Local Mode

In this mode, all the files are installed and run from your local host and local file system. There is no need of Hadoop or HDFS. This mode is generally used for testing purpose.

MapReduce Mode

MapReduce mode is where we load or process the data that exists in the Hadoop File System (HDFS) using Apache Pig. In this mode, whenever we execute the Pig Latin statements to process the data, a MapReduce job is invoked in the back-end to perform a particular operation on the data that exists in the HDFS.