Opposing Automation: IFTTT Vs. Zapier Vs. Microsoft Flow
Bringing all the web apps and services you use together and working together is trendy, but the two established services for this, IFTTT and Zapier, have now been joined by a new heavyweight: Microsoft Flow. It’s time to compare these three powerful options to see what’s best for whom.
Applicants
Automation services do one simple thing: they create causal relationships between the various web services you use. Want to save every photo you’ve tagged on Facebook to your Dropbox account for safekeeping? Automation does this invisibly, you don’t even need to lift a finger. If This Then That (IFTTT) has been one of our favorite games for a long time , but that doesn’t mean it’s the only game in town. Zapier is a similar service that has been around for a while and is mainly aimed at business users and corporate services. Now Microsoft recently released Flow, a new competitor here. Let’s take a look at each of them:
- IFTTT : IFTTT is very easy to use. As the name suggests, you are setting a trigger: this is the “if”. Then you choose a reaction, that is. IFTTT supports 320 popular services including Dropbox, Drive, WordPress, Twitter and many more. IFTTT calls this “recipes,” and you can view recipes others have created, making it easy to come up with ideas for how you can use the service yourself. In addition to the website, IFTTT also offers Android and iOS apps so you can use them on the go. IFTTT is free. On Android, IFTTT and Tasker work very similarly.
- Zapier : Zapier works the same as IFTTT, but instead of “recipes”, the service calls your actions “zaps”. Zapier is more focused on integrating business applications and therefore supports niche enterprise applications such as Recurly, HelloSign, and MySQL. Zapier is also more customizable. If IFTTT is limited to two steps (it happens, then it happens), Zapier supports multi-step zap operations (it happens, then this, then and then). However, Zapier has no mobile apps. It’s not free either. Even though Zapier has a free plan, it limits you to five zaps at once, blocks access to certain apps, and can only do two-step zaps (like IFTTT). For $ 20 a month, you unlock the real power of Zapier, including access to all 500+ app integrations and multi-stage launches.
- Microsoft Flow : Flow is the newest automation tool on the market and the most limited. As you might expect, Flow’s strength lies in its integration with Microsoft applications and services. Flow works like an IFTTT with two-step automation recipes called “templates”. Just like IFTTT, you can view other people’s templates or share your own. Flow is currently a “preview” version on the web that, in addition to being slightly limited in size, also restricts it to work or school email accounts. This most likely doesn’t apply to you, unless your company is part of the Microsoft ecosystem or you’re a student. But at least there is an iPhone version . Flow is currently free while in preview.
Regardless of which application you end up using, it all simplifies your life by automating basic tasks that you would otherwise have to do manually. What works best for you depends entirely on your needs.
Integration of third-party applications
Each of these three services has strengths and weaknesses when it comes to supported third-party applications, but how much is a simple enough question to answer:
- Zapier : over 500
- IFTTT : 320
- Consumption : 36
But numbers are not important here. The main obvious difference between Zapier and IFTTT is the type of application. Flow has so little support that it’s hardly worth discussing, but unsurprisingly, it’s designed to integrate apps between Office. Flow supports several third party apps including Slack, Facebook, and Instagram.
IFTTT supports mainly consumer oriented software. This includes every social media imaginable, as well as connected home devices like the Philips Hue and Nest Thermostat . Almost all of the IFTTT recipes are taken from apps that regular users need, from Facebook to Spotify . IFTTT is also free, which sounds great on paper, but means third-party integrations can be a little awkward at times. For example, with some recipes, you are more likely to have a slight delay. This is rarely a long delay, but definitely not as instantaneous as Zapier usually has.
If IFTTT focuses on connected devices and mainstream web applications, Zapier enters the business market. This is not to say that Zapier doesn’t have a lot of consumer-friendly app integrations. It definitely works with apps like Wunderlist, Evernote, or Dropbox. But instead of looking for connected devices that Zapier completely ignores, it deals with specific business software. This is most obvious when you look at the Zapier research page . Here you can sort applications by type, for example “accounting”, “call tracking” or “HR”. Depending on what you do for a living, you will find Zapier a useful or useless overkill, so take a moment to see which apps it integrates and which it doesn’t. If you’re looking at Zapier for personal use, that’s fine, but it might be too much and too irrelevant for the average user.
Ease of use and setup
Since automation is all about simplification , it is important that the software you use to do this is easy to use. Otherwise, you will spend more time setting it up than you will save.
This is where things start to break down. IFTTT and Flow are by far the easiest to use, but you can do tons more with Zapier. IFTTT and Flow work in a simple way: one trigger leads to an action. This makes it easy to set up IFTTT and Flow and start using right away.
To create an IFTTT recipe, all you have to do is find the service you want to use as a trigger, select the parameter that starts it, and then choose what you want to happen. This can be anything as long as IFTTT supports the app you want to connect to, from turning an email into a Trello card to sending yourself an email when it rains tomorrow . His viewing function I th h er e l s t rel e t e . Not sure why and how to use IFTTT? Just look at all the recipes that other people have created and use the ones you like. You can browse by overall popularity or by specific app, so if you want something to happen on Instagram, you can search for it with Dropbox or Evernote, for example.
Flow works in a similar way and is just as easy to use, but as we mentioned, it’s only useful for people in the Office ecosystem. Flow can make your life a lot easier with templates like this one, which creates a task in the Wunderlist when you mark an email in Office 365 as important, or one that sends you text when your boss sends you an email . Creating your own template works the same way as in IFTTT. Select the trigger, then the action, and you’re done. However, all of these services are also supported by IFTTT. Pretty much everything in Office 365 is available on IFTTT , so it’s not clear yet why you would want to use Flow over IFTTT.
Due to the amount of customization Zapier offers, it is a little more complicated than IFTTT at first. It can be as simple as IFTTT, with one trigger leading to one action. Or, you can make one trigger lead to several actions. Or, if you really want to be specific, Zapier supports filters that only fire triggers when keywords are found. For example, you can set up an email trigger that fires only when the word “vacation” is in the body of the email. Due to the multitude of options, creating even a 2-step seal in Zapier takes a little longer than in IFTTT.
IFTTT is clearly the winner here. It takes less than five minutes to learn how to use it, and the ease of browsing the recipes allows even the least tech-savvy people to understand why they used them.
Mobile apps and accessibility
Given that Zapier doesn’t have mobile apps, IFTTT is the best option if you prefer to work from your Android phone or iPhone. In addition to the excellent IF apps , IFTTT also has three single-purpose apps: the DO button, which acts as a manual trigger for recipes, the DO camera, which will share photos with multiple services at once, and DO Note, which does the same for text. … More importantly, the IF application is fully functional. Anything you can do in the web version of IFTTT you can do in the mobile app. What’s more, the mobile app actually integrates with your phone’s services, so you can do things like save iOS photos directly to Dropbox, or automatically send text to Android when you arrive . The thing is, the IFTTT mobile apps are fantastic, they can do a ton of different things, and like the web app they are free.
Sadly, Zapier doesn’t have mobile apps, but it has nothing to offer better than what Microsoft has done with its Flow app. Microsoft Flow is currently only available on iPhones and is just a skin for the web version. In fact, when you try to create a template, you are taken to a website. Again, Microsoft Flow is still in preview mode so we won’t be complaining too much, but the app is pretty useless right now.
IFTTT is the best here by default, but it’s worth noting the strengths of its mobile apps nonetheless. You can happily use exclusively mobile apps without ever touching the desktop version, which is an astounding achievement.
Verdict: IFTTT is best for most people, Zapier is great for business users and avoids flow for now
The winners here are pretty easy to decide. If you’re a casual user who wants to automate a few basic things, choose IFTTT. If you are a business user or have been using IFTTT for a while and want to be able to do more with it, then choose Zapier.
IFTTT is powerful enough for most people, but more importantly, a huge database of ready-made recipes acts as a guide to how to use it.
You can also browse the “popular archives” on Zapier, but this is not as intuitive or fun to browse. Implementing popular zap files is also not easy. Anyway, if you want to tweak, tinker and experiment with triggers and actions, Zapier is the web app you need. And all this on top of the fact that Zapier’s vast array of enterprise applications makes it the obvious choice for anyone using niche business software.
We’ll loosen up Flow a bit because it’s a preview build, but it’s still pretty hard to tell why it even exists or why Microsoft even released it in this state. On the surface, it works exactly like IFTTT, but with very limited capabilities. It doesn’t add anything new to the spreadsheet other than the Wunderlist integration, which is fairly easy to bypass using any of these hacky IFTTT integrations . Right now, there is no reason to use this other than pure curiosity.