IT AI Index
Index Vendors › Rancher · September 2026 Edition
1 category · Ranked

Rancher

58Judge labels
1First choices
7Negative labels
12 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.
Best standing
2% in Managed Kubernetes for mid-market buyers
Rank 7 of 48 in the mid-market standingaccepted challenger
1 of 12 models made it the first choice on the direct prompt; 8% of its 24 labels there were negative.
By buyer segmentRead the same way at every buyer size.
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 Rancher 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.
CategoryFunctionShareRankNegative rateLabelsQuadrant
Managed Kubernetes platformsCloud and infrastructure2%7 of 488%24accepted challenger

Movement

This is the first edition on this tier, so no move can be computed for Rancher 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 Rancher across every prompt where it was named for a mid-market B2B company. Twelve models, six prompts per category.
ModelFirst choiceAlternativeMentionNegativeLabels
Claude Haiku 4.500101
GPT-5.4 mini00101
Gemini 3.5 Flash01102
Perplexity Sonar01001
Grok 4.1 Fast00303
Mistral Small01102
DeepSeek V4 Flash01102
Llama 4 Maverick00101
Qwen 3.7 Flash01113
Kimi K201113
GLM 4.7 FlashX13004
MiniMax M2.501001

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
Direct8 labels1
Paraphrase1 labelNone
Comparative20 labelsNone
Budget-constrained4 labelsNone
Scale-constrained14 labelsNone
Negative11 labelsNone
First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative58 labels in all, every segment counted; 1 of the 1 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.

“Verdict: For most mid-market B2B companies, Rancher (via RKE2) is the best starting point.” GLM 4.7 FlashX · Managed Kubernetes · direct prompt · first choice
“best for managing many heterogeneous clusters across clouds and on‑prem with a lightweight management layer” GLM 4.7 FlashX · Managed Kubernetes · comparative prompt · alternative
“Multi-cloud needs | Rancher (modular, less opinionated than OpenShift/Tanzu)” Kimi K2 · Managed Kubernetes · negative prompt · alternative
“Best for managing clusters across multiple cloud providers and on-premises” MiniMax M2.5 · Managed Kubernetes · comparative 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.

“Multi-cloud abstraction layers (like Rancher or VMware Tanzu) add complexity that mid-market teams rarely need.” Kimi K2 · Managed Kubernetes · direct prompt · hard negative
“users report that management UIs and API responses become sluggish when managing more than 20\u201330 distinct clusters” Qwen 3.7 Flash · Managed Kubernetes · negative prompt · soft negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as Rancher, over the 58 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and Rancher was named but was not.
ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head
Google Kubernetes Engine57 of 5829Not in the top three
Amazon EKS56 of 5812Not in the top three
Azure Kubernetes Service54 of 589Not in the top three
Red Hat OpenShift48 of 583Not in the top three
DigitalOcean Kubernetes26 of 584Not in the top three
VMware Tanzu24 of 580Not in the top three
Linode Kubernetes Engine17 of 582Not in the top three
Mirantis Kubernetes Engine12 of 580Not in the top three
Civo10 of 581Not in the top three
Platform99 of 581Not 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 Rancher. 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 43 of the 58 answers that named Rancher and are not a share of its labels.

Names read as Rancher

What the judge wrote, as written, with how often. The vendor table decides that these count as Rancher; a claim can dispute any of them.
SUSE Rancher 3Rancher (RKE2) 1Rancher (SUSE) 1Rancher (via RKE2) 1Rancher Labs (now SUSE) 1SUSE Rancher (Rancher Prime) 1
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 Rancher'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 Rancher, 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 rancher.com 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.