Action1, Automox and NinjaOne tied at the top of this category: each was named in 4 of the 6 answers we collected. No other product came close, and no single tool was named in all six. We ran this on 2026-08-07 by putting six real buyer questions to ChatGPT and Gemini, giving each question one live web search, and writing down every product the answer named and every source domain it leaned on.
Across those six answers, 29 different product names came up, and 22 of them appeared in exactly one answer. So the real headline is not "these three win." It is that a category this fragmented hands the AI a different shortlist almost every time the question changes, and only three names had enough coverage to survive more than half of the phrasings.
Even the leaders were not safe everywhere. Action1, Automox and NinjaOne each landed 4 of 6, but not one of the three showed up in the "most affordable endpoint management software" answer. That single word, "affordable," wiped the top of the category and replaced it with names most buyers have never typed into a search bar.
How the shortlist changed from question to question
The six questions split into three moods, and each mood returned an almost separate market.
The bare "best endpoint management software" answer named 8 products and leaned enterprise: Microsoft Intune, HCL BigFix, Ivanti Endpoint Manager, Scalefusion and SureMDM alongside the three leaders. Of those, HCL BigFix, Scalefusion and SureMDM appeared in this one answer and nowhere else in the study.
"Best free endpoint management software" returned 7 products and reset the board almost completely. The Open Endpoint Manager, MeshCentral, GLPI, Pritunl Endpoint and Zecurit Admin Toolkit each showed up in this single answer and in no other. Only Action1 carried over from the mainstream questions, while Automox and NinjaOne, two of the three overall leaders, did not appear in the free answer at all.
"Most affordable endpoint management software" returned yet another 7 products with almost no overlap with anything else: Level, MSP360 RMM Community Edition, System Frontier, VirtuWorks and PDQ each appeared only here. This affordable answer shared zero product names with the "best free" answer and zero with the bare "best" answer. Change the value word from "free" to "affordable" and the model handed back a completely different set.
Two brands even showed up under two different labels depending on the question. PDQ was named as PDQ Connect in the small-teams answer and as PDQ in the affordable answer, 1 of 6 under each name. Zecurit split the same way, named as Zecurit Admin Toolkit in the free answer and as Zecurit in the affordable answer. We keep those as separate rows, because that is how the assistants said them, and it is a live reminder that the model matches whatever a page happens to call the product.
Only 7 of the 29 names appeared in more than one answer: the three leaders, plus ManageEngine Endpoint Central at 3 of 6, and Ivanti Endpoint Manager, Microsoft Intune and OctoFleet at 2 of 6 each. Everything else was a one-answer wonder, pulled in by a single page for a single phrasing.
The source map: who fed the answers
Twenty-seven different domains supplied the 41 source citations behind these six answers, and the most-cited was not an analyst alone. Gartner.com and pdq.com tied at 4 citations each, which means a single vendor's own website was retrieved as often as the biggest analyst brand in tech.
Gartner.com fed 4 of the 6 answers, but only the mainstream ones: the bare "best," "small teams," "should I use" and "recommendations." It appeared in neither the "free" nor the "affordable" answer, where analyst coverage is simply not what the model reaches for.
The most important pattern is vendor self-citation. In the "most affordable" answer, 6 of the 7 named products came straight off their own websites: level.io named Level, msp360.com named MSP360, systemfrontier.com named System Frontier, virtuworks.com named VirtuWorks, pdq.com named PDQ and zecurit.com named Zecurit. Only ManageEngine Endpoint Central, the seventh, came in through a third-party roundup. When a question is specific and lightly covered by the press, the vendor page that ranks for it basically writes the answer.
Review directories showed up, but selectively. G2 appeared through learn.g2.com in 2 of the 6 answers, and SoftwareAdvice and TrustRadius appeared once each. Capterra did not appear in a single answer. Notably, community forums played no part here at all: there was no Reddit and no Quora anywhere in the 27 domains. The only community-style source was GitHub, cited twice, feeding the open-source names in the "free" and "small teams" answers.
What this means if you sell endpoint management software
The source list, not your market share, decides whether you get named. Level, System Frontier and VirtuWorks are not household names, yet each was named in the "affordable" answer because their own page was the thing the model retrieved for that exact query. Meanwhile Jamf, a giant in real life, was named in just 1 of 6 answers, and Microsoft Intune in only 2.
So the job is concrete. Find the exact phrasings your buyers use, "free," "affordable," "for small teams," and make sure a page you control clearly answers each one, because in this category the vendor's own domain is doing a lot of the naming. Then get onto the specific third-party pages these assistants actually read: Gartner, learn.g2.com, the CTO Club, mspcompared.com, viewpointanalysis.com, techvendorindex.com, softwareadvice.com and trustradius.com. Chasing a Reddit thread would be wasted effort here, because Reddit fed zero of these six answers.
The uncomfortable part is that this moves. OctoFleet, a name many buyers would not recognise, was named in 2 of 6 answers and outscored Jamf. That ranking is a snapshot of which pages were retrievable on 2026-08-07, and it will drift as pages change, which is exactly why it is worth watching rather than reading once.
The full list, counted
Every product in the top tier, with how many of the six answers named it and its share of the six.
| Product | Named in | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Action1 | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| Automox | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| NinjaOne | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| ManageEngine Endpoint Central | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Ivanti Endpoint Manager | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Microsoft Intune | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| OctoFleet | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Atera | 1 of 6 | 17% |
| Datto RMM | 1 of 6 | 17% |
Where Glotier fits
Glotier does not sell endpoint management software, so we were not named in any of these six answers, and that is the correct result. We are not in this category, and a tool that invented its own presence here would be worthless to you.
What we do sell is the measurement itself. The table above, the fan-out across "free" and "affordable," the source map showing your own domain doing the work: that is the report Glotier runs for your category, on your product's real buyer questions. The check is free, needs no account and takes about a minute, and it tells you whether ChatGPT and Gemini name you today and which pages you would need to be on to change that.