Which project management tools do AI answer engines actually recommend?

When an SMB buyer asks an AI assistant which project management 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 106 vendors below are simply everyone the engines named.

Run 3 Aug 2026 Questions 44 Answers 88 Vendors named 106 Top-10 repeatability 9/10

Free to read, raw data included. What is for sale — $9.99/mo monitoring for a single vendor.

The leaderboard

“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/pm/#monday.

#VendorAnswers ShareGeminiPerplexity
1Monday.com#5865.9%3424
2ClickUp#5360.2%2825
3Asana#4854.5%2820
4Jira#3236.4%2012
5Trello#3034.1%1416
6Wrike#2427.3%519
7Basecamp#1314.8%94
8Smartsheet#910.2%81
9Notion#89.1%53
10Teamwork#89.1%26
11Airtable#66.8%24
12Paymo#55.7%05
13Planview#55.7%32
14Linear#44.5%40
15Zoho Projects#44.5%13
16Adobe Workfront#33.4%12
17Autodesk Construction Cloud#33.4%12
18Businessmap#33.4%03
19Celoxis#33.4%03
20OpenProject#33.4%12
21Workzone#33.4%03
22Aha!#22.3%11
23Azure Boards#22.3%11
24Azure DevOps#22.3%20
25Buildertrend#22.3%11
26Cascade#22.3%11
27Codecks#22.3%11
28Contractor Foreman#22.3%11
29Cvent#22.3%11
30Fieldwire#22.3%11
31GanttPRO#22.3%02
32HacknPlan#22.3%11
33Microsoft Planner#22.3%11
34Microsoft Project#22.3%02
35Monograph#22.3%11
36Procore#22.3%11
37ProjectManager#22.3%02
38ServiceNow SPM#22.3%20
39Taiga#22.3%11
40WorkBoard#22.3%11
4110,000ft#11.1%10
42AchieveIt#11.1%01
43Aha! Roadmaps#11.1%01
44Arena PLM#11.1%10
45Avaza#11.1%01
46BigPicture#11.1%10
47BigTime#11.1%01
48Breeze#11.1%01
49Broadcom Clarity#11.1%10
50Clarity#11.1%10
51Clubhouse#11.1%10
52CoConstruct#11.1%10
53CoSchedule#11.1%10
54Deck#11.1%10
55Envisio#11.1%01
56Float#11.1%10
57Focalboard#11.1%10
58Freedcamp#11.1%01
59GitHub Projects#11.1%10
60Hansoft#11.1%10
61Houzz Pro#11.1%01
62Hub Planner#11.1%01
63Kanbanchi#11.1%01
64Kantata#11.1%01
65Leantime#11.1%01
66Meegle#11.1%01
67Microsoft 365#11.1%10
68Microsoft Office#11.1%10
69Microsoft Project & Power Platform (MS PPM)#11.1%10
70Microsoft Project for the web#11.1%01
71Microsoft Project/Project Online#11.1%01
72Motion#11.1%01
73Nextcloud#11.1%10
74Nextcloud + Deck#11.1%10
75nTask#11.1%01
76OnePlan#11.1%01
77ONES Project#11.1%01
78ONES.com#11.1%01
79Plaky#11.1%01
80Plane#11.1%01
81Planisware#11.1%01
82Planka#11.1%10
83Planning Pod#11.1%10
84Productboard#11.1%10
85ProductPlan#11.1%01
86PTC Windchill#11.1%10
87Quantive (formerly Gtmhub)#11.1%10
88Quickbase#11.1%01
89Redmine#11.1%01
90Resource Guru#11.1%10
91Rework#11.1%01
92Runn#11.1%01
93Scoro#11.1%01
94ServiceNow PPM#11.1%01
95ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM)#11.1%10
96Shortcut#11.1%10
97Siemens Teamcenter#11.1%10
98SmartSuite#11.1%01
99Spider Impact#11.1%01
100Structure#11.1%10
101Targetprocess#11.1%10
102Teamhood#11.1%01
103Todoist#11.1%01
104Todoist for Teams#11.1%10
105Tripleseat#11.1%10
106Zenhub#11.1%01

What is free, and what is for sale

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 →

Method

Every claim on this page is reproducible from the files linked at the bottom.

The engines

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.

The questions

44 distinct phrasings of one purchase decision, written before any measurement was run. No vendor name appears in any of them.

  1. What is the best project management software for a 50-person company?
  2. Best project management software for small business
  3. We're a 30 person startup and tasks are getting lost in email and chat. What project management tool should we buy?
  4. Recommend project management software for a company with under 100 employees.
  5. affordable project management software for SMB
  6. What project management tools do small teams actually use?
  7. Best work management platform for creative agencies
  8. What software should a software development team use to manage sprints and backlogs?
  9. Top project management software for construction contractors
  10. Best lightweight project management tool for freelancers
  11. What project management tool is best for managing client deliverables?
  12. We are scaling from 10 to 50 employees and need a structured project management system. What should we choose?
  13. Best project management software with built-in time tracking and Gantt charts
  14. What project management app is best for non-tech teams?
  15. Easy to use task management software for remote teams
  16. Best visual Kanban board software for team workflows
  17. What is the best project management tool for marketing teams?
  18. We need project management software that supports both Agile and Waterfall methodologies.
  19. Best project management software for healthcare organizations with strict compliance needs
  20. What project management software offers the best free tier for small non-profits?
  21. Which work management software is best for cross-functional product teams?
  22. We are currently tracking projects in spreadsheets and it's becoming chaotic. What software should we move to?
  23. Best project management software for enterprise engineering organizations
  24. What software do professional service firms use to manage client projects and resource allocation?
  25. Best project tracking software for architectural firms
  26. What project management tool integrates best with communication tools and cloud storage?
  27. Simple task tracking software for non-technical office staff
  28. Best project management platform for managing multiple client accounts simultaneously
  29. What software should we use to coordinate product launch roadmaps across departments?
  30. Best self-hosted or open-source project management software for privacy-conscious teams
  31. What project management tool has the gentlest learning curve for non-technical employees?
  32. Best project portfolio management tools for enterprise IT departments
  33. We need a tool to track deadlines, dependencies, and team workload. What project management software do you recommend?
  34. What project management platforms are most popular for event planning companies?
  35. Best project management tool with subtask hierarchies and custom fields
  36. What software should a hybrid agency use for internal task management and external client updates?
  37. Best project management software for game development studios
  38. What is the best intuitive work management tool for fast-growing startups?
  39. Most customizable project management software for complex operational workflows
  40. What project management software is best for managing hardware design and manufacturing projects?
  41. Best task management tool for small digital marketing agencies
  42. Which project management software offers the best workload management and capacity planning features?
  43. What software do operations managers use to track company-wide strategic initiatives?
  44. Best collaborative project management software for distributed remote workers

How the vendor list was built

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 project management platforms, task and work management tools, and broader productivity suites whose project management module was named. Excluded, even when named: personal to-do list apps, documentation-only and wiki tools, digital whiteboards, standalone time-tracking tools, generic CRMs, team messaging tools, code repositories and standalone issue trackers, diagramming tools, full enterprise ERP/PSA accounting suites, and companies named only as an example user.

Spelling variants of one product are folded together — “Monday.com”, “monday” and “Monday Work OS” 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 “ClickUp Unlimited” counts as ClickUp and “Asana Enterprise” counts as Asana. 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.

Is this stable, or is it noise?

The entire run was repeated a second time, same 44 questions, same engines, independent calls. The top ten came back 9/10 identical. What moved: Smartsheet (8 in run A) dropped out of run B's ten and Airtable (10 in run B) took that place. by position, Basecamp was 7 in run A and 9 in run B; Notion was 9 in run A and 8 in run B; Teamwork was 10 in run A and 7 in run B. Run B named 109 vendors over 88 answers against run A's 106. The tail moves; the head does not.

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.

What this is not

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 project management software to buy. A product can be excellent and rank low here — that gap is the point.

The raw data

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.