morphik-core vs PixelRAG
Multimodal retrieval engine for visually rich documents: ingestion, visual-first search over charts, tables and diagrams, knowledge graphs and cache-augmented generation — one engine, not a pipeline. — versus — Berkeley's visual RAG: render pages and PDFs to screenshot tiles and retrieve with a VLM embedder — tables, charts and layout survive. pixelshot CLI plus a hosted 8.28M-page Wikipedia index.
Both bet on visual retrieval for documents: PixelRAG is Berkeley's research recipe (screenshot tiles + VLM embedder); Morphik Core is the production engine with storage, KG and an API around the same idea.
| morphik-core | PixelRAG | |
|---|---|---|
| Stars | 3.7k | 9.3k |
| Forks | 322 | 788 |
| Language | Python | Python |
| License | NOASSERTION | Apache-2.0 |
| Last activity | 17 days ago | 9 days ago |
| Topics | rag | rag, vision |
| Curated connections | 2 | 3 |
morphik-core — the curator's take
Built on the observation that RAG dies on visual documents — charts become word soup — so retrieval is visual-first end to end, and the whole extract-embed-store-retrieve chain is one system instead of duct tape. When NOT: license is NOASSERTION, and the company has pivoted to nursing-home back-office AI with Core as the engine underneath — gauge maintenance commitment before betting your stack; for text-only corpora a plain vector store is simpler and cheaper.
PixelRAG — the curator's take
The paper's claim — screenshots beat parsed text for RAG — matters when your answers live in visual structure: tables, charts, infographics, layout-heavy PDFs that text chunkers flatten into noise. Zero-setup on-ramp is real: a hosted 8.28M-page Wikipedia index with no API key, and the pixelbrowse Claude Code plugin gives the agent screenshot-based page reading (pixelshot via Playwright/CDP, no MCP server). NOT a drop-in for text RAG stacks: your reader must be a VLM, tile indexes cost more storage/compute than text embeddings, and retrieval quality rides on their LoRA-tuned Qwen3-VL-Embedding model. Research codebase — expect pipeline assembly, not a product.