Data study
I asked ChatGPT to recommend project management software 210 times. Here's who it actually names.
VisibleAI team ·
91%
of answers named Asana (191 of 210)
94%
of answers named at least one of Asana, ClickUp or monday.com (197 of 210)
83
distinct tools named across all 210 answers
20
established PM tools named zero times
ChatGPT · 5 questions × 3 runs · 210 answers
14 scans, one per buyer sub-segment: small teams, agencies, startups, remote teams, free plans, enterprise, construction, marketing teams, software development teams, nonprofits, consultants, manufacturing, freelancers, and time tracking. ChatGPT only (free VisibleAI scans) — Gemini and Perplexity were not part of this study.
We used VisibleAI to put project management buying questions to ChatGPT across 14 buyer sub-segments and counted every tool named in the 210 answers. Here is what it actually recommends.
Three names cover almost every shortlist. Asana was named in 91% of answers, ClickUp and monday.com in 86% each. At least one of those three appeared in 197 of 210 answers (94%). Trello (69%) completes a top four.
Sub-segment wording barely moves the top. Whether the question was about agencies, construction, nonprofits, software teams or freelancers, the same names led the list.
General-purpose tools show up often. Notion (40%), Microsoft Project / Planner / 365 (30%) and Airtable (12%) were named more often than many dedicated project management products, such as Teamwork.com (20%), Linear (14%) and Zoho Projects (4%).
Asana, ClickUp or monday.com appear in 94% of answers; 80 other tools split the rest.
The long tail is real but thin. 83 distinct tools were named across the study, but most appeared in only a handful of answers.
Some established tools never appear. These 20 were named in zero of the 210 answers: Podio, Hive, ProofHub, LiquidPlanner, Celoxis, nTask, Redmine, Pivotal Tracker, Bitrix24, Nifty, Favro, Workzone, YouTrack, Businessmap (Kanbanize), Zenhub, ProjectManager.com, Zenkit, Taskade, Backlog, Wekan. Some are well reviewed — being a good product does not guarantee a place in AI answers.
How we ran this. 14 free VisibleAI scans on ChatGPT, one per sub-segment, each with 5 questions asked 3 times — 210 answers in total. This study covers ChatGPT only.