The top 4 brands in the market place occupy about 96% of all the sales of compact tractors. They are, Kubota (60%), John Deere (20%), Case/New Holland (12%) and Mahindra (4%), in that sequence.
Numbers are pretty sketchy after that, but Cub Cadet and Massey Ferguson seem to be #5 and #6 or possibly #6 and #5.
What you will find is that individual tractors of any brand may have some specific advantages for some specific jobs but may also have some specific disadvantages for other jobs. And while some brands push one feature, that feature may be irrelevant, or even detrimental to the majority of tasks you have to do. Other brands may have tractors of different design types that are more or less job specific.
Consider the Corvette, great for going fast, excellent in turns, but not so good in deep mud. Consider the 2wd Colorado, great for light hauling, lousy in the snow. Consider a 4wd Tahoe with offroad tires, loud on the highway, wallows in turns, but great in snow and mud. Tractors are much the same way; different characteristics like weight per horsepower, transmission type, physical size, etc can yield dramatically different virtues. The common mistake people make it to compare HORSEPOWER when they really need to compare characteristics. But they really only should do that AFTER they indentify the jobs they need to do and what characteristics are best suited to accomplish those long term jobs the best.
Then look at the dealerships. Some brands do not even require their dealers to have a service department, let alone stock spare parts. Other brands require trained and certified repair technicians and a parts department that stocks all common maintenance parts, wear parts, etc.
