Index › Vendors › k3s · September 2026 Edition

1 category · Named, not ranked

k3s

5Judge labels

0First choices

1Negative labels

4 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

2 labels, too few to rank

A product needs 10 labels in a category before a share or quadrant is stated. k3s was named 2 times in Managed Kubernetes, where Google Kubernetes Engine led with 39%. The labels and the evidence are below, counted exactly.

By buyer segmentRead the same way at every buyer size.

Small business45 of 56

under the label threshold

Mid-market20 of 48

under the label threshold

Enterprisenot named

No model named it for this buyer.

In managed kubernetes · 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 k3s 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
Managed Kubernetes platforms	Cloud and infrastructure	0%	20 of 48	0%	2	under 10 labels · led by Google Kubernetes Engine at 39%

Movement

This is the first edition on this tier, so no move can be computed for k3s 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 k3s across every prompt where it was named for a mid-market B2B company. Twelve models, six prompts per category.

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

Paraphrase0 labelsNone

Comparative0 labelsNone

Budget-constrained1 labelNone

Scale-constrained0 labelsNone

Negative4 labelsNone

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative5 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.

“you must migrate to RKE2, k3s, or a CNCF-certified distribution immediately” Qwen 3.7 Flash · Managed Kubernetes · negative prompt · alternative

“Bare metal/edge | RKE2 or k3s with your own tooling” Kimi K2 · Managed Kubernetes · 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.

No model argued against it.

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as k3s, over the 5 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and k3s was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

Google Kubernetes Engine4 of 52Not in the top three

Amazon EKS4 of 51Not in the top three

Linode Kubernetes Engine4 of 51Not in the top three

Rancher4 of 50Not in the top three

Red Hat OpenShift4 of 50Not in the top three

DigitalOcean Kubernetes3 of 53Not in the top three

Civo3 of 51Not in the top three

Azure Kubernetes Service3 of 50Not in the top three

Google Cloud Run2 of 50Not in the top three

Nutanix Kubernetes Platform2 of 50Not 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 k3s. 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 4 of the 5 answers that named k3s and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

medium.com4

blog.railway.com3

digitalocean.com2

mirantis.com2

portainer.io2

reddit.com2

spot.rackspace.com2

burdweiser.com1

byteiota.com1

cloud.google.com1

No domain is on file for k3s, so its own site is not marked.

Pages cited

blog.railway.com/p/best-managed-kubernetes-hosting-20263

medium.com/@BuildShift/15-managed-kubernetes-platforms-ranked-for-developers-2025-9c82acad2

medium.com/@devlinktips/15-managed-kubernetes-platforms-ranked-for-developers-2025-9c82aca2

medium.com/@elliotgraebert/comparing-the-top-eight-managed-kubernetes-providers-2ae39662392

spot.rackspace.com/blog/kubernetes-managed-services2

burdweiser.com/blog/2026-05-20-choosing-kubernetes-platform-vmware-openshift-tanzu-rancher1

byteiota.com/kubernetes-exodus-why-companies-ditch-k8s-in-20251

byteiota.com/kubernetes-is-overkill-why-companies-are-ditching-k8s1

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 k3s'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 k3s, 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 the vendor's own domain 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.