Excalidraw was the only diagramming tool that ChatGPT and Gemini named in all six answers, a clean 6 of 6, when we asked them the questions a buyer actually types. On 2026-08-03 we ran six buyer questions through ChatGPT and Gemini, one live web search each, and recorded every product named and every source domain cited. Excalidraw finished on top at 6 of 6 (100%), ahead of Lucidchart at 5 of 6 (83%) and Zapier Canvas at 4 of 6 (67%).
Below the top three, four tools tied at 3 of 6 answers (50% each): Draw.io, FigJam by Figma, Miro, and SmartDraw. That is the middle of this market as the two assistants see it, present often enough to be a common suggestion but not an every-time default. A tool sitting at 3 of 6 is one or two well-placed source pages away from climbing.
Across the six answers the assistants produced 15 named entries, and two of them are the same product: FigJam shows up once as "FigJam by Figma" (3 of 6) and once as plain "FigJam" (2 of 6), sometimes both inside a single answer. We keep them as two separate rows because that is what the data shows, and folding them into one larger number would invent a figure the measurement never produced. Five tools were named just once (1 of 6 each): Cloudcraft, Gliffy, MindManager, TLDraw, and Visio.
The word you add changes the whole list
The bare question "best diagramming tools" returned six names, two of them the FigJam double-label, so five distinct tools: Lucidchart, Zapier Canvas, Excalidraw, MermaidChart, and FigJam. That is the neutral shortlist, and every extra word a buyer adds after "best" rearranges it.
Adding "free" produced the shortest list of the entire run: just 3 tools for "best free diagramming tools", namely FigJam by Figma, Draw.io, and Excalidraw. Lucidchart, named in 5 of 6 answers overall, was dropped completely the moment the buyer asked for free. If you sell against a free tier, this is the one query where the category's most-named tool is not even in the room.
Adding "affordable" did the opposite and produced one of the longest lists: 8 tools for "most affordable diagramming tools". It was the only question that surfaced Cloudcraft, Gliffy, and MindManager, each named in that single answer and nowhere else in the run. "Free" and "affordable" sound like the same intent, yet their two lists shared only 2 tools (Excalidraw and Draw.io), so the assistants treat them as two different questions with two different shortlists.
The "for small teams" cut was the only place Visio was named (1 of 6), and "recommendations" was the only place TLDraw was named (1 of 6). So of the five tools named just once, three (Cloudcraft, Gliffy, MindManager) owe their entire visibility to the "affordable" question alone. Miss the exact query variant your buyers use, and you are absent from that whole search even if you are strong elsewhere.
The source map: Reddit fed every answer, G2 and Capterra fed none
Reddit was cited in all 6 answers (6 of 6), the only domain to appear in every one, and across the run 21 distinct domains supplied 44 citations in total. The next most-cited source was the roundup site slite.com at 5 of 6, followed by figma.com and zapier.com at 4 of 6 each.
Community and forum threads did much of the work: Reddit (6), Quora (2), Stack Overflow (1), and UX Stack Exchange (1) together supplied 10 of the 44 citations, with two more coming from Facebook. The classic software review directories were absent: G2 and Capterra did not appear once across the 21 domains. If your category plan leans on your G2 rating, note that neither ChatGPT nor Gemini reached for it here.
The sharpest pattern is vendor domains feeding the very answers that named them. zapier.com was cited in exactly the 4 answers where Zapier Canvas was named, and in the 2 answers where zapier.com was not a source, Zapier Canvas went unnamed, a clean 1:1. figma.com shows the same four-for-four match with FigJam, and canva.com lines up with Canva in both of the 2 answers it fed. When one of these tools' own pages was pulled into the search, that tool was named in that same answer. Being your own best source page is a real route onto the list.
Roundup pages were the other major feeder: slite.com (5 of 6) plus planfix.com (2), pluralsight.com (1), thedigitalprojectmanager.com (1), bridging-the-gap.com (1), and clickhelp.com (1). One vendor, IcePanel, got in a side door: its own domains (icepanel.io and icepanel.medium.com) supplied 3 citations even though IcePanel was never named as a product, because it publishes roundups of the category. Writing the comparison is another way onto the source list, even when you are not on the list of tools.
What we would do if we sold a diagramming tool
We would stop thinking about market share and start thinking about the source list, because in this run the source list decided who got named. The tools sitting at 5 or 6 of 6 are the ones whose names recur on reddit.com, on slite.com, and on their own domains, not necessarily the ones with the most users.
Three moves, in the order the data supports. First, get named in the Reddit threads these assistants actually pull, since Reddit fed 6 of 6 answers. Second, make your own site rank for these exact phrases, because the three cleanest wins here (Zapier Canvas, FigJam, Canva) were each named in the same answers their own domains were cited. Third, earn a place in the roundups that carry weight, starting with slite.com at 5 of 6. None of these can be bought, all three can be earned, and every one of them can be measured.
The full list, counted
| Product | Named in | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Excalidraw | 6 of 6 | 100% |
| Lucidchart | 5 of 6 | 83% |
| Zapier Canvas | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| Draw.io | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| FigJam by Figma | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Miro | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| SmartDraw | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Canva | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| FigJam | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| MermaidChart | 2 of 6 | 33% |
FigJam by Figma (3 of 6) and FigJam (2 of 6) are the same tool under two labels; we list both rather than sum them into a number the data does not show. Five more tools were named once each (1 of 6) and sit below this table: Cloudcraft, Gliffy, MindManager, TLDraw, and Visio.
Why Glotier is not on this list
Glotier does not sell a diagramming tool, so we are correctly absent from all 6 answers, and we would distrust our own measurement if we had somehow shown up. That is the whole point of running it straight: the list reflects what ChatGPT and Gemini actually said, not what we would like them to say.
This page is the exact thing Glotier runs for a customer's own category: six buyer questions, the real assistants, every product and every source domain recorded, so you can see whether you are the Excalidraw of your category (6 of 6) or one of the tools named just once. The check is free, needs no account, and takes about a minute.