Every category where a model named Crossplane 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%	9 of 46	12%	25	accepted challenger

Movement

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

Direct6 labelsNone

Paraphrase13 labelsNone

Comparative21 labels1not counted in share

Budget-constrained5 labels1

Scale-constrained12 labelsNone

Negative10 labelsNone

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative67 labels in all, every segment counted; 1 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.

“For multi-cloud provisioning, Terraform, Pulumi, and Crossplane are top choices.” Mistral Small · IaC · comparative prompt · first choice

“Crossplane | Moves away from state files and coordinates infrastructure natively via K8s controllers.” Gemini 3.5 Flash · IaC · scale prompt · alternative

“Other options to consider are Pulumi and Crossplane, which provide non-HCL alternatives.” Llama 4 Maverick · IaC · budget prompt · alternative

“Crossplane | Heavy Kubernetes users. | Requires a K8s cluster; overkill otherwise.” Grok 4.1 Fast · IaC · paraphrase 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.

“Pitfalls: Kubernetes-only (requires cluster), complex YAML/Compositions/patches... limited community/docs” Grok 4.1 Fast · IaC · negative prompt · soft negative

“Crossplane introduces far too much operational overhead for a mid-market organization” Gemini 3.5 Flash · IaC · direct prompt · soft negative

“Crossplane: Open source (CNCF), but requires more Kubernetes expertise.” Kimi K2 · IaC · scale prompt · soft negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as Crossplane, over the 67 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and Crossplane was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

Terraform65 of 6747Not in the top three

Pulumi65 of 6710Not in the top three

OpenTofu50 of 6723Not in the top three

AWS CloudFormation35 of 670Not in the top three

Ansible33 of 672Not in the top three

AWS CDK32 of 671Not in the top three

Spacelift21 of 670Not in the top three

Puppet17 of 671Not in the top three

Azure Bicep17 of 670Not in the top three

Azure Resource Manager templates14 of 670Not 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 Crossplane. 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 50 of the 67 answers that named Crossplane and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

pulumi.com38

apiiro.com31

spacelift.io25

cortex.io24

guideflow.com23

devopsplatforms.com15

facets.cloud15

firefly.ai15

checkthat.ai11

computingforgeeks.com11

208 of the 208 domain citations in answers naming Crossplane came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

pulumi.com/blog/infrastructure-as-code-tools34

apiiro.com/blog/best-iac-tools31

cortex.io/post/best-infrastructure-as-code-iac-tools24

guideflow.com/blog/infrastructure-as-code-tools23

spacelift.io/blog/infrastructure-as-code-tools18

devopsplatforms.com/buying-guides/best-iac-tools15

facets.cloud/blog/top-8-infrastructure-as-code-iac-tools13

checkthat.ai/answers/what-are-the-best-infrastructure-as-code-tools11

Pages are listed as the models cited 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 Crossplane'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 Crossplane, 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 crossplane.io 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.