IT AI Index

Index › Vendors › SaltStack · September 2026 Edition

1 category · Named, not ranked

SaltStack

18Judge labels

0First choices

14Negative labels

9 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

7 labels, too few to rank

A product needs 10 labels in a category before a share or quadrant is stated. SaltStack was named 7 times in IaC, where Terraform led with 46%. The labels and the evidence are below, counted exactly.

By buyer segmentRead the same way at every buyer size.

Small business42 of 44

under the label threshold

Mid-market44 of 46

under the label threshold

Enterprise62 of 64

under the label threshold

In iac · 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 SaltStack 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%	44 of 46	71%	7	under 10 labels · led by Terraform at 46%

Movement

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

Model	Mention	Negative	Labels
Claude Haiku 4.5	0	0	0
GPT-5.4 mini	0	0	0
Gemini 3.5 Flash	0	1	1
Perplexity Sonar	0	1	1
Grok 4.1 Fast	1	1	2
Mistral Small	1	0	1
DeepSeek V4 Flash	0	1	1
Llama 4 Maverick	0	0	0
Qwen 3.7 Flash	0	0	0
Kimi K2	0	0	0
GLM 4.7 FlashX	0	1	1
MiniMax M2.5	0	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

Comparative4 labelsNone

Budget-constrained0 labelsNone

Scale-constrained0 labelsNone

Negative14 labelsNone

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative18 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.

No positive label carried a quote.

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.

“Mutable infrastructure model (in-place changes lead to drift), steep learning curves... declining adoption” Grok 4.1 Fast · IaC · negative prompt · hard negative

“Why avoid: No long-term vendor commitment.” DeepSeek V4 Flash · IaC · negative prompt · hard negative

“Avoid for infrastructure provisioning.” Gemini 3.5 Flash · IaC · negative prompt · hard negative

“adoption has declined significantly compared to Ansible and Terraform... Smaller community means fewer resources” GLM 4.7 FlashX · IaC · negative prompt · soft negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as SaltStack, over the 18 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and SaltStack was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

Puppet18 of 180Not in the top three

Pulumi17 of 184Not in the top three

Chef17 of 180Not in the top three

Terraform16 of 189Not in the top three

AWS CloudFormation15 of 180Not in the top three

Ansible14 of 183Not in the top three

OpenTofu13 of 186Not in the top three

Google Cloud Deployment Manager9 of 180Not in the top three

Crossplane8 of 181Not in the top three

Azure Resource Manager templates7 of 180Not 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 SaltStack. 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 15 of the 18 answers that named SaltStack and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

apiiro.com10

pulumi.com10

spacelift.io10

computingforgeeks.com8

reddit.com8

claranet.com7

daily.dev6

cortex.io5

guideflow.com5

medium.com5

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

Pages cited

apiiro.com/blog/best-iac-tools10

pulumi.com/blog/infrastructure-as-code-tools9

computingforgeeks.com/best-infrastructure-as-code-iac-cloud-automation-tools8

claranet.com/uk/blog/right-and-wrong-approach-to-infrastructure-code6

daily.dev/blog/top-7-iac-pitfalls-risks-challenges-solutions6

cortex.io/post/best-infrastructure-as-code-iac-tools5

guideflow.com/blog/infrastructure-as-code-tools5

spacelift.io/blog/infrastructure-as-code-tools5

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Names read as SaltStack

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

Salt 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 SaltStack'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 SaltStack, 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 saltstack.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.