When asked for the best spreadsheet database tool, 5 AI assistants named 6 brands between them this month. Airtable was named most often, followed by Google Sheets and Smartsheet. 2 brands were named by every assistant that answered: Airtable, Google Sheets.
Who named whom
| Brand | ChatGPT | Perplexity | Claude | Grok | DeepSeek | Named by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Airtable | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | 5 of 5 |
| Google Sheets | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | 5 of 5 |
| Smartsheet | ✓ | ✓ | · | ✓ | ✓ | 4 of 5 |
| Notion | · | · | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | 3 of 5 |
| Microsoft Excel | ✓ | · | ✓ | · | · | 2 of 5 |
| Zoho Sheet | ✓ | ✓ | · | · | · | 2 of 5 |
Share of voice
What each assistant said
ChatGPT
Named 5 brands, in this order: Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, Airtable, Zoho Sheet, Smartsheet.
Choosing the best spreadsheet and database tool for a small business depends on your specific needs, budget, and the complexity of the tasks you intend to manage.
Perplexity
Named 4 brands, in this order: Airtable, Google Sheets, Smartsheet, Zoho Sheet.
For most small businesses, Airtable is the best spreadsheet-database tool because it is repeatedly ranked as the strongest all-around option for SMBs, balancing ease of use, features, and value.
Claude
Named 4 brands, in this order: Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, Airtable, Notion.
Here are the top options depending on your needs:
Grok
Named 4 brands, in this order: Airtable, Google Sheets, Notion, Smartsheet.
DeepSeek
Named 4 brands, in this order: Airtable, Google Sheets, Notion, Smartsheet.
There's no single "best" tool — it depends on your team's technical comfort, data volume, and budget.
The questions asked
- What is the best spreadsheet database tool for a small business?
Asked between 2026-09-26 and 2026-09-26. Not answering this month: Gemini, Mistral, Cohere.
Track what AI assistants say about every client, with white-label reports your clients can read.
See the GEO suiteHow this was measured
Each month we ask every assistant the same plain buyer questions, worded the way a person shopping for this kind of product would ask them, with no brand suggested in the question except where the question itself names the market leader to find alternatives to. Each assistant answers in a fresh session with no earlier conversation, so an answer reflects what the assistant says to anyone who asks, not what it was steered towards.
From each answer we keep the product and company names it recommends. A name counts only when it appears in the answer as a proper name, is not a heading such as "Best for" or "Pricing", and is confirmed by a second assistant naming it too, by a website the answer cites, or by being the market leader named in the question. Share of voice is each brand's share of all brand mentions in the category this month. Assistants that could not answer this month are listed as not answering, never counted as naming nobody.
Cite this page
https://mentionfox.com/ai-recommends/spreadsheet-alternatives