Every category where a model named Apache Airflow 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
Workflow orchestration	Data platform	16%	3 of 86	32%	56	criticized challenger
ETL and ELT	Data platform	0%	11 of 66	0%	27	accepted challenger

Movement

This is the first edition on this tier, so no move can be computed for Apache Airflow 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 Apache Airflow 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	2	2	3	1	8
GPT-5.4 mini	1	2	1	2	6
Gemini 3.5 Flash	0	1	3	4	8
Perplexity Sonar	1	2	1	1	5
Grok 4.1 Fast	1	1	4	4	10
Mistral Small	1	1	3	1	6
DeepSeek V4 Flash	2	6	0	1	9
Llama 4 Maverick	0	1	3	0	4
Qwen 3.7 Flash	0	2	4	2	8
Kimi K2	0	3	1	1	5
GLM 4.7 FlashX	2	3	2	0	7
MiniMax M2.5	1	3	2	1	7

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

Direct24 labels5

Paraphrase43 labels13

Comparative36 labels6not counted in share

Budget-constrained35 labels6

Scale-constrained24 labelsNone

Negative40 labelsNone

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative202 labels in all, every segment counted; 24 of the 30 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.

“Pick Airflow if you need the battle-tested standard with the largest integration ecosystem, especially for scheduled batch data pipelines.” DeepSeek V4 Flash · Orchestration · comparative prompt · first choice

“Apache Airflow - The longstanding leader (open-source, Apache 2.0), used by massive enterprises for batch ETL/data pipelines.” Grok 4.1 Fast · Orchestration · comparative prompt · first choice

“If you have engineering resources, Apache Airflow remains the industry standard for free orchestration.” Claude Haiku 4.5 · Orchestration · budget prompt · first choice

“If you're already using Airflow or need maximum reliability and ecosystem support, stick with Airflow.” Mistral Small · Orchestration · paraphrase 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.

“Airflow is often a budget trap for small companies.” Gemini 3.5 Flash · Orchestration · budget prompt · hard negative

“Be cautious if you need: Very low-latency / event-driven orchestration... great for batch pipelines; be careful if you want lightweight, event-native” GPT-5.4 mini · Orchestration · negative prompt · soft negative

“infamous for production headaches—DAG parsing failures, scheduler bottlenecks... Avoid if you want quick iteration; great for mature teams” Grok 4.1 Fast · Orchestration · negative prompt · soft negative

“despite being an industry standard, it has significant pain points: Steep learning curve... Deployment complexity” MiniMax M2.5 · Orchestration · negative prompt · soft negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as Apache Airflow, over the 201 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and Apache Airflow was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

Prefect129 of 20129Compare →

Dagster118 of 20114Compare →

Temporal77 of 2017Not in the top three

Zapier69 of 20110Not in the top three

n8n67 of 20115Not in the top three

Make54 of 20114Not in the top three

Camunda47 of 2014Not in the top three

Airbyte45 of 20112Not in the top three

Fivetran43 of 20116Not in the top three

Argo Workflows38 of 2010Not 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 Apache Airflow. 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 151 of the 201 answers that named Apache Airflow and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

reddit.com58

zapier.com58

elementum.ai55

teamwork.com44

getorchestra.io43

wrike.com43

devopsschool.com41

enate.io40

integrate.io30

thedigitalprojectmanager.com28

440 of the 440 domain citations in answers naming Apache Airflow came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

elementum.ai/blog/best-workflow-orchestration-tools55

zapier.com/blog/workflow-orchestration-tools52

teamwork.com/blog/workflow-orchestration-tools44

wrike.com/workflow-guide/workflow-orchestration-tools43

enate.io/blog/workflow-orchestration-tools39

devopsschool.com/blog/top-10-workflow-orchestration-tools-features-pros-cons-comparison32

thedigitalprojectmanager.com/tools/workflow-orchestration-tools26

cognism.com/blog/data-orchestration-tools25

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Names read as Apache Airflow

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

Airflow 15Managed Apache Airflow 1n8n/Airflow 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 Apache Airflow'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 Apache Airflow, 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 apache.io is approved on the spot, any other address is reviewed by hand.

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