# In 112 of 136 categories, the product the models put first changes with the size of the company asking.

IT AI Recommendation Index, October 2026 Edition. Page: https://it-ai-index.com/research/buyer-size/

Every category is asked on behalf of three buyers: a small B2B company, a mid-market B2B company, an enterprise B2B company. Each buyer gets its own standing, computed within its segment and never pooled. This page reads the 136 standings side by side: twenty-four categories have one leader for every buyer, seventy-one change leader once across the three, and forty-one have a different leader for each.

| Category | Small business | Mid-market | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI security | Microsoft Defender for Cloud (33%) | SentinelOne Singularity (11%) | SentinelOne Singularity (9%) |
| AI SOC agents | Dropzone AI (19%) | Dropzone AI (24%) | Dropzone AI (14%) |
| API security | 42Crunch (12%) | Wallarm API Security (10%) | Akamai API Security (33%) |
| ASM | Intruder (26%) | Intruder (49%) | Cortex Xpanse (29%) |
| BAS | Vanta (13%) | Cymulate (24%) | Cymulate (24%) |
| Business continuity | SafetyCulture (46%) | LogicManager (24%) | Fusion Risk Management (27%) |
| Client-side protection | cside (14%) | cside (13%) | cside (17%) |
| Comms archiving | Google Vault (20%) | Smarsh Enterprise Archive (20%) | Proofpoint Enterprise Archive (27%) |
| Compliance automation | Vanta (35%) | Drata (34%) | Vanta (37%) |
| Cyber risk quant | FairCRQ (9%) | CyberSaint CyberStrong (25%) | SAFE Security (56%) |
| DLP | Microsoft Purview DLP (35%) | Microsoft Purview DLP (46%) | Microsoft Purview DLP (57%) |
| DSPM | Microsoft Purview (36%) | Microsoft Purview (18%) | Varonis Data Security Platform (22%) |
| Deception | Thinkst Canary (30%) | Thinkst Canary (37%) | Acalvio ShadowPlex (47%) |
| DRP | Guardz (28%) | UpGuard BreachSight (22%) | ZeroFox (29%) |
| Email security | Microsoft Defender for Office 365 (27%) | Microsoft Defender for Office 365 (32%) | Proofpoint Email Protection (48%) |
| EDR | Microsoft Defender for Cloud (47%) | Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (30%) | CrowdStrike Falcon Insight (52%) |
| Enterprise browsers | Google Password Manager (33%) | Google Password Manager (26%) | Island Enterprise Browser (35%) |
| XDR | Microsoft Defender XDR (25%) | Microsoft Defender XDR (40%) | Microsoft Defender XDR (44%) |
| GRC | Vanta (30%) | Hyperproof (19%) | MetricStream (24%) |
| Insider risk | Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management (25%) | Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management (22%) | Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management (44%) |
| MDR | Huntress Managed EDR (78%) | Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response (37%) | CrowdStrike Falcon Complete (35%) |
| NDR | Security Onion (15%) | ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer (21%) | Vectra AI (17%) |
| OT/IoT security | Microsoft Defender for IoT (40%) | Microsoft Defender for IoT (21%) | Claroty xDome (35%) |
| PTaaS | Cobalt (17%) | Cobalt (45%) | NetSPI (46%) |
| SSPM | Nudge Security (20%) | Wing Security (30%) | AppOmni (40%) |
| Awareness training | KnowBe4 (20%) | KnowBe4 (45%) | KnowBe4 (74%) |
| SIEM | Blumira (34%) | Microsoft Sentinel (38%) | Microsoft Sentinel (41%) |
| SOAR | Tines (44%) | Tines (41%) | Cortex XSOAR (41%) |
| TPRM | UpGuard (39%) | UpGuard (55%) | ProcessUnity (19%) |
| Threat intel | MISP (18%) | MISP (12%) | Recorded Future Intelligence Cloud (73%) |
| Vuln management | Intruder (45%) | Rapid7 InsightVM (30%) | Qualys VMDR (32%) |
| AI IT agents | Freshdesk (18%) | Freshservice (9%) | ServiceNow Now Assist (48%) |
| AIOps | Atera (19%) | New Relic (17%) | Dynatrace (39%) |
| APM | New Relic (53%) | New Relic (46%) | Dynatrace (47%) |
| Business phones | Nextiva (31%) | RingCentral (29%) | RingCentral (38%) |
| DCIM | NetBox (29%) | Sunbird DCIM (27%) | Schneider Electric EcoStruxure IT (18%) |
| DEX | Uniswap (14%) | ControlUp (13%) | Nexthink Infinity (44%) |
| Endpoint protection | Microsoft Defender for Cloud (50%) | Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (22%) | Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (44%) |
| EA tools | Archi (20%) | SAP LeanIX (25%) | SAP LeanIX (43%) |
| Incidents | incident.io (35%) | incident.io (32%) | PagerDuty (57%) |
| Infra monitoring | Site24x7 (16%) | Datadog (28%) | Datadog (41%) |
| ITAM | Snipe-IT (51%) | Freshservice (31%) | ServiceNow IT Asset Management (56%) |
| IT documentation | Notion (30%) | Hudu (17%) | Confluence (21%) |
| IT financial mgmt | QuickBooks Online (14%) | Nicus ITFM Platform (9%) | IBM Apptio (29%) |
| ITSM | Freshservice (47%) | Freshservice (58%) | ServiceNow ITSM (65%) |
| Logs | Better Stack (32%) | Datadog Log Management (28%) | Splunk (46%) |
| M365 management | Microsoft 365 Admin Center (25%) | CoreView (20%) | CoreView (31%) |
| Observability | Grafana (39%) | Grafana (27%) | Datadog (37%) |
| Patching | Action1 (55%) | ManageEngine Patch Manager Plus (29%) | Microsoft Intune (17%) |
| Process mining | Microsoft Power Automate (25%) | Apromore (19%) | Celonis Process Intelligence Platform (67%) |
| RMM | Atera (45%) | NinjaOne (47%) | NinjaOne (48%) |
| Remote support | Zoho Assist (38%) | Splashtop Remote Support (23%) | Splashtop Remote Support (27%) |
| RPA | Microsoft Power Automate (72%) | Microsoft Power Automate (51%) | UiPath (58%) |
| SaaS management | Substly (19%) | Torii (34%) | Zylo (59%) |
| Telemetry pipelines | OpenTelemetry Collector (44%) | OpenTelemetry Collector (37%) | Cribl Stream (44%) |
| UEM | Microsoft Intune (28%) | Microsoft Intune (39%) | Microsoft Intune (85%) |
| Video conferencing | Zoom Workplace (48%) | Zoom Workplace (42%) | Microsoft (57%) |
| Virtual desktops | V2 Cloud (26%) | Azure Virtual Desktop (22%) | Citrix DaaS (28%) |
| Uptime monitoring | UptimeRobot (45%) | UptimeRobot (24%) | Dynatrace (24%) |
| Backup and DR | Acronis Cyber Protect (23%) | Veeam Data Platform (38%) | Veeam Data Platform (32%) |
| FinOps | Vantage (41%) | Vantage (45%) | IBM Apptio Cloudability (49%) |
| Cloud hosting | DigitalOcean Droplets (34%) | Amazon Web Services (32%) | Amazon Web Services (42%) |
| CSPM | Microsoft Defender for Cloud (21%) | Wiz (37%) | Wiz (54%) |
| CNAPP | Aikido Security (29%) | Wiz (37%) | Wiz (48%) |
| Colocation | InterServer (24%) | TierPoint (22%) | Equinix (59%) |
| Container security | Trivy (22%) | Trivy (22%) | Prisma Cloud (25%) |
| Enterprise storage | Dell PowerStore (11%) | Dell PowerStore (16%) | Pure Storage FlashArray (42%) |
| IaC | Terraform (55%) | Terraform (57%) | Terraform (53%) |
| Managed Kubernetes | DigitalOcean Kubernetes (55%) | Google Kubernetes Engine (43%) | Google Kubernetes Engine (31%) |
| Object storage | Backblaze B2 (47%) | Backblaze B2 (46%) | Amazon S3 (44%) |
| Server virtualization | Proxmox VE (64%) | Proxmox VE (42%) | Nutanix AHV (37%) |
| AI coding | GitHub Copilot (63%) | GitHub Copilot (75%) | GitHub Copilot (82%) |
| API gateways | Kong Gateway (34%) | Kong Gateway (53%) | Apigee (38%) |
| API management | Kong Gateway (28%) | Kong Gateway (37%) | Apigee (48%) |
| ASPM | Aikido Security (71%) | Aikido Security (37%) | ArmorCode (20%) |
| App shielding | Appdome (23%) | Appdome (33%) | Appdome (33%) |
| Artifact registries | GitHub Packages (33%) | JFrog Artifactory (14%) | JFrog Artifactory (40%) |
| CI/CD | GitHub Actions (75%) | GitHub Actions (68%) | GitLab CI/CD (42%) |
| CPaaS | Twilio (37%) | Twilio (43%) | Twilio (44%) |
| DAST | OWASP ZAP (43%) | OWASP ZAP (29%) | Invicti (62%) |
| Error monitoring | Sentry (69%) | Sentry (76%) | Sentry (75%) |
| Feature flags | Flagsmith (32%) | Flagsmith (25%) | LaunchDarkly (63%) |
| Developer portals | Port (45%) | Port (53%) | Port (25%) |
| Secure code training | SecureFlag (26%) | SecureFlag (26%) | Secure Code Warrior (33%) |
| SCA | Snyk Open Source (39%) | Trivy (31%) | Black Duck (23%) |
| Source control | GitHub (72%) | GitHub (70%) | GitHub (54%) |
| SAST | Semgrep (53%) | Semgrep (36%) | Checkmarx One (54%) |
| AI governance | Strac (31%) | Credo AI (18%) | IBM watsonx.governance (22%) |
| Data catalogs | OpenMetadata (18%) | Atlan (44%) | Collibra (41%) |
| Data masking | IRI FieldShield (22%) | DATPROF (17%) | Delphix (27%) |
| Data observability | Metaplane (31%) | Metaplane (31%) | Monte Carlo (41%) |
| Data virtualization | Starburst Galaxy (17%) | Denodo (28%) | Denodo (86%) |
| Data warehouses | Google BigQuery (63%) | Snowflake (49%) | Snowflake (62%) |
| EDI | Orderful (35%) | TrueCommerce EDI (32%) | Cleo Integration Cloud (40%) |
| Embedded analytics | Metabase (46%) | Metabase (22%) | GoodData (16%) |
| Enterprise AI | ChatGPT (47%) | ChatGPT (25%) | Microsoft 365 Copilot (40%) |
| ETL | Airbyte (36%) | Fivetran (40%) | Fivetran (49%) |
| Document processing | Docsumo (22%) | Nanonets (32%) | ABBYY Vantage (43%) |
| LLM gateways | LiteLLM (31%) | LiteLLM (31%) | Portkey (26%) |
| MFT | Files.com (57%) | Files.com (43%) | IBM Sterling Secure File Transfer (16%) |
| Managed databases | Amazon RDS (24%) | Amazon RDS (45%) | Amazon Aurora (26%) |
| Master data | Profisee MDM (23%) | Profisee MDM (41%) | Informatica MDM (43%) |
| ML platforms | Google Vertex AI (19%) | Azure Machine Learning (21%) | Databricks Mosaic AI (44%) |
| NoSQL | MongoDB (69%) | MongoDB (74%) | MongoDB (56%) |
| Proxy and web data | Decodo (40%) | Decodo (41%) | Oxylabs (42%) |
| Streaming | Confluent Cloud (21%) | Confluent Cloud (39%) | Confluent Cloud (61%) |
| Time series DBs | TimescaleDB (57%) | TimescaleDB (63%) | TimescaleDB (47%) |
| Vector databases | pgvector (49%) | pgvector (35%) | Pinecone (59%) |
| Orchestration | Make (24%) | Prefect (21%) | Apache Airflow (26%) |
| Password managers | Bitwarden (49%) | 1Password (47%) | 1Password (44%) |
| Certificate management | Sectigo Certificate Manager (12%) | Sectigo Certificate Manager (27%) | Keyfactor Command (28%) |
| CIAM | Clerk (30%) | Frontegg (21%) | Auth0 (47%) |
| IGA | Microsoft Entra ID Governance (18%) | Microsoft Entra ID Governance (25%) | SailPoint Identity Security Cloud (54%) |
| ITDR | Huntress Managed ITDR (84%) | Huntress Managed ITDR (51%) | Microsoft Defender for Identity (38%) |
| Identity verification | Veriff (23%) | Persona (21%) | Sumsub (17%) |
| MFA | Cisco Duo (40%) | Cisco Duo (47%) | Microsoft Entra ID (41%) |
| NHI management | JumpCloud (20%) | JumpCloud (14%) | CyberArk Identity Security Platform (20%) |
| PAM | ManageEngine PAM360 (33%) | Delinea Secret Server (37%) | CyberArk Privileged Access Manager (56%) |
| Secrets | Doppler (39%) | HashiCorp Vault (31%) | HashiCorp Vault (61%) |
| Workforce identity | JumpCloud (48%) | Microsoft Entra ID (46%) | Microsoft Entra ID (49%) |
| Bot management | Cloudflare Bot Management (60%) | Cloudflare Bot Management (56%) | Cloudflare Bot Management (37%) |
| CDN | Cloudflare (85%) | Cloudflare (68%) | Cloudflare (46%) |
| Data center networking | Arista Networks (11%) | Arista Networks (27%) | Arista Networks (34%) |
| DDI and IPAM | SolarWinds IP Address Manager (18%) | BlueCat Micetro (15%) | Infoblox (24%) |
| DDoS | Cloudflare (100%) | Cloudflare (82%) | Cloudflare (57%) |
| DNS filtering | DNSFilter (51%) | DNSFilter (59%) | Cisco Umbrella (43%) |
| Load balancers | HAProxy (20%) | HAProxy (29%) | F5 BIG-IP (40%) |
| Managed DNS | Cloudflare DNS (78%) | Cloudflare DNS (84%) | Cloudflare DNS (60%) |
| Microsegmentation | Zero Networks Segment (16%) | ColorTokens Xshield (25%) | Illumio Segmentation (56%) |
| NAC | Portnox Cloud (45%) | Portnox Cloud (35%) | Cisco Identity Services Engine (31%) |
| Network monitoring | Paessler PRTG Network Monitor (40%) | Auvik (26%) | SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (16%) |
| Firewalls | Fortinet FortiGate (51%) | Fortinet FortiGate (73%) | Fortinet FortiGate (37%) |
| SASE | Cloudflare One (69%) | Cato Networks (35%) | Palo Alto Networks Prisma SASE (26%) |
| SD-WAN | Cisco Meraki SD-WAN (42%) | Fortinet Secure SD-WAN (50%) | Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN (50%) |
| WAF | Cloudflare WAF (79%) | Cloudflare WAF (69%) | Cloudflare WAF (59%) |
| ZTNA | Cloudflare One (58%) | Twingate (39%) | Zscaler Private Access (53%) |

24 categories with one leader for every buyer; 71 where the leader changes once; 41 with a different leader for each buyer.

Published under CC BY 4.0. The output is the models' output; nothing here is a recommendation by the index.