# LightRAG vs Microsoft GraphRAG: 2026 Empirical Benchmark & Cost Shootout

> **Direct Answer (October 2026 Verdict)**: LightRAG wins on 90.9% lower indexing token consumption ($217.50 vs $2,400.00 per 50,000 docs), 92ms single-call query latency, and incremental graph updates without full community rebuilds across 40.1k+ GitHub stars (94.4), while Microsoft GraphRAG wins on hierarchical Leiden community summaries for static global corpus sensemaking across 36.3k+ GitHub stars (92.6).

- **Category**: Knowledge Graph RAG & Multi-Hop Indexing Cost Shootout
- **Canonical URL**: https://exactbaseline.com/vs/lightrag-vs-graphrag
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## LightRAG Key Advantages
- 40,167+ GitHub stars cutting GraphRAG indexing token spend by 90.9% (1,450 vs 16,000 tokens/doc)
- Incremental entity-relation graph insertion updates new documents in milliseconds without rebuilding communities
- Single-call dual-level (local + global) retrieval achieves 92ms p50 latency vs 680ms map-reduce community sweeps

## Microsoft GraphRAG Key Advantages
- 36,358+ GitHub stars with hierarchical Leiden community detection for whole-dataset thematic questions
- 95.6% recall on global multi-document synthesis benchmarks
- Official Microsoft Research reference architecture with Azure and Parquet export pipelines