Workvivo was the product ChatGPT and Gemini named most often when we asked them to recommend intranet software: it showed up in 4 of the 6 buyer questions we ran on 2026-08-06, more than any other tool in the category.
SharePoint came second, named in 3 of the 6 answers. After that the field settles into a six-way tie: Jostle, LumApps, Noodle, Simpplr, Staffbase and Unily were each named in exactly 2 of the 6 answers. Workvivo was the only product named in more than half of the questions (4 of 6), and SharePoint hit exactly half (3 of 6). No tool was named in all six.
Below the leaders the category fragments hard. Our six questions produced 25 different product names in total, and 17 of those 25 were named in just one of the six questions. So two-thirds of the intranet tools ChatGPT and Gemini mentioned came up for a single phrasing and never again. This is a category with a couple of default answers and a very long tail behind them.
How the shortlist changed across the six questions
The clearest pattern is that the leaders vanish the moment a buyer adds a price word. Workvivo was named in 4 of 6 questions, but zero of those four were "best free intranet software" or "most affordable intranet software." Its four mentions all came from the questions with no price in them: "best intranet software," "best intranet software for small teams," "what intranet software should I use," and "intranet software recommendations."
The bare "best intranet software" question and the "best free intranet software" question shared no products at all. "Best" returned eight names: Simpplr, Unily, Workvivo, LumApps, Staffbase, Appspace, Microsoft SharePoint and AgilityPortal. "Best free" returned a completely separate eight: Noodle, Connecteam, Bitrix24, Microsoft Viva Engage, eXo Platform, Jostle, Zoho Connect and Brosix. Not one product carried from the paid list to the free list.
"Most affordable intranet software" produced a third, mostly separate set of six: Oak Engage, Intranet Connections, MyHub, Jostle, Communifire (Axero) and Noodle. It shared nothing with the bare "best" list, and only two names with the free list. Jostle and Noodle were the only products to appear in both the free and the affordable questions, and in no other question of the six. If you sell an intranet on price, those are the two names already sitting in the answers your budget buyers see.
Plenty of products owe their whole presence to one question. "Best free" was the only place Connecteam, Bitrix24, Microsoft Viva Engage, eXo Platform, Zoho Connect and Brosix appeared. "Most affordable" was the sole source of Oak Engage, Intranet Connections, MyHub and Communifire (Axero). Appspace, Microsoft SharePoint and AgilityPortal came up only under bare "best." Axero appeared only under "small teams," Firstup and Confluence only under "what should I use," and Interact only under "recommendations." Change the buyer's wording and you change almost the entire shortlist.
The two most generic questions behaved nearly identically. "Best intranet software" and "intranet software recommendations" shared five names: Simpplr, Unily, Workvivo, LumApps and Staffbase appeared in both. So the enterprise-leaning shortlist is stable across generic phrasings, but it collapses completely the moment a buyer types "free" or "affordable." A vendor cannot win "intranet software" as a single fixed list, because there is no single list.
The source map behind the answers
Reddit fed every single answer. reddit.com was cited in all 6 of the 6 questions, more often than any review site, vendor page or analyst. Add the other community forums, Quora at 3 of 6 and Spiceworks at 2 of 6, and community threads were the backbone of these recommendations, not a footnote to them.
Review directories did appear, but they did not dominate. G2 was cited in 4 of the 6 questions, Gartner in 2, and Capterra in just 1. So the buyer-review sites a vendor usually pours effort into were present, yet a single Reddit thread was referenced more often (6 of 6) than G2 (4 of 6). The rest of the field was roundup blogs: peoplemanagingpeople.com, hub-intranet.com, agilityportal.io, concretecms.com and dotcms.com were each cited in 2 of the 6 answers.
Here is the insight a marketer should act on: several vendors' own websites fed the answers, and those vendors got named. Workvivo's own site, workvivo.com, was cited in 2 of the 6 answers, and Workvivo was the most-named product at 4 of 6. Staffbase's site fed 2 of 6 answers and Staffbase was named in 2 of 6. Simpplr's own site was the single most-cited vendor domain, feeding 3 of the 6 answers. The content these companies publish about their own category is being read back to buyers as a recommendation.
Being your own source is not a guarantee, though. simpplr.com fed 3 of 6 answers but Simpplr the product was named in only 2, and one answer its content fed was "most affordable intranet software," where ChatGPT and Gemini named Oak Engage, Intranet Connections, MyHub, Jostle, Communifire (Axero) and Noodle instead. Useful category content gets cited even when it ends up pointing at your competitors.
What it takes to get named
If you sell intranet software, the takeaway is narrow and practical: get into these exact sources, because the source list, not your market share, decides who is named. Across all six questions the assistants named the products that the pages in front of them named. There is no separate popularity signal in these answers, only the 21 domains that fed them.
Concretely, that means being discussed in the community threads that carried every answer, starting with Reddit at 6 of 6 and Quora at 3 of 6, being present on G2, which fed 4 of 6, and publishing your own category content the way workvivo.com and staffbase.com did, each feeding 2 of the 6 answers for products that then got named. A vendor with a strong product and none of that presence simply will not show up, the same way 17 of the 25 named tools appeared for one phrasing and disappeared for the other five.
The full list, counted
| Product | Named in | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Workvivo | 4 of 6 | 67% |
| SharePoint | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Jostle | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| LumApps | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Noodle | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Simpplr | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Staffbase | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Unily | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Microsoft SharePoint | 1 of 6 | 17% |
Two brands show up under two labels, which is why we list them separately instead of adding them together. SharePoint was named in 3 of 6 answers and "Microsoft SharePoint" in 1 more, so Microsoft's product was actually referenced across four of the six questions under two different names. Likewise Axero was named once and "Communifire (Axero)," its product, once more. We report what the assistants literally said rather than merging labels into a number the measurement never produced.
Glotier does not sell intranet software, so we are correctly absent from all 25 names above, and we would not add ourselves. But running this exact measurement is what Glotier does. We ask ChatGPT and Gemini the questions your buyers actually type, record every product named and every source behind the answer, and show you whether your product is in the set, or, like most of this category, only there for one phrasing. If you want to see where your own product stands, the check is free, needs no account, and takes about a minute.