Every category where a model named VMware Tanzu 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	Since September 2026
Managed Kubernetes platforms	Cloud and infrastructure	0%	16 of 52	25%	16	criticized challenger	=heldSince September 2026: 0% → 0%, ±0 points. Inside the 11-point floor: within noise. Read over the models both editions asked.

Movement

Since September 2026, VMware Tanzu held within the floor in its one category: no change cleared 11 points.

Best category · Managed Kubernetes · by segment

Small business=heldSince September 2026: 0% → 0%, ±0 points. Inside the 11-point floor: within noise. Read over the models both editions asked.

0%from 0% in September 2026

Inside the floor by 11 pointsRank 52 → 67 of 68

Mid-market=heldSince September 2026: 0% → 0%, ±0 points. Inside the 11-point floor: within noise. Read over the models both editions asked.

0%from 0% in September 2026

Inside the floor by 11 pointsRank 37 → 15 of 46

Enterprise▼−2Since September 2026: 2% → 0%, −2 points. Inside the 11-point floor: within noise. Read over the models both editions asked.

0%from 2% in September 2026

Inside the floor by 9 pointsRank 12 → 37 of 47

All categories · Mid-market

Category	September 2026	Now	Change	Reading	Rank
Managed Kubernetes	0%	0%	=heldSince September 2026: 0% → 0%, ±0 points. Inside the 11-point floor: within noise. Read over the models both editions asked.	Within noise	Rank 37 → 16 of 52

Shares here are read over the models both editions asked, so they can differ by a point or two from the standing above, which counts every model in this edition.

The floor is 11 points of share, measured: how far the models move a leader on their own when the same questions are asked twice with nothing changed. A larger change is movement; a smaller one is noise, and both are shown. Movement is read over the twelve models both editions asked; GPT-6 Luna, Muse Glimmer 30B joined this edition and are in the standing but not yet in the comparison. How the floor is measured · The editions

By model

How each model treated VMware Tanzu across every prompt where it was named for a mid-market B2B company. Fourteen models, six prompts per category.

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Model	Alternative	Mention	Negative	Labels
Claude Haiku 4.5	0	1	0	1
GPT-5.4 mini	0	1	0	1
Gemini 3.5 Flash	0	0	1	1
Perplexity Sonar	0	0	0	0
Grok 4.20	0	2	0	2
Mistral Small	1	2	0	3
DeepSeek V4 Flash	0	2	0	2
Llama 4 Maverick	0	0	0	0
Qwen 3.7 Flash	0	0	0	0
Kimi K2	0	1	1	2
GLM 4.7 FlashX	1	0	1	2
MiniMax M2.5	0	0	0	0
GPT-6 Luna	0	0	0	0
Muse Glimmer 30B	0	1	1	2

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

Direct5 labelsNone

Paraphrase1 labelNone

Comparative10 labelsNone

Budget-constrained1 labelNone

Scale-constrained9 labelsNone

Negative15 labelsNone

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative41 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.

“Best for: Enterprises with VMware environments needing multi-cloud/hybrid Kubernetes.” Mistral Small · Managed Kubernetes · comparative prompt · alternative

“vSphere-heavy environments | Deep vSphere/NSX integration” GLM 4.7 FlashX · Managed Kubernetes · scale 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.

“The Verdict: Avoid for any new cloud-native projects. The license instability and shifting product roadmap make it a massive liability.” Gemini 3.5 Flash · Managed Kubernetes · negative prompt · hard negative

“Deeply integrated PaaS-like platforms (Tanzu Application Platform, OpenShift) unless you're comfortable with that model” GLM 4.7 FlashX · Managed Kubernetes · negative prompt · soft negative

“Be cautious with deeply integrated PaaS-like platforms such as VMware Tanzu / OpenShift Managed Services” Muse Glimmer 30B · Managed Kubernetes · negative prompt · soft negative

“No true managed option... Licensing complexity” Kimi K2 · Managed Kubernetes · negative prompt · soft negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as VMware Tanzu, over the 41 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and VMware Tanzu was named but was not.

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ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

Google Kubernetes Engine39 of 4116Not among the top eight

Amazon EKS39 of 415Not among the top eight

Azure Kubernetes Service39 of 414Not among the top eight

Red Hat OpenShift34 of 411Not among the top eight

Rancher23 of 410Not among the top eight

DigitalOcean Kubernetes17 of 411Not among the top eight

Linode Kubernetes Engine12 of 410Not among the top eight

IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service9 of 410Not among the top eight

Mirantis Kubernetes Engine8 of 410Not among the top eight

Platform9 Managed Kubernetes6 of 410Not among the top eight

A head-to-head page exists where both products are among a category's top eight. 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 VMware Tanzu. A fact about retrieval, not a lever on the model.

Citations exist only for the models that return a source list, five of the fourteen in this edition, so these counts come from 38 of the 41 answers that named VMware Tanzu and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

dev.to17

linkedin.com16

mirantis.com16

qovery.com16

it-ai-index.com15

spot.rackspace.com15

northflank.com14

ciopages.com13

medium.com11

portainer.io11

144 of the 144 domain citations in answers naming VMware Tanzu came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

linkedin.com/pulse/top-kubernetes-service-providers-compared-vx0ac15

spot.rackspace.com/blog/kubernetes-managed-services14

ciopages.com/buyer-guides/kubernetes-platforms13

it-ai-index.com/cloud/managed-kubernetes-platforms/enterprise12

controlplane.com/blog/post/top-managed-kubernetes-services10

qovery.com/blog/kubernetes-management-tools10

blog.railway.com/p/best-managed-kubernetes-hosting-20269

devopsschool.com/blog/top-10-kubernetes-management-platforms-features-pros-cons-comparison9

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Search and answers

Where VMware Tanzu stands in Google search beside where it stands in the models' answers.

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In search

Google, US estimates

Searches for its name, Google: 590 a month (“vmware tanzu”)
AI search demand for its name, est.: 46 a month
Its own site: It sits on VMware's site (vmware.com), so there are no site figures for it alone

In answers

This edition

Share of first choices

rank 16 of 52 in managed kubernetes

Segment leader

43%

Google Kubernetes Engine

First choices: 0 across its categories
Named in: 41 answers
Its own site cited: in 38 of the answers that named it

Search figures are US estimates from DataForSEO, read September 28, 2026; AI search demand is its modeled, directional estimate, not a count of queries to any assistant. The answers are this edition's. Two measurements side by side: neither is read as the cause of the other.

Names read as VMware Tanzu

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

Tanzu 4Tanzu by VMware 1VMware Tanzu (TKG/TKGI) 1

Follow VMware Tanzu

An email the morning each edition publishes: where this product moved, where it held, and by how much against the noise floor. One address, confirmed by a click; a stop link in every email.

Already following? Everything you follow, with a stop for each.

The company

VMware is the company behind VMware Tanzu.

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On record

Company records

Also from VMware: VMware Aria Cost, VMware Avi Load Balancer, VMware Carbon Black, VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware ESXi, VMware Horizon, VMware Horizon / Omnissa Horizon, VMware Horizon/Omnissa and 19 more

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 VMware Tanzu'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 VMware Tanzu, applied by version and listed in the change log; and a one-line description supplied by the vendor and marked as such.

What a new claim receivesHide what a new claim receives

A new claim receives the current edition's vendor brief for VMware Tanzu by email, built from the raw record of the edition. It shows:

where VMware Tanzu is named, by buyer and by framing, and which cells hold its first choices;
the claims the models make when they name it, ranked, with the strongest and the weakest quoted;
its vocabulary against the segment leader's, and the pages the models cited;
who was chosen in the answers that did not name VMware Tanzu, and every reason the record gives;
a battlecard for each top rival: the head-to-head split, why they win, and the reservation quoted against them;
one page of published figures cleared to show a buyer.