Every category where a model named Redpanda 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
Streaming platforms	Data platform	17%	2 of 78	9%	57	accepted challenger

Movement

This is the first edition on this tier, so no move can be computed for Redpanda 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 Redpanda 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	0	0	0
GPT-5.4 mini	0	3	1	1	5
Gemini 3.5 Flash	4	3	0	0	7
Perplexity Sonar	0	3	1	1	5
Grok 4.1 Fast	1	5	0	1	7
Mistral Small	1	3	1	0	5
DeepSeek V4 Flash	1	4	0	1	6
Llama 4 Maverick	0	1	0	1	2
Qwen 3.7 Flash	1	4	1	0	6
Kimi K2	1	4	0	0	5
GLM 4.7 FlashX	0	5	0	0	5
MiniMax M2.5	1	2	1	0	4

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

Direct30 labels11

Paraphrase15 labels1

Comparative29 labels7not counted in share

Budget-constrained30 labels13

Scale-constrained23 labels4

Negative19 labels4not counted in share

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative146 labels in all, every segment counted; 29 of the 40 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.

“"I have zero DevOps resources and want to pay pennies to start." | Redpanda Serverless | True serverless, scales to zero” Gemini 3.5 Flash · Streaming · budget prompt · first choice

“Redpanda (a modern, C++ based, Kafka-compatible binary that is much easier to run self-hosted)” Gemini 3.5 Flash · Streaming · negative prompt · first choice

“Redpanda or Confluent are typically the best starting points for mid-market B2B companies.” MiniMax M2.5 · Streaming · direct prompt · first choice

“Set up a small test cluster with both Confluent Cloud and Redpanda.” Gemini 3.5 Flash · Streaming · scale prompt · first choice

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.

“it is not Apache Kafka internally, so compatibility and operational behavior should be tested against real workloads before committing” Perplexity Sonar · Streaming · negative prompt · soft negative

“Redpanda: good Kafka compatibility, but it is not a perfect drop-in replacement. Some Kafka features are unsupported” GPT-5.4 mini · Streaming · negative prompt · soft negative

“it may have a newer ecosystem compared to Confluent and AWS-native services” Llama 4 Maverick · Streaming · negative prompt · soft negative

“Some (like Redpanda) have moved to a BSL ... Facade compatibility” DeepSeek V4 Flash · Streaming · negative prompt · soft negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as Redpanda, over the 142 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and Redpanda was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

Confluent Cloud115 of 14237Compare →

Apache Kafka101 of 14232Compare →

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams81 of 1424Not in the top three

Apache Pulsar71 of 1423Not in the top three

Amazon MSK69 of 1427Not in the top three

Google Cloud Pub/Sub66 of 1422Not in the top three

Azure Event Hubs54 of 1421Not in the top three

Aiven for Apache Kafka47 of 1422Not in the top three

WarpStream22 of 1421Not in the top three

RabbitMQ21 of 1420Not 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 Redpanda. 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 113 of the 142 answers that named Redpanda and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

guideflow.com62

confluent.io59

automq.com48

devopsschool.com43

cotocus.com41

redpanda.comYour site40

gartner.com34

modern-datatools.com26

bestdevops.com23

g2.com22

358 of the 398 domain citations in answers naming Redpanda came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

guideflow.com/blog/event-streaming-software60

cotocus.com/blog/top-10-event-streaming-platforms-features-pros-cons-comparison39

devopsschool.com/blog/top-10-event-streaming-platforms-features-pros-cons-comparison37

gartner.com/reviews/market/event-stream-processing34

automq.com/blog/top-10-event-streaming-platforms-confluent-msk-redpanda-alternatives31

bestdevops.com/top-10-event-streaming-platforms-tools-in-2025-features-pros-cons-compariso22

gravitee.io/blog/best-event-streaming-solutions21

eltherion.com/blog/event-streaming-architecture-kafka-kinesis-pulsar19

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Names read as Redpanda

What the judge wrote, as written, with how often. The vendor table decides that these count as Redpanda; a claim can dispute any of them.

Redpanda Cloud 6Redpanda Community Edition 1Redpanda Serverless 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 Redpanda'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 Redpanda, 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 redpanda.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.