I do find that some people/articles think that ZFNet is not the winner, this conclusion maybe come from the ranking of ILSVRC that Clarifai is the winner instead of ZF. However, Clarifai is the company founded by the author of ZFNet, Zeiler.

In addition, according to the official paper "ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge" (https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.0575) with over 18000 citations, it mentioned:

“There were 24 teams participating in the ILSVRC2013 competition, compared to 21 in the previous three years combined. Following the success of the deep learning-based method in 2012, the vast majority of entries in 2013 used deep convolutional neural networks in their submission. The winner of the classification task was Clarifai, with several large deep convolutional networks averaged together. The network architectures were chosen using the visualization technique of (Zeiler and Fergus, 2013),…”

The reference (Zeiler and Fergus, 2013) cited as in the above passage is ZFNet. Thus, it is officially announced that ZFNet is the winner!