IT AI Index

Index › Vendors › AWS CloudFormation / CDK · September 2026 Edition

AWS · 1 category · Named, not ranked

AWS CloudFormation / CDK

7Judge labels

0First choices

3Negative labels

5 of 12Models named it

1Category

September 2026 Edition. Every number here is derived from the raw labels under vendor table vv2026-09.2, every buyer segment counted.

Standing

3 labels, too few to rank

A product needs 10 labels in a category before a share or quadrant is stated. AWS CloudFormation / CDK was named 3 times in IaC, where Terraform led with 46%. The labels and the evidence are below, counted exactly.

By buyer segmentRead the same way at every buyer size.

Small business20 of 44

under the label threshold

Mid-market38 of 46

under the label threshold

Enterprise24 of 64

under the label threshold

In iac · each standing computed within its segment · bars are 0 to 100 · the accent bar is the product's own best reading

Standing by category

Every category where a model named AWS CloudFormation / CDK 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
Infrastructure as code	Cloud and infrastructure	0%	38 of 46	67%	3	under 10 labels · led by Terraform at 46%

Movement

This is the first edition on this tier, so no move can be computed for AWS CloudFormation / CDK 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 AWS CloudFormation / CDK across every prompt where it was named for a mid-market B2B company. Twelve models, six prompts per category.

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

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

Direct1 labelNone

Paraphrase1 labelNone

Comparative3 labelsNone

Budget-constrained1 labelNone

Scale-constrained0 labelsNone

Negative1 labelNone

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative7 labels in all, every segment counted; 0 of the 0 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.

“Single cloud? Go native (CloudFormation for AWS—zero extra cost, day-0 support)” Grok 4.1 Fast · IaC · direct prompt · alternative

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.

“These tools are tightly coupled to their respective providers... high risk of "Vendor Lock-in."” Qwen 3.7 Flash · IaC · negative prompt · soft negative

“Limitation: Vendor lock-in; not designed for multi-cloud usage.” Qwen 3.7 Flash · IaC · comparative prompt · soft negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as AWS CloudFormation / CDK, over the 7 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and AWS CloudFormation / CDK was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

Pulumi7 of 70Not in the top three

OpenTofu6 of 73Not in the top three

Terraform6 of 73Not in the top three

Ansible5 of 70Not in the top three

Crossplane3 of 70Not in the top three

Spacelift2 of 71Not in the top three

Azure ARM/Bicep2 of 70Not in the top three

Terragrunt2 of 70Not in the top three

Terraform/OpenTofu1 of 71Not in the top three

Argo CD1 of 70Not 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 AWS CloudFormation / CDK. 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 7 of the 7 answers that named AWS CloudFormation / CDK and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

apiiro.com7

cortex.io5

checkthat.ai4

firefly.ai4

guideflow.com3

pulumi.com3

claranet.com2

cloudaqube.com2

computingforgeeks.com2

devopsplatforms.com2

Thirty-four of the thirty-four domain citations in answers naming AWS CloudFormation / CDK came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

apiiro.com/blog/best-iac-tools7

cortex.io/post/best-infrastructure-as-code-iac-tools5

checkthat.ai/answers/what-are-the-best-infrastructure-as-code-tools4

firefly.ai/academy/pulumi-vs-terraform-vs-cloudformation-which-iac-tool-is-best-for-your-i3

guideflow.com/blog/infrastructure-as-code-tools3

pulumi.com/blog/infrastructure-as-code-tools3

cloudaqube.com/blog/terraform-vs-cloudformation-vs-pulumi2

computingforgeeks.com/best-infrastructure-as-code-iac-cloud-automation-tools2

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Names read as AWS CloudFormation / CDK

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

AWS CloudFormation/CDK 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 AWS CloudFormation / CDK'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 AWS CloudFormation / CDK, 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 awscloud.com is approved on the spot, any other address is reviewed by hand.

Your name and company appear on the claimed page, or the company alone if you ask below. A title and a LinkedIn address appear there too if you give them, and are left off if you do not. Your email address is never published.