Every category where a model named Amazon EKS for a mid-market B2B company. Share is first choices across the direct, paraphrase, budget and scale prompts; rank is within every product named in that category.

Category	Function	Share	Rank	Negative rate	Labels	Quadrant
Managed Kubernetes platforms	Cloud and infrastructure	6%	6 of 48	31%	58	criticized challenger

Movement

This is the first edition on this tier, so no move can be computed for Amazon EKS yet. From the next edition this section shows, per buyer segment, whether its share moved by more than the measured noise floor.

By model

How each model treated Amazon EKS across every prompt where it was named for a mid-market B2B company. Twelve models, six prompts per category.

Model	First choice	Alternative	Mention	Negative	Labels
Claude Haiku 4.5	0	1	3	1	5
GPT-5.4 mini	1	2	2	0	5
Gemini 3.5 Flash	1	3	0	2	6
Perplexity Sonar	0	3	0	1	4
Grok 4.1 Fast	0	3	0	3	6
Mistral Small	0	1	1	0	2
DeepSeek V4 Flash	0	4	0	2	6
Llama 4 Maverick	0	0	2	0	2
Qwen 3.7 Flash	1	2	0	3	6
Kimi K2	1	2	0	3	6
GLM 4.7 FlashX	0	2	1	3	6
MiniMax M2.5	0	4	0	0	4

By framing

Which of the six questions produced the naming. By model says how often; this says asked what. The first-choice count on the right carries the marks of the models that produced it.

FramingLabels by classFirst choices

Direct30 labels5

Paraphrase31 labels8

Comparative33 labels4not counted in share

Budget-constrained26 labelsNone

Scale-constrained26 labels5

Negative29 labels4not counted in share

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative175 labels in all, every segment counted; 18 of the 26 first choices count toward share, since the comparative and negative framings do not. The bar is one segment per label class, to scale within the framing.

What the models said for it

Verbatim evidence the judge attached to positive labels.

“Stick to GKE (Google) or EKS (AWS). GKE is widely considered the easiest to use (lowest ops burden). EKS has the largest talent pool.” Qwen 3.7 Flash · Managed Kubernetes · scale prompt · first choice

“If 90% of your current stack is on AWS, Amazon EKS (paired with Karpenter for scaling) is your path of least resistance.” Gemini 3.5 Flash · Managed Kubernetes · scale prompt · first choice

“GKE (best UX) or EKS (best ecosystem)” Kimi K2 · Managed Kubernetes · negative prompt · first choice

“Amazon EKS is the safest default choice” GPT-5.4 mini · Managed Kubernetes · direct prompt · first choice

And against it

Verbatim evidence attached to negative labels. A warning on a product with few labels is a warning; on a product with many, it is one voice among them.

“EKS is frequently described as "the worst managed Kubernetes provider out of all the major players"... avoid hyperscaler-only solutions like EKS” GLM 4.7 FlashX · Managed Kubernetes · negative prompt · hard negative

“Avoid for small teams, startups, or solo developers who lack dedicated platform engineering resources.” Gemini 3.5 Flash · Managed Kubernetes · negative prompt · hard negative

“Avoid if: Startups/small teams without AWS/K8s experts—start simpler elsewhere.” Grok 4.1 Fast · Managed Kubernetes · negative prompt · hard negative

“Avoid EKS/AKS/GKE if you need multi-cloud portability” Perplexity Sonar · Managed Kubernetes · negative prompt · hard negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as Amazon EKS, over the 175 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and Amazon EKS was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

Google Kubernetes Engine169 of 17552Not in the top three

Azure Kubernetes Service166 of 17511Not in the top three

DigitalOcean Kubernetes90 of 17540Not in the top three

Red Hat OpenShift76 of 1759Not in the top three

Rancher56 of 1751Not in the top three

Linode Kubernetes Engine51 of 17510Not in the top three

Civo37 of 1757Not in the top three

VMware Tanzu31 of 1751Not in the top three

Vultr Kubernetes Engine22 of 1750Not in the top three

Scaleway Kapsule17 of 1751Not in the top three

A head-to-head page exists where both products are in a category's top three. The other rows are the same fact without a page behind them, so they link to the product instead.

What carried it into the answer

The sites and pages cited by the answers that named Amazon EKS. A fact about retrieval, not a lever on the model.

Citations exist only for the models that return a source list, four of the twelve in this edition, so these counts come from 139 of the 175 answers that named Amazon EKS and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

spot.rackspace.com96

medium.com87

blog.railway.com70

northflank.com66

portainer.io60

dev.to56

lucaberton.com45

digitalocean.com41

mirantis.com35

reddit.com33

589 of the 589 domain citations in answers naming Amazon EKS came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

spot.rackspace.com/blog/kubernetes-managed-services95

blog.railway.com/p/best-managed-kubernetes-hosting-202669

medium.com/@BuildShift/15-managed-kubernetes-platforms-ranked-for-developers-2025-9c82acad58

medium.com/@devlinktips/15-managed-kubernetes-platforms-ranked-for-developers-2025-9c82aca47

northflank.com/blog/best-managed-kubernetes-platforms45

medium.com/@elliotgraebert/comparing-the-top-eight-managed-kubernetes-providers-2ae396623944

dev.to/dev_tips/comparing-the-top-10-managed-kubernetes-providers-2025-edition-12h843

northflank.com/blog/top-managed-kubernetes-hosting-platforms43

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Names read as Amazon EKS

What the judge wrote, as written, with how often. The vendor table decides that these count as Amazon EKS; a claim can dispute any of them.

AWS EKS 14EKS 9Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) 5Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) 3AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) 2EKS (AWS) 2AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) 1Amazon EKS (with EKS Auto Mode or Karpenter) 1Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) 1

Is this your product?

Claim this page

Claiming is free and changes nothing in the data. A claimed page shows a verified contact who is told when each edition publishes and when Amazon EKS's standing changes by more than the noise floor; the right to propose corrections to the vendor table, meaning names the judge wrote that should or should not read as Amazon EKS, applied by version and listed in the change log; and a one-line description supplied by the vendor and marked as such.

It does not get any change to labels, shares or verdicts, any preview, or any say over which quotes appear. A verification link goes to your work email; an address at amazon.com is approved on the spot, any other address is reviewed by hand.

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