When an SMB buyer asks an AI assistant which HR software to buy, a shortlist comes back. We asked 44 different phrasings of that question across 2 engines, 88 answers in total, and counted every product named. This is the result. Nobody paid to be on it, and no vendor list was written in advance — the 38 vendors below are simply everyone the engines named.
Free to read, raw data included. What is for sale — $9.99/mo monitoring for a single vendor.
“Answers” is how many of the 88 answers named that product.
Share is the same number as a percentage. The two right-hand columns split it by engine.
Every row has its own link — the # beside a vendor name gives you
something like connexion.me/c/hr/#gusto.
| # | Vendor | Answers | Share | Gemini | Perplexity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gusto# | 82 | 93.2% | 42 | 40 | |
| 2 | BambooHR# | 75 | 85.2% | 35 | 40 | |
| 3 | Rippling# | 72 | 81.8% | 40 | 32 | |
| 4 | Zoho People# | 28 | 31.8% | 11 | 17 | |
| 5 | Deel# | 15 | 17.0% | 12 | 3 | |
| 6 | Justworks# | 10 | 11.4% | 7 | 3 | |
| 7 | Homebase# | 9 | 10.2% | 3 | 6 | |
| 8 | Paylocity# | 8 | 9.1% | 3 | 5 | |
| 9 | GoCo# | 6 | 6.8% | 1 | 5 | |
| 10 | HiBob# | 6 | 6.8% | 1 | 5 | |
| 11 | OnPay# | 6 | 6.8% | 4 | 2 | |
| 12 | RUN Powered by ADP# | 6 | 6.8% | 0 | 6 | |
| 13 | ADP RUN# | 5 | 5.7% | 2 | 3 | |
| 14 | Paycor# | 4 | 4.5% | 0 | 4 | |
| 15 | TriNet Zenefits# | 4 | 4.5% | 3 | 1 | |
| 16 | Factorial# | 3 | 3.4% | 0 | 3 | |
| 17 | TriNet# | 3 | 3.4% | 0 | 3 | |
| 18 | ADP# | 2 | 2.3% | 0 | 2 | |
| 19 | ADP Workforce Now# | 2 | 2.3% | 0 | 2 | |
| 20 | FirstHR# | 2 | 2.3% | 0 | 2 | |
| 21 | Freshteam# | 2 | 2.3% | 1 | 1 | |
| 22 | Paychex Flex# | 2 | 2.3% | 1 | 1 | |
| 23 | ADP Roll# | 1 | 1.1% | 1 | 0 | |
| 24 | CharlieHR# | 1 | 1.1% | 0 | 1 | |
| 25 | Checkwriters# | 1 | 1.1% | 0 | 1 | |
| 26 | Folks HR# | 1 | 1.1% | 0 | 1 | |
| 27 | HR Cloud# | 1 | 1.1% | 0 | 1 | |
| 28 | HRLocker# | 1 | 1.1% | 0 | 1 | |
| 29 | Kenjo# | 1 | 1.1% | 0 | 1 | |
| 30 | Namely# | 1 | 1.1% | 0 | 1 | |
| 31 | Oyster# | 1 | 1.1% | 0 | 1 | |
| 32 | Papershift# | 1 | 1.1% | 0 | 1 | |
| 33 | PeopleForce# | 1 | 1.1% | 0 | 1 | |
| 34 | Personio# | 1 | 1.1% | 0 | 1 | |
| 35 | Remote# | 1 | 1.1% | 0 | 1 | |
| 36 | Workable HR# | 1 | 1.1% | 0 | 1 | |
| 37 | Workforce.com# | 1 | 1.1% | 0 | 1 | |
| 38 | Zenefits (TriNet)# | 1 | 1.1% | 1 | 0 |
Everything above is free and stays free — the leaderboard, the method, all 88 raw answers and the machine-readable ranking, published in full at the bottom of this page. No vendor paid to be listed, no vendor can pay to move, and nothing here goes behind a login later.
What is for sale is one vendor's row, watched: $9.99 a month to be told when your rank moves, who took your mentions, and which phrasings started or stopped naming you — the board is re-run monthly and you get what changed. A one-off $199 deep report on a single row is the other option. What is in each →
Every claim on this page is reproducible from the files linked at the bottom.
Gemini (gemini-flash-latest), Perplexity (sonar). Each was called through its public API with a near-empty system prompt —
“answer the user's question directly and concisely” — and nothing else. The engines were
not asked to produce a list, rank anything, or name vendors. Steering them toward a list
would have manufactured the thing being measured.
44 distinct phrasings of one purchase decision, written before any measurement was run. No vendor name appears in any of them.
Each of the 88 answers was read back and every named product extracted. The vendor list is discovered: a product appears here if and only if an engine named it. Counted are core HR platforms, HRIS, HRMS, and all-in-one HR suites for small business. Excluded, even when named: standalone payroll-only processors, standalone applicant tracking systems, standalone background check services, standalone time-tracking apps, standalone LMS tools, standalone performance review software, standalone benefits administration platforms, employee survey tools, generic spreadsheets, and companies named only as an example employer.
Spelling variants of one product are folded together — “BambooHR”, “Bamboo HR” and “bamboohr.com” are one row, and a trailing “by company” is dropped. An edition name is folded into its product when the plain name is at least three times as common, so “Gusto Plus” counts as Gusto and “Rippling Unity” counts as Rippling. No pair was merged by hand in this category: every fold above is the rule applied mechanically, with no human judgement about who is who.
A product is counted once per answer, however many times that answer mentions it.
A leaderboard whose top ten reshuffles between runs would not be worth publishing, so this check was run before the page was, and the page ships only because it passed.
This measures what two answer engines said on 3 Aug 2026, in response to these questions, through their APIs. It is not a quality ranking, not a review, and not advice on which HR software to buy. A product can be excellent and rank low here — that gap is the point.
All 88 answers, verbatim, one JSON object per line: run A · run B. The per-answer extracted product names: run A · run B. Machine-readable ranking: ranking.json.