Every category where a model named Azure Resource Manager templates 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%	11 of 46	21%	14	accepted challenger

Movement

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

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

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

Paraphrase6 labelsNone

Comparative7 labelsNone

Budget-constrained5 labelsNone

Scale-constrained2 labelsNone

Negative16 labelsNone

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative37 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.

“native tools (CloudFormation or ARM) are excellent for governance and integration” Mistral Small · IaC · paraphrase prompt · alternative

“ARM Templates | Free (for Azure resources) | Azure-only deployments” MiniMax M2.5 · IaC · budget prompt · alternative

“Best for: Azure-only environments” MiniMax M2.5 · IaC · comparative prompt · alternative

“opt for Azure Bicep or ARM templates” Llama 4 Maverick · IaC · negative 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.

“If you are looking for a tool for on-premises environments or multiple cloud providers, this isn't it” Claude Haiku 4.5 · IaC · negative prompt · hard negative

“Writing raw CloudFormation or ARM templates by hand is notoriously painful.” Gemini 3.5 Flash · IaC · negative prompt · soft negative

“Similar lock-in concerns. Prefer multi-cloud tools” Kimi K2 · IaC · negative prompt · soft negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as Azure Resource Manager templates, over the 37 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and Azure Resource Manager templates was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

Terraform37 of 3720Not in the top three

AWS CloudFormation34 of 370Not in the top three

Pulumi30 of 375Not in the top three

Ansible23 of 376Not in the top three

OpenTofu20 of 3710Not in the top three

Chef16 of 370Not in the top three

Puppet16 of 370Not in the top three

AWS CDK15 of 371Not in the top three

Azure Bicep15 of 370Not in the top three

Crossplane14 of 371Not 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 Azure Resource Manager templates. 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 24 of the 37 answers that named Azure Resource Manager templates and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

pulumi.com13

apiiro.com11

guideflow.com11

reddit.com9

spacelift.io9

claranet.com8

dev.to8

stackgen.com6

cortex.io5

docs.aws.amazon.com5

Eighty-five of the eighty-five domain citations in answers naming Azure Resource Manager templates came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

pulumi.com/blog/infrastructure-as-code-tools13

apiiro.com/blog/best-iac-tools11

guideflow.com/blog/infrastructure-as-code-tools11

claranet.com/uk/blog/right-and-wrong-approach-to-infrastructure-code8

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

spacelift.io/blog/infrastructure-as-code-tools5

technologymatch.com/blog/terraform-ansible-puppet-or-chef-which-tool-is-right-for-it-leade5

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

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Names read as Azure Resource Manager templates

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

ARM 2ARM templates 2Azure ARM 2Azure Resource Manager (ARM) 2Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Templates 2ARM Templates 1ARM/Bicep 1Azure ARM Templates 1Azure Resource Manager (ARM) / Azure Bicep 1

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