GraphRAG review

Q: How do I install GraphRAG?

Run pip install graphrag. The graphrag package needs Python 3.11 or newer, below 3.14.

GraphRAG is a Microsoft Research Python pipeline that extracts knowledge graphs from unstructured text to improve LLM question answering over private data.

Updated Nov 1, 2026. Review written Oct 22, 2026 from the project's own sources; usage data refreshed every Monday.

TL;DR

GraphRAG is a graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation system from Microsoft Research that builds a knowledge graph, community hierarchy and summaries from raw text. GraphRAG is for developers answering complex questions over private datasets. GraphRAG is now largely in maintenance mode, receiving bug fixes and dependency updates but no new features.

36.5kGitHub stars
+80new stars, week of Oct 25
11.1kdownloads a week, −17% vs 4-week avg
#37in RAG, data and memory this week

GraphRAG at a glance

Category: RAG, data and memory
Maintained by: Microsoft (organization, @microsoft on GitHub)
License: MIT
Language: Python, Jupyter Notebook, TypeScript
Repository: github.com/microsoft/graphrag
Website: microsoft.github.io/graphrag
PyPI package: graphrag 3.3.0
Latest release: v3.3.0 on GitHub, Oct 8, 2026
First published: Mar 27, 2024

What GraphRAG does

GraphRAG extracts a knowledge graph from raw text using LLMs.
GraphRAG builds a community hierarchy and generates summaries for those communities.
GraphRAG uses the graph, community summaries and graph machine learning outputs to augment prompts at query time.
GraphRAG offers Global Search, Local Search and DRIFT Search query methods, plus question generation.
GraphRAG supports auto and manual prompt tuning to adapt extraction to your data.
GraphRAG includes a native CosmosTableProvider with namespace partitioning and transactional batch writes.

How it works

GraphRAG runs as a Python package with a command line interface. An indexing step extracts entities and relationships from your text corpus with an LLM, builds a community hierarchy and summarizes communities. A query step then uses these structures for global, local or DRIFT search. Configuration is created with an init command, and storage options include Azure Cosmos.

How to install and start using GraphRAG

From PyPI

pip install graphrag

Requirements

Python 3.11 or later, below 3.14.
Access to an LLM, since GraphRAG uses language models for extraction and querying.

First steps

Follow the GraphRAG command line quickstart in the official documentation.
Start with a small dataset, since GraphRAG indexing can be expensive.
Tune GraphRAG prompts for your data using the Prompt Tuning Guide before relying on results.

Who GraphRAG is for

Developers answering questions that require connecting scattered information across a private dataset.
Teams needing holistic summaries of themes across large document collections or single large documents.
Researchers exploring knowledge graph memory structures to enhance LLM outputs.

Limitations to know

GraphRAG is largely in maintenance mode and will not accept new PRs or implement new features.
GraphRAG indexing can be an expensive operation; the README advises reading the docs on costs and starting small.
GraphRAG code is a demonstration and not an officially supported Microsoft offering.
GraphRAG may not give the best results out of the box without prompt tuning.

Is GraphRAG growing? Usage data

In the week of Oct 25–31, 2026, GraphRAG ranked #365 on the Devtoolwatch Board and #37 in RAG, data and memory, with a momentum score of 16 out of 100. Its main package had 11.1k downloads that week, −17% against its own 4-week average.

New GitHub stars per week for the last 12 weeks, from GitHub's stargazer history (today's stargazers by the week they starred).

Show the weekly numbers

New GitHub stars per week for GraphRAG
Week of	New stars
Aug 9, 2026	185
Aug 16, 2026	136
Aug 23, 2026	123
Aug 30, 2026	121
Sep 6, 2026	118
Sep 13, 2026	94
Sep 20, 2026	85
Sep 27, 2026	102
Oct 4, 2026	103
Oct 11, 2026	87
Oct 18, 2026	85
Oct 25, 2026	80

On Hacker News

The Monaco Code Editor, 724 points and 170 comments (Jun 20, 2016)
React Native for Windows and Mac, 715 points and 477 comments (May 12, 2020)
Generative AI for Beginners, 648 points and 92 comments (Nov 24, 2023)
TypeChat, 556 points and 169 comments (Jul 20, 2023)
VibeVoice: A Frontier Open-Source Text-to-Speech Model, 448 points and 170 comments (Sep 3, 2025)

The Board ranks tools by four signals each week: new stars, new stars for the repo's size, added downloads and download growth beyond the market. How the ranking works.

GraphRAG alternatives

Other RAG, data and memory tools on the Board in the week of Oct 25–31, 2026, by momentum:

RAG, data and memory ranked by momentum, the week of Oct 25–31, 2026
Rank	Tool	Stars	Downloads/wk
#1	XERJXERJ is a local-first search engine and MCP server for AI agents, packaged as one Rust binary with an Elasticsearch-compatible API.	17.9k	–
#2	MemvidMemvid is a single-file memory layer for AI agents that packages data, embeddings, search indexes, and metadata into one portable .mv2 file.	17.3k	–
#3	LEANNLEANN is a Python vector database and RAG library that recomputes embeddings on demand to keep indexes small on personal devices.	13.7k	–
#4	GraphifyGraphify is an AI coding assistant skill that turns a codebase, with its docs, PDFs, images and videos, into a queryable knowledge graph.	140k	480.7k
#5	MarkItDownMarkItDown is a lightweight Python utility from Microsoft that converts PDFs, Office documents, images, audio and other files to…	193.2k	4.7M
#6	FirecrawlFirecrawl is an API and open source project to search, scrape, crawl, and interact with web pages, returning LLM-ready markdown or JSON…	197.4k	2.9M

All RAG, data and memory tools, ranked

Recent GraphRAG releases

v3.3.0, Oct 8, 2026
v3.2.0, Sep 24, 2026
v3.1.2, Aug 21, 2026
v3.1.1, Jul 18, 2026
v3.1.0, May 28, 2026

GraphRAG FAQ

Is GraphRAG free and open source?

Yes. GraphRAG's source code is on GitHub (microsoft/graphrag) under the MIT license, so you can use it for free.

How do I install GraphRAG?

Run pip install graphrag. The graphrag package needs Python 3.11 or newer, below 3.14.

Is GraphRAG still maintained?

Yes. The microsoft/graphrag repository was last updated on Oct 20, 2026, and the latest release, v3.3.0 on GitHub, came out on Oct 8, 2026.

How popular is GraphRAG?

GraphRAG has 36.5k GitHub stars as of Nov 1, 2026. It gained 80 new stars in the week of Oct 25–31, 2026, against a 12-week average of 110 a week. Its main package had 11.1k downloads that week, −17% against its own 4-week average. That made it #37 among RAG, data and memory tools on the Devtoolwatch Board.

GraphRAG vs Graphify: how do they compare?

GraphRAG and Graphify are both tracked by Devtoolwatch as RAG, data and memory tools. GraphRAG has 36.5k GitHub stars and Graphify has 140k. In the week of Oct 25–31, 2026, GraphRAG's main package had 11.1k downloads and Graphify's had 480.7k. Graphify is an AI coding assistant skill that turns a codebase, with its docs, PDFs, images and videos, into a queryable knowledge graph. Graphify review.

GraphRAG vs LangGraph: how do they compare?

GraphRAG and LangGraph are both tracked by Devtoolwatch. GraphRAG has 36.5k GitHub stars and LangGraph has 44.2k. In the week of Oct 25–31, 2026, GraphRAG's main package had 11.1k downloads and LangGraph's had 18.5M. LangGraph is a low-level orchestration framework and runtime for building, managing, and deploying long-running, stateful agents in Python or JavaScript. LangGraph review.

What are the best alternatives to GraphRAG?

Other RAG, data and memory tools on the Devtoolwatch Board in the week of Oct 25–31, 2026, by momentum: XERJ (#1), Memvid (#2), LEANN (#3), Graphify (#4), MarkItDown (#5). The alternatives table above has their numbers.

What is the difference between GraphRAG and baseline RAG?

GraphRAG uses a knowledge graph, community hierarchy and summaries instead of only vector similarity over text snippets. The docs say baseline RAG struggles to connect scattered facts and to summarize concepts across large collections, and GraphRAG shows substantial improvement on those question types.

Is GraphRAG still being developed?

GraphRAG is largely in maintenance mode. The README says the team will not accept new PRs or add features, but will perform bug fixes and dependency updates, particularly for CVEs.

Is GraphRAG a knowledge graph?

GraphRAG is not a knowledge graph itself. GraphRAG is a data pipeline that builds a knowledge graph from an input corpus, then uses that graph with community summaries to augment LLM prompts at query time.

What does GraphRAG stand for?

GraphRAG combines graphs with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), a technique to improve LLM outputs using real-world information. GraphRAG describes itself as a modular graph-based RAG system.

How do I upgrade GraphRAG between versions?

GraphRAG recommends running graphrag init --root [path] --force between minor version bumps to get the latest config format. Between major bumps, run the provided migration notebook to avoid re-indexing. Back up configuration and prompts first, since they get overwritten.

Sources

GraphRAG README badge

Maintainers can show the tool's weekly Board rank in their README:

[![Devtoolwatch](https://index.devtoolwatch.com/badge/graphrag.svg)](https://index.devtoolwatch.com/tools/graphrag/)

How this page is made: Devtoolwatch writes each review from the project's README, releases, package metadata and website, with an AI model, then checks every claim against the source it cites and drops what the sources don't support. The numbers come from Devtoolwatch's daily GitHub snapshots, GitHub's stargazer history, and the npm and PyPI download APIs. Spotted an error? Email [email protected].