Every category where a model named Cilium 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
Microsegmentation	Network and edge	4%	5 of 94	0%	6	under 10 labels · led by ColorTokens Xshield at 25%
Container and Kubernetes security	Cloud and infrastructure	0%	22 of 77	0%	4	under 10 labels · led by Trivy at 22%	=heldSince September 2026: 0% → 0%, ±0 points. Inside the 11-point floor: within noise. Read over the models both editions asked.

Movement

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

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Model	First choice	Alternative	Mention	Labels
Claude Haiku 4.5	0	0	0	0
GPT-5.4 mini	0	0	0	0
Gemini 3.5 Flash	0	1	0	1
Perplexity Sonar	0	0	1	1
Grok 4.20	1	0	0	1
Mistral Small	0	0	0	0
DeepSeek V4 Flash	1	0	0	1
Llama 4 Maverick	0	0	0	0
Qwen 3.7 Flash	0	0	1	1
Kimi K2	0	1	0	1
GLM 4.7 FlashX	0	1	0	1
MiniMax M2.5	0	1	0	1
GPT-6 Luna	0	1	0	1
Muse Glimmer 30B	0	1	0	1

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

Paraphrase4 labelsNone

Comparative1 labelNone

Budget-constrained9 labels2

Scale-constrained1 labelNone

Negative2 labelsNone

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative17 labels in all, every segment counted; 2 of the 2 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.

“Why best for budget? Completely free; enterprise support available via Isovalent if needed later.” Grok 4.20 · Microsegmentation · budget prompt · first choice

“Cilium (Free / Open Source) ⭐ Best Overall Budget Option” DeepSeek V4 Flash · Microsegmentation · budget prompt · first choice

“Cilium is a free microsegmentation tool... Cilium adds eBPF-based identity-aware enforcement and observability.” Muse Glimmer 30B · Microsegmentation · budget prompt · alternative

“Consider Cilium, which supports Kubernetes network policies and offers richer policy options.” GPT-6 Luna · Microsegmentation · 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 Cilium, over the 17 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and Cilium was named but was not.

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ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

Illumio Segmentation8 of 170Not among the top eight

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation7 of 170Not among the top eight

Calico6 of 170Not among the top eight

Faddom6 of 170Not among the top eight

AWS Security Groups5 of 174Not among the top eight

Trivy5 of 172Not among the top eight

Falco5 of 171Not among the top eight

Azure Network Security Groups4 of 173Not among the top eight

Prisma Cloud4 of 171Not among the top eight

Kubescape4 of 170Not 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 Cilium. 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 15 of the 17 answers that named Cilium and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

tigera.io10

aimultiple.com8

g2.com8

itechguides.com8

forrester.com7

cyberpress.org6

gartner.com6

slashdot.org6

sourceforge.net6

toxigon.com6

Seventy-one of the seventy-one domain citations in answers naming Cilium came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

aimultiple.com/open-source-micro-segmentation-tools8

forrester.com/report/the-forrester-wave-tm-microsegmentation-solutions-q3-2024/RES1813027

g2.com/categories/microsegmentation/free6

itechguides.com/best/microsegmentation-software6

tigera.io/learn/guides/microsegmentation/microsegmentation-software6

aimultiple.com/microsegmentation-tools5

gartner.com/reviews/market/microsegmentation5

toxigon.com/best-microsegmentation-software-in-the-market5

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Search and answers

cilium.io is not in Google's top ten for any of the category's searches. In the answers, Cilium takes 4% of first choices and ColorTokens Xshield takes 25%.

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In search

Google, US estimates

Position for “microsegmentation solution”

–

not in the top ten

Position for “microsegmentation solutions”

–

not in the top ten

Searches for its name, Google: 5,400 a month (“cilium”)
AI search demand for its name, est.: 304 a month
Organic visits to its site: about 4,632 a month
Searches its site ranks for: 478 · 89 in the top three
Sites linking to it: 4,005
Paid Google search: No ads found in the estimate; that does not mean it runs none

Ads on Google

None found in Google's ad transparency records for the US

In answers

This edition

Share of first choices

rank 5 of 94 in microsegmentation

Segment leader

25%

ColorTokens Xshield

First choices: 2 across its categories
Named in: 17 answers
Its own site cited: in 15 of the answers that named it

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.

What it publishes

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Addresses on cilium.io

subdomains included

Content

counted in the table below

Documentation

Product · Integration

0 · 0

Kind	Pages	Last 90 days	2025-10 to 2026-09	Latest	Categories named
Blog	16	3		2026-09-23

Most recent

2026-09-23Cilium at kubecon na 26 blog
2026-08-28Zero trust developer platforms with cilium network policies blog
2026-07-08How k0rdent and cilium turn kubernetes sprawl into a platform blog
2026-06-13Multi cluster kubernetes explained blog
2026-06-07Kubernetes runtime security the guide blog
2026-06-07Understanding kubernetes network security blog

How it is countedHide how it is counted

Every page cilium.io exposes, subdomains included. Kind is read from the address and title. The last 90 days, the latest date and the twelve months count pages by when they were published, from the site's feeds, a date in the address, or the page's own publication date, read from up to a hundred of its most recently changed pages; a page that says only when it last changed is counted in its kind but not in when, so the recent counts are a floor, and a kind none of whose pages gives a publication date reads undated. Read September 29, 2026.

Follow Cilium

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.

The company

Cilium is its own company.

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In its own words

Stated by the vendor, not checked

Positioning: Cloud Native, eBPF-based Networking, Observability, and Security
cilium.io
Free plan or trial: Quickly get started with Cilium. Read the documentation or use our interactive tutorial in a live environment. cilium.io
Certifications: Cilium Certified Associate (CCA)
Customers named: Digital OceanTrip.comWSO2Post FinanceForm3BloombergDatadogAlibaba
Not stated on the pages read: Who it is for, price, starting price, integrations, hosting

What Cilium's own pages state, read October 5, 2026: cilium.io. A claimed page can correct any of them.

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 Cilium'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 Cilium, 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 Cilium by email, built from the raw record of the edition. It shows:

where Cilium 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 Cilium, 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.