Index › Products › Caddy · October 2026 Edition

2 categories · Named, not ranked

Caddy

17Judge labels

1First choices

0Negative labels

11 / 14Models named it

2Categories

October 2026 Edition. Every number here is derived from the raw labels under vendor table v2026-10.8, 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. Caddy was named 3 times in Load balancers and 1 other category, where HAProxy led with 29%. The labels and the evidence are below, counted exactly.

By buyer segmentRead the same way at every buyer size.

Small business19 of 104

under the label threshold

Mid-market30 of 94

under the label threshold

Enterprisenot named

No model named it for this buyer.

In load balancers · 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 Caddy 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	Since September 2026
Load balancers	Network and edge	0%	30 of 94	0%	2	under 10 labels · led by HAProxy at 29%
Certificate lifecycle management	Identity and access	0%	73 of 104	0%	1	under 10 labels · led by Sectigo Certificate Manager at 27%

Movement

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

By model

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

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Model	Alternative	Mention	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	0	0	0
Mistral Small	0	0	0
DeepSeek V4 Flash	1	1	2
Llama 4 Maverick	0	0	0
Qwen 3.7 Flash	1	0	1
Kimi K2	0	0	0
GLM 4.7 FlashX	0	0	0
MiniMax M2.5	0	0	0
GPT-6 Luna	0	0	0
Muse Glimmer 30B	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

Direct0 labelsNone

Paraphrase2 labelsNone

Comparative8 labels2not counted in share

Budget-constrained5 labels1

Scale-constrained0 labelsNone

Negative2 labelsNone

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative17 labels in all, every segment counted; 1 of the 3 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.

“Best For: Small teams or individuals who want a "set-it-and-forget-it" solution” Qwen 3.7 Flash · Load balancers · budget prompt · alternative

“Easiest config of all, automatic HTTPS” DeepSeek V4 Flash · Load balancers · budget 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.

No model argued against it.

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as Caddy, over the 17 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and Caddy was named but was not.

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ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

NGINX14 of 173Not among the top eight

HAProxy11 of 173Not among the top eight

Traefik11 of 171Not among the top eight

DigitalOcean Load Balancers5 of 171Not among the top eight

Cloudflare Load Balancing4 of 172Not among the top eight

Amazon API Gateway3 of 171Not among the top eight

AWS ALB3 of 170Not among the top eight

Google Cloud Load Balancing3 of 170Not among the top eight

Kemp LoadMaster3 of 170Not among the top eight

Traefik Hub2 of 172Not among the top eight

A head-to-head page exists where both products are among a category's top eight. 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 Caddy. A fact about retrieval, not a lever on the model.

Citations exist only for the models that return a source list, five of the fourteen in this edition, so these counts come from 17 of the 17 answers that named Caddy and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

g2.com9

dev.to8

contabo.com7

devopsschool.com7

geekflare.com7

guideflow.com6

xurrent.com6

nomios.com5

skudonet.com5

cloudflare.com4

No domain is on file for Caddy, so its own site is not marked.

Pages cited

contabo.com/blog/best-open-source-load-balancers7

xurrent.com/blog/top-load-balancers6

geekflare.com/software/best-open-source-load-balancer5

nomios.com/news-blog/best-load-balancers-20245

skudonet.com/blog/top-5-free-load-balancers-for-businesses5

dev.to/shinagawa-web/nginx-caddy-traefik-or-haproxy-how-to-pick-the-right-reverse-proxy-fo4

digitalocean.com/products/load-balancers4

hostim.dev/learn/proxies/haproxy-alternatives4

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Search and answers

Where Caddy stands in Google search beside where it stands in the models' answers.

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In search

Google, US estimates

Searches for its name, Google: 49,500 a month (“caddy”)
AI search demand for its name, est.: 32,922 a month
Its own site: No site of its own on file, so no site figures

In answers

This edition

Share of first choices

rank 30 of 94 in load balancers

Segment leader

29%

HAProxy

First choices: 1 across its categories
Named in: 17 answers
Its own site cited: No site on file to match

Search figures are US estimates from DataForSEO, read October 5, 2026; AI search demand is its modeled, directional estimate, not a count of queries to any assistant. The answers are this edition's. Two measurements side by side: neither is read as the cause of the other.

Follow Caddy

An email the morning each edition publishes: where this product moved, where it held, and by how much against the noise floor. One address, confirmed by a click; a stop link in every email.

Already following? Everything you follow, with a stop for each.

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 Caddy'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 Caddy, applied by version and listed in the change log; and a one-line description supplied by the vendor and marked as such.

What a new claim receivesHide what a new claim receives

A new claim receives the current edition's vendor brief for Caddy by email, built from the raw record of the edition. It shows:

where Caddy is named, by buyer and by framing, and which cells hold its first choices;
the claims the models make when they name it, ranked, with the strongest and the weakest quoted;
its vocabulary against the segment leader's, and the pages the models cited;
who was chosen in the answers that did not name Caddy, and every reason the record gives;
a battlecard for each top rival: the head-to-head split, why they win, and the reservation quoted against them;
one page of published figures cleared to show a buyer.