RAG vs. Graph RAG vs. Agentic RAG

A visual comparison of three RAG architectures: standard RAG uses vector similarity search for single-hop factual lookups; Graph RAG adds a knowledge graph layer enabling multi-hop queries by traversing entity relationships; Agentic RAG uses an LLM agent to dynamically decide which tools and sources to query at runtime. The key insight is that these aren't a progression of sophistication but rather solutions to different query types — factual lookups, relationship queries, and dynamic multi-source tasks respectively.