degree, 12-megapixel autofocus camera and a four-microphone array based on a reSpeaker board, which covers a desk and the person sitting at it.

The two Reachy Mini versions sense identically, which is worth knowing before you pay the extra $100. The Wireless does not see or hear better than the Lite. What it adds is a Raspberry Pi CM4 with 4 GB of RAM, a 2000 mAh LiFePO4 battery, and an IMU, at 1.475 kg against the Lite's 1.350 kg.

Neither Reachy Mini carries a lidar or a time-of-flight sensor. A robot that stays in one spot never needs to know how far away the wall is, and that absence is most of the sensing gap between these two machines.

Ecosystem and Support Today

Reachy Mini has a working app ecosystem and Microduck has a training stack, and those mature at different speeds. An app store fills up only as users publish. A training stack is useful the day it ships.

Reachy Mini apps install with one click from Hugging Face Spaces, and the published examples include a conversation app driven by language models, a radio app, and a hand tracker. There is also a MuJoCo simulation path that needs no hardware, so you can write and test before buying anything.

Microduck's equivalent is the GitHub release of its SDK, simulator, and reinforcement-learning pipeline. That is a stronger foundation for original work and a weaker one for a first evening, because nothing installs in one click yet.

Both robots come from Pollen Robotics and both point users at a Discord community for help. Reachy Mini has had a year of questions asked and answered in public. Microduck has had three days. Buying the duck in the first months means being an early tester of its documentation.

Assembly and Time to First Run

Reachy Mini takes two to three hours to assemble before it does anything. Hugging Face publishes that figure directly, and it applies to both the Lite and the Wireless version, since both ship as kits.

Microduck has no published assembly requirement and is described as a finished product at launch. If that holds, it is the faster of the two to a first working session, which is unusual for the more complex machine.

Time to a behaviour you designed yourself runs the other way. A Reachy Mini web app can be written in an afternoon in a browser. A new Microduck gait needs a simulator run of one to two hours on a CUDA graphics card, plus the reward-tuning cycles that rarely work first time.

Budget the difference before choosing. A Reachy Mini web app is an evening of work. A new Microduck gait is one to two hours of training plus the reward-tuning cycles after it.

Which One Fits Your Project

Pick Microduck if your project involves balance, gait, terrain, or recovery. Those are continuous-control problems where a trained policy beats scripted motion, and Microduck is the only one of the two with legs to run them on.

Pick Reachy Mini Lite if you want the cheapest entry into the Hugging Face robot ecosystem and already have a Mac or Linux machine to tether it to. At $399 it costs exactly what Microduck does, so the choice is purely about the job.

Pick Reachy Mini Wireless if the robot needs to work away from a computer, for a demo, a classroom, or a shared space. The onboard Raspberry Pi CM4 and battery are what the extra $100 over the Lite buys.

Building your own is a third option. Our Microduck versus Open Duck Mini comparison covers the DIY route. Our Microduck alternatives page covers what else sits near this price.

Who Should Skip Both

Neither robot suits a buyer who wants household work done. Both are development platforms, and shoppers after a machine that cleans or fetches should read our home robot assistant guide instead.

Anyone unwilling to assemble should be careful with Reachy Mini specifically. Both versions ship as kits that take two to three hours to build, and Hugging Face has not published an assembly requirement for Microduck either way.

Families buying a first robot for a child will find both frustrating. A tethered developer kit and a 15-motor biped both assume a person who wants to write code, and our robots for kids guide is the better starting point.

What would change our answer is Microduck gaining an app store of its own. Reachy Mini's advantage today is the installed ecosystem on Hugging Face Spaces. Bring that one-click app model to the duck and the walking robot becomes the stronger buy at every level of skill.