# Contextual AI vs LightRAG

**Leader by vioscaleAI score:** LightRAG

| Attribute | Contextual AI | LightRAG |
|---|---|---|
| **vioscaleAI score** | 52.8 (61% (medium)) | 61.7 (53% (medium)) |
| activity.commits_last_30d | - | 100 |
| adoption.dependent_repos | - | 0 |
| adoption.github_stars | - | 40,136 |
| content.faq | `[{"answer":"A unified platform that enables enterprises to rapidly build and deploy specialized AI agents capable of reasoning across complex enterprise data, technical documentation, and institutional knowledge to automate high-value tasks at scale with grounded, accurate responses. It is indexed under RAG Tools.","source":"https://contextual.ai/pricing","question":"What is Contextual AI?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Contextual AI is sold across 2 plans: On-demand and Enterprise. We have not confirmed a published price for every tier. There is no free tier. Pricing changes often, so verify at source before relying on it.","source":"https://contextual.ai/pricing","question":"How much does Contextual AI cost?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Contextual AI supports the web and a command-line interface. Platforms we have not confirmed are simply not listed here rather than ruled out.","source":"https://contextual.ai/pricing","question":"What platforms does Contextual AI support?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Not fully, on what we have confirmed. Contextual AI is offered as cloud / SaaS and hybrid, and a hybrid deployment usually means some components can run on your own infrastructure while the rest stays vendor-hosted. We have not confirmed a completely self-hosted option, so check with the vendor if that is a requirement.","source":"https://contextual.ai/pricing","question":"Can Contextual AI be self-hosted?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have independently confirmed SOC 2, HIPAA and GDPR for Contextual AI. Certifications we do not list are ones we have not been able to verify from public sources, which is not the same as Contextual AI not holding them. Always confirm compliance directly before you rely on it.","source":"https://contextual.ai/security/vulnerability-disclosure-program","question":"What security certifications does Contextual AI have?","confidence":0.7},{"answer":"Contextual AI is available worldwide. Its primary markets are the United States and the EU.","source":"https://contextual.ai/pricing","question":"Where is Contextual AI available?","confidence":0.75}]` | `[{"answer":"A lightweight RAG system that processes documents through flexible parsing engines and supports local deployment of embedding, reranking, and storage backends. Includes built-in citation attribution and can work with various open-source LLMs and embedding models. It is indexed under RAG Tools.","source":"https://github.com/pricing","question":"What is LightRAG?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"LightRAG supports the web and a command-line interface. Platforms we have not confirmed are simply not listed here rather than ruled out.","source":"https://github.com/pricing","question":"What platforms does LightRAG support?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Yes. LightRAG can be deployed cloud / SaaS, on-premise and self-hosted, so it does not have to run on the vendor's infrastructure.","source":"https://github.com/pricing","question":"Can LightRAG be self-hosted?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Yes. LightRAG is published under the MIT licence, a permissive licence that generally allows commercial use and modification. Licence terms can change between releases, so verify against the repository for the version you intend to use.","source":"https://github.com/HKUDS/LightRAG","question":"Is LightRAG open source?","confidence":0.95}]` |
| deployment.options | `{"cloud":true,"hybrid":true}` | `{"on_prem":true,"self_hosted":true}` |
| description.long | A unified platform that enables enterprises to rapidly build and deploy specialized AI agents capable of reasoning across complex enterprise data, technical documentation, and institutional knowledge to automate high-value tasks at scale with grounded, accurate responses. | An open-source RAG system designed for high scalability that uses both knowledge graphs and vector search to retrieve information from large datasets with reduced computational overhead and faster response times. |
| features.capabilities | `{"open_source":false,"multimodal_rag":true,"citation_attribution":true,"llm_provider_agnostic":false,"reranking_integration":true,"built_in_rag_eval_metrics":true,"managed_ingestion_pipeline":true,"embedding_provider_agnostic":false,"multi_hop_agentic_retrieval":true}` | `{"open_source":true,"multimodal_rag":true,"hybrid_retrieval":true,"citation_attribution":true,"llm_provider_agnostic":true,"reranking_integration":true,"managed_ingestion_pipeline":true,"embedding_provider_agnostic":true,"multi_hop_agentic_retrieval":false}` |
| integrations.count | 1 | 9 |
| integrations.list | `[{"name":"Google Cloud"}]` | `[{"name":"PostgreSQL","native":true,"category":"storage"},{"name":"Neo4j","native":true,"category":"storage"},{"name":"MongoDB","native":true,"category":"storage"},{"name":"Milvus","native":true,"category":"storage"},{"name":"Qdrant","native":true,"category":"storage"},{"name":"Redis","native":true,"category":"storage"},{"name":"Memgraph","native":true,"category":"storage"},{"name":"MinerU","native":true},{"name":"Docling","native":true}]` |
| language.primary | - | Python |
| license.spdx | - | MIT |
| market.availability | `{"primaryMarkets":["US","EU"],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` | - |
| platform.support | `{"cli":true,"web":true}` | `{"cli":true,"mac":true,"web":true,"linux":true}` |
| pricing | `{"type":"hybrid","plans":[{"free":false,"name":"On-demand","summary":"Pay-as-you-go with $25 free credits","features":["Unlimited users","Document access entitlements","Usage analytics","Pipeline observability","Simple text document ingestion","Maximum 1 data integration","Query reformulation and decomposition","Document retrieval","Response generation with groundedness evaluation","Contextual SaaS deployment"],"commitment":"monthly","description":"Usage-based pricing with included free credits","contactSales":false,"includedLimits":{"free_credits":"$25"}},{"free":false,"name":"Enterprise","summary":"Custom pricing","features":["Unlimited users","User roles and admin permissions","Document access entitlements","SOC2 Type II compliance","HIPAA compliance","SAML/SSO","Role-based access control","Usage analytics","Pipeline observability","Uptime SLA","Complex document processing with charts and images","Unstructured data support","Structured data support","UI-based and continuous data ingestion","Unlimited data integrations","Dedicated support","Onboarding services","Custom development support","Custom data retention","Customer VPC or SaaS deployment"],"description":"Custom pricing with enterprise security and performance features","contactSales":true}],"addOns":[{"name":"Parse - Text Only","components":[{"per":{"qty":1000,"unit":"pages"},"kind":"metered","amount":3,"currency":"USD"}]},{"name":"Parse - Multimodal","components":[{"per":{"qty":1000,"unit":"pages"},"kind":"metered","amount":40,"currency":"USD"}]},{"name":"Rerank v2","components":[{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"million tokens"},"kind":"metered","amount":0.05,"currency":"USD"}]},{"name":"Rerank v2 Mini","components":[{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"million tokens"},"kind":"metered","amount":0.02,"currency":"USD"}]},{"name":"Generate - Input Tokens","components":[{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"million tokens"},"kind":"metered","amount":3,"currency":"USD"}]},{"name":"Generate - Output Tokens","components":[{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"million tokens"},"kind":"metered","amount":15,"currency":"USD"}]}],"summary":"On-demand usage-based pricing from $25 free credits, or Enterprise with custom pricing. Component APIs available separately.","currency":"USD","freeTier":false,"sourceUrl":"https://contextual.ai/pricing","retrievedAt":"2026-08-25T15:36:22.486Z","billingPeriods":["month"]}` | `{"type":"open_source","sourceUrl":"https://github.com/pricing","retrievedAt":"2026-09-14T09:25:31.588Z"}` |
| pricing.free_tier | no | - |
| pricing.model | commercial | open_source |
| pricing.price_level | unknown | free |
| pricing.transparent | yes | - |
| release.cadence_days | - | 7 |
| release.history | - | `[{"url":"https://github.com/HKUDS/LightRAG/releases/tag/v1.5.7","date":"2026-09-02T07:23:55Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.5.7"},{"url":"https://github.com/HKUDS/LightRAG/releases/tag/v1.5.7rc2","date":"2026-08-19T07:01:48Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.5.7rc2"},{"url":"https://github.com/HKUDS/LightRAG/releases/tag/v1.5.7rc1","date":"2026-08-17T06:47:01Z","type":"prerelease","version":"v1.5.7rc1"},{"url":"https://github.com/HKUDS/LightRAG/releases/tag/v1.5.6","date":"2026-08-06T08:29:47Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.5.6"},{"url":"https://github.com/HKUDS/LightRAG/releases/tag/v1.5.5","date":"2026-07-31T12:07:29Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.5.5"},{"url":"https://github.com/HKUDS/LightRAG/releases/tag/v1.5.5rc1","date":"2026-07-13T19:33:37Z","type":"prerelease","version":"v1.5.5rc1"},{"url":"https://github.com/HKUDS/LightRAG/releases/tag/v1.5.4","date":"2026-06-24T10:24:01Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.5.4"},{"url":"https://github.com/HKUDS/LightRAG/releases/tag/v1.5.3","date":"2026-06-14T06:21:33Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.5.3"},{"url":"https://github.com/HKUDS/LightRAG/releases/tag/v1.5.2","date":"2026-06-11T06:14:51Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.5.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/HKUDS/LightRAG/releases/tag/v1.5.1","date":"2026-06-09T08:32:30Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.5.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/HKUDS/LightRAG/releases/tag/v1.5.0","date":"2026-06-03T01:54:09Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.5.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/HKUDS/LightRAG/releases/tag/v1.5.0rc3","date":"2026-05-26T09:27:02Z","type":"prerelease","version":"v1.5.0rc3"},{"url":"https://github.com/HKUDS/LightRAG/releases/tag/v1.4.16","date":"2026-05-07T19:34:01Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.4.16"},{"url":"https://github.com/HKUDS/LightRAG/releases/tag/v1.4.15","date":"2026-04-19T08:40:25Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.4.15"},{"url":"https://github.com/HKUDS/LightRAG/releases/tag/v1.4.14","date":"2026-04-12T20:43:18Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.4.14"},{"url":"https://github.com/HKUDS/LightRAG/releases/tag/v1.4.13","date":"2026-04-02T17:00:24Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.4.13"},{"url":"https://github.com/HKUDS/LightRAG/releases/tag/v1.4.12","date":"2026-03-27T05:52:31Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.4.12"},{"url":"https://github.com/HKUDS/LightRAG/releases/tag/v1.4.11","date":"2026-03-20T08:41:06Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.4.11"},{"url":"https://github.com/HKUDS/LightRAG/releases/tag/v1.4.11rc2","date":"2026-03-13T06:19:07Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.4.11rc2"},{"url":"https://github.com/HKUDS/LightRAG/releases/tag/v1.4.10","date":"2026-02-27T07:39:59Z","type":"stable","version":"v1.4.10"}]` |
| security.disclosure_policy | yes | yes |
| security.gdpr | yes | - |
| security.hipaa | yes | - |
| security.soc2 | yes | - |
| security.trust_center | - | https://github.com/HKUDS/LightRAG/security |
| security.vulnerabilities | - | `{"count":10,"source":"https://advisories.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/advisories?ecosystem=pypi&package_name=lightrag-hku&per_page=100","last_12m":9,"max_severity":"CRITICAL"}` |

## Capabilities (RAG Tools)

| Capability | Contextual AI | LightRAG |
|---|:--:|:--:|
| **Capabilities** |  |  |
| Hybrid retrieval | - | ✓ |
| Reranking integration | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multi hop agentic retrieval | ✓ | ✗ |
| Embedding provider agnostic | ✗ | ✓ |
| LLM provider agnostic | ✗ | ✓ |
| Built in rag eval metrics | ✓ | - |
| Citation attribution | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multimodal rag | ✓ | ✓ |
| Managed ingestion pipeline | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✗ | ✓ |

*Source: vioscaleAI. Generated 2026-10-16T02:36:07.272Z. "-" = undocumented, not absent.*