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 August 2026 Questions 44 Answers 88 Vendors named 106 Top-10 repeatability 9/10

Free to read, raw data included.

Is one of these project management tools yours?

The board is re-measured every month. For $9.99 a month you get one email when your own row moves — your rank and answer count, who took the mentions you were absent from, and which of the 44 questions started or stopped naming you. Leave your address and I reply by hand with what your row reads today. What is in it, and the $29.99 one-off report →

Nothing is charged and nothing starts — I reply by email. Your address is used to answer you and to set up billing; it does not go on a list.

Two conditions on every number below

These 44 questions are one family of phrasings — project management software — and every number below is conditional on them. A differently worded family about the same products — a different size of buyer, a different budget, a different constraint — is a different measurement and can come back naming a different set of products. All 44 questions are printed in full below, so you can see exactly what was asked before you read what came back. We have measured how big that can get, on two of our own boards: SuiteCRM is named in 83 of the 132 answers on /c/crmctx/ and in none of the 132 on /c/crm/ — same products, same day, same extraction, asked differently.
The engine columns below are not one instrument. Perplexity (sonar) searches the web while it answers and returned the sources used beside every one of those 44 answers — that column is what gets retrieved. Gemini (gemini-flash-latest) was called through its API with no tools and the near-empty system prompt quoted in the method below, so it answers out of the model’s own weights — not one of those 44 answers came back with a source. That column is what the model already remembers. Both are worth counting and they are not the same measurement: a product can be named often by what the models remember and rarely by what they retrieve, or the reverse, and the totals in the Answers column add the two together.

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. Click a vendor's name to see which of the 44 questions named them, and click one of those to read the answer it was counted from, word for word.

#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#
Named together with Shortcut in 1 of the 1 answers that name either. Gemini’s answer to question 8 writes the two as one product renamed: “Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse)”. Counted as separate rows — how names are counted.
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#
Named together with Clubhouse in 1 of the 1 answers that name either. Gemini’s answer to question 8 writes the two as one product renamed: “Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse)”. Counted as separate rows — how names are counted.
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 $29.99 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.

These 44 questions are one phrasing family, not every way this market gets asked about. The family is project management software — that is the wording they were written from, and it is counted back against them here: 33 of them contain “project”; 36 of them contain “management”; 28 of them contain “software”, and all 44 of them contain at least one. A different family about the same products — a different size of buyer, a different budget, a different constraint, different words — is a different measurement, and it can come back naming a different set of vendors. This board is this family, measured. It is not the whole market.
  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, and a trailing “by company” is dropped. This run collapsed 32 spellings onto 11 of the rows below: “Monday.com”, “monday.com” and “monday work management” are one row — the one the table prints as Monday.com. An edition name is folded into its product when it is that product’s name followed by a further word, and the plain name is at least three times as common. This run folded 9 such names, among them “Monday.com Enterprise” counts as Monday.com and “Asana Enterprise” counts as Asana. A name that merely begins with the same letters is a different product and keeps its own row. 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.

Beyond those folds a product is counted as the engines spelled it, and two rows in the table are never merged into one. When a product has been renamed or acquired and the engines still answer with both names, both names keep their own row: this page carries no hand-maintained list of who is now who, because that list would be a human claim about a mechanical count and nothing here could check it. What it has instead is the answers. Where an answer itself writes two of the rows below as one product renamed — the construction “X (formerly Y)” — the line beside those rows quotes that sentence and gives the overlap and the total, so the union is on the page. Nothing else produces that line. Two rows being named in the same answers does not, however often: the engines answer in shortlists, so the leaders of a category are named together whatever they are called. One pair of rows below carries that line in this run: Clubhouse and Shortcut. What each one quotes is what an engine wrote, not a judgement of ours about who owns what.

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 August 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.

What Perplexity was reading. It is the only one of these engines that returns a source list, and the markers in its answers above — [1], [2] — point into it. Every URL it cited, with the title, date and the excerpt it actually retrieved, one JSON object per answer: run A · run B. Join on index to the answers file, and read [n] as citations[n-1]. Perplexity returned a source list on 44 of its 44 answers. Gemini returned no sources at all — no citation, grounding or search-result field of any kind appears anywhere in its API response, on any of the 44 answers it gave. That is a fact about the engine, not a gap in this page.

The sources behind the answers

Run A's 44 Perplexity answers cited 862 URLs across 281 distinct domains. Below are the 61 that were cited in three or more separate answers. Citations counts every URL from that domain, so a domain cited three times in one answer counts three times; Answers is how many of the 44 answers cited it at all.

DomainCitationsAnswers
reddit.com8843
youtube.com4325
thedigitalprojectmanager.com4139
wrike.com3729
project-management.com2625
gitnux.org2018
ones.com1914
monday.com1816
paymoapp.com1716
zapier.com1616
pcmag.com1111
atlassian.com1110
plaky.com1010
clickup.com109
asana.com108
icagile.com99
g2.com98
productive.io97
capterra.com88
celoxis.com88
teamwork.com88
wifitalents.com88
getapp.com87
cloudwards.net66
toggl.com66
worldmetrics.org66
zipdo.co66
forbes.com65
bigtime.net55
facebook.com55
jotform.com55
proprofsproject.com55
smartsuite.com55
techrepublic.com55
worksection.com55
businessmap.io54
technologyadvice.com54
workzone.com54
es.celoxis.com44
goodday.work44
hive.com44
learn.g2.com44
projectmanager.com44
taskrhino.ca44
teamhood.com44
uschamber.com44
zoho.com44
guideflow.com43
monograph.com43
techstackdaily.com43
5day.io33
breeze.pm33
deltek.com33
epicflow.com33
gartner.com33
graphicdesignforum.com33
linkedin.com33
milientsoftware.com33
onesuite.io33
planview.com33
us.fitgap.com33

A domain missing from this table was cited in fewer than three answers, or was never cited at all — the run A file linked above is the complete list either way, and it is the only way to tell those two apart. Cited is not endorsed: a page the engine retrieved is not a page that recommended anyone, and this counts what was read, not what it said.

The answer a vendor panel shows you is read straight out of the run A file linked above — the page fetches the one line it needs and displays it unaltered, so what you read there and what you get by downloading the file are the same bytes.

What one line of each file holds, and the terms you may re-use them under — the raw answers may be re-used in any medium, commercially and inside open-source software, with attribution.