Classic RAG vs GraphRAG vs Agentic RAG

Retrieval-augmented generation isn't one pattern — it's a family, and picking the wrong member is expensive. This article compares classic vector RAG, GraphRAG, and agentic retrieval head-to-head: what each is actually good at, what it costs to run, and the failure modes each one hides.

The decision framework comes down to the shape of your knowledge and your questions: flat corpora with single-hop questions, relationship-heavy domains that need multi-hop traversal, and open-ended tasks where the retrieval strategy itself has to be decided at runtime. Pick by the problem, not the hype cycle.