Independent research by CitedGEO. Not a client engagement. No vendor listed below paid for or reviewed this analysis.
What we measured
Niche: project management software for small architecture and design firms (5-15 people, phase-based billing, client-facing deliverables).
Engine: Perplexity, default web search mode, one logged-in account, no custom Space or model override.
Method: 10 commercial prompts, each run 3 times, sequentially, on 2026-09-23. 30 answers total. For each answer we captured the full rendered text and every outbound link visible in the DOM at capture time. Mentions were counted only in the answer body, not in Perplexity's own session sidebar or related-questions block — see Limits.
The 10 prompts:
- best project management tool for a 10-person architecture firm
- alternatives to Monday for design studios
- software to track billable hours by project phase
- project management software for small architecture firms
- best software for architects to manage client projects and invoicing
- Asana vs Monday for a small architecture firm project tracking
- tools for architects to track project phases from schematic design to construction documents
- best resource management software for small design studios
- project management app for interior design and architecture firms with time tracking
- what software do architecture firms use to manage multiple projects and deadlines
Mention rate (28 brands named across 30 answers)
| Brand | Answers naming the brand / 30 | Mention rate | Domain cited |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asana | 22 | 73% | 0 |
| Monograph | 21 | 70% | 2 |
| monday.com | 20 | 67% | 2 |
| BQE Core | 19 | 63% | 1 |
| ClickUp | 19 | 63% | 0 |
| Deltek (Ajera/Vantagepoint) | 16 | 53% | 0 |
| Teamwork | 15 | 50% | 1 |
| Autodesk Construction Cloud | 14 | 47% | 2 |
| Harvest | 13 | 43% | 0 |
| Wrike | 12 | 40% | 0 |
| Productive | 10 | 33% | 2 |
| Notion | 8 | 27% | 0 |
| Projectworks | 7 | 23% | 2 |
| Newforma | 6 | 20% | 0 |
| Trello | 6 | 20% | 0 |
| Toggl | 6 | 20% | 0 |
| Tempo | 5 | 17% | 3 |
| Paymo | 5 | 17% | 1 |
10 more brands were named 1-4 times each: BigTime, Jira, Scoro, Float (4 each), Basecamp (3), Plutio, Microsoft Project, Primavera P6 (2 each), MinuteDock, Odoo (1 each).
"Domain cited" counts the brand's own site among captured outbound links, not text mentions — see Limits.
Top 10 cited domains (74 outbound links captured across 30 answers)
| Domain | Citations |
|---|---|
| monograph.com | 5 |
| rize.io | 5 |
| breeze.pm | 4 |
| quickbase.com | 4 |
| worksection.com | 4 |
| ingenious.build | 3 |
| archivinci.com | 3 |
| autodesk.com | 3 |
| workyard.com | 3 |
| tempo.io | 3 |
Half of these are third-party comparison blogs (rize.io, breeze.pm, worksection.com, archivinci.com, workyard.com), not vendor pages.
Observations
- Asana (22/30) narrowly leads monday.com (20/30) and Monograph (21/30) — but 2 of the 10 prompts name Monday or Asana by brand ("alternatives to Monday...", "Asana vs Monday..."), which mechanically pulls both in. Excluding those 2 prompts, the ranking flips: Monograph and BQE Core tie for the lead at 18/24 (75%), ahead of Asana (16/24, 67%) and monday.com (14/24, 58%). No prompt names Monograph or BQE Core.
- Monograph, built around phase-based billing for architects, is the most stable brand: present in 7 of 10 prompts, all 3 runs in every one of those 7, zero partial appearances — but absent from the prompt about tracking billable hours by phase, and from both "design studio" prompts.
- monday.com and ClickUp are the least stable high-volume brands: monday.com is full 3-of-3 in only 5 of the 10 prompts it appears in, ClickUp in only 4 of 8 — the same prompt run three times gives a different answer more often for these two than for Monograph or BQE Core.
- Deltek and Autodesk Construction Cloud cluster around firm-operations and construction-document prompts (financials, scheduling, schematic-to-CD phases) and are absent from both "design studio" prompts, while Asana and Monograph show the opposite pattern. Perplexity treats "architecture firm" and "design studio" as different reference classes, not synonyms.
- Citations are thin relative to mentions: 74 outbound links across 30 answers, 2.5 per answer, despite answers routinely citing "15 sources" in text. Listicle blogs (rize.io, breeze.pm, worksection.com) are cited as often as the leading vendor's own site.
Limits
- One engine (Perplexity), one account, one date (2026-09-23), one location — no cross-engine or cross-geo comparison.
- 30 answers is a small sample for a 10-prompt set; stability figures (3-of-3 vs 1-2-of-3) rest on exactly 3 runs.
- 2 of the 10 prompts name Monday or Asana directly, inflating their raw counts (see observation 1 for the picture excluding those 2). Read the 30-run ranking for those two brands as a ceiling, not a neutral mention rate.
- The page's full
innerTextincludes Perplexity's session-history sidebar and a related-questions block, which first miscounted monday.com at 30/30 by reading past-session titles like "alternatives to Monday..." as answer content. Fixed: mentions now count only the answer body, between the page's "Share" control and its "N sources" line, checked against all 30 raw files. Domain-citation links were checked separately and are unaffected — all captured links point to external vendor or media domains, none to the sidebar or related questions. - Domain-citation counts reflect only outbound links rendered as clickable anchors at capture time; answers often cite more sources in text than links present on the page, so citation counts here are a lower bound.
- Brand mentions were matched by a manually built dictionary; a brand under a spelling outside that dictionary would not be counted.