head to head · open source
graphrag vs PixelRAG
graphrag has 36,547 GitHub stars, 3,871 forks, 47 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. PixelRAG has 10,848 stars, 981 forks, 19 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. graphrag leads on adoption by 237% (36,547 vs 10,848 stars). graphrag is written in Python under MIT; PixelRAG is written in Python under Apache-2.0. graphrag has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, PixelRAG 9%. PixelRAG was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (rag), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| graphrag | PixelRAG | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 37K | ★ 11K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.9K | ⑂ 981 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick graphrag if
- You weight community size — 37K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick PixelRAG if
- You want the PixelRAG feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and PixelRAG fits your workflow better
About graphrag
GraphRAG [!WARNING] GraphRAG is a research project that explores the functional use of graphs to form a targeted context for question answering. Since our first release in July 2024 the capabilities of frontier models have changed dramatically, and our portfolio of research projects has diversified to match. This project is largely in maintenance mode, and won't be accepting new PRs or implementing new features. We'll perform bug fixes and dependency updates as appropriate, particularly to address CVEs as they arise. 👉 Microsoft Research Blog Post 👉 Read the docs 👉 GraphRAG Arxiv Overview The GraphRAG project…
read the full graphrag overview →
About PixelRAG
Official codebase for PIXELRAG: Web Screenshots Beat Text for Retrieval Augmented Generation Yichuan Wang , Zhifei Li , Zirui Wang , Paul Teiletche , Lesheng Jin Matei Zaharia †, Joseph E. Gonzalez †, Sewon Min † Equal contribution † Equal advising Work done at Berkeley SkyLab & BAIR & Berkeley NLP Search any document by how it looks , not just the text it contains. What it is · Give Claude eyes · How it works · Pipelines The two core operations — render a page to screenshots, search a visual index: Live, hosted endpoint — serves a pre built index of 8.28M Wikipedia pages . No setup, no API…
read the full PixelRAG overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is graphrag or PixelRAG more popular?
graphrag has 36,547 GitHub stars and PixelRAG has 10,848. graphrag has the larger community by that measure.
Are graphrag and PixelRAG free?
Both are open source. graphrag is licensed under MIT and PixelRAG under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between graphrag and PixelRAG?
graphrag is written in Python and PixelRAG in Python. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, graphrag or PixelRAG?
Choose graphrag if you want the larger community (36,547 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose PixelRAG if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.