RAG Pipeline vs Agentic RAG

Classic RAG vs agentic RAG — same retrieval stack, different orchestration. When to start simple, when to add agency, and how to measure both.

Classic RAG Pipeline

Query → retrieve → generate

Agentic RAG

Agent loop — plan, act, observe

When To Use Which

FAQ, catalog, single-hop → RAG

Key Tradeoffs

Both need citations, guardrails & eval gates