LightRAG is completely free with 7 features included. No paid tiers offered, making it perfect for budget-conscious users.
LightRAG is significantly lighter and cheaper to run. GraphRAG builds more comprehensive community summaries and handles global queries better, but costs 5-10x in indexing tokens. LightRAG is ideal when you want graph-enhanced retrieval without the heavy infrastructure and cost overhead.
Yes. LightRAG supports Ollama and other local LLM providers for both entity extraction during indexing and query-time processing. This means you can run the entire pipeline on-premise with zero API costs.
Higher than plain vector RAG because entity extraction requires LLM calls during indexing. Typically 2-3x the token count of source material for LightRAG vs near-zero LLM cost for basic vector RAG. With local models via Ollama, the monetary cost is essentially zero.
Yes. New documents can be added without re-indexing the entire collection. The knowledge graph is updated incrementally with new entities and relationships, though periodic full re-indexing can improve graph quality over time.
LightRAG supports Neo4j for production graph storage, NetworkX for lightweight in-memory graphs, OpenSearch as a unified backend for all four storage types (added in March 2026), and built-in lightweight stores for quick prototyping.
It's completely free — no credit card required.
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Last verified March 2026