Which should you use? [2026]

In his bestselling book Atomic Habits, productivity expert James Clear talks about the power of “onetime actions” that improve your life indefinitely. Automation is a perfect example: you can create workflows that remind you to apply sunscreen when the UV index is high, or that automatically turn off your home’s lights at 9 p.m. so you go to bed earlier.

IFTTT works well for this sort of use case. It’s a simple single-step automation app focused on habits, personal productivity, and smart home workflows. But if you’re automating anything related to business, you’ll quickly outgrow IFTTT’s capabilities.

Zapier, on the other hand, is built for businesses of all sizes, from solopreneurs to enterprises. It’s an AI orchestration platform that integrates automation into a broader suite of products, including chatbots, agents, databases, interfaces, and workflow diagramming. With Copilot, Zapier’s AI assistant, even beginners can easily tie all of these products together into custom AI business systems.

In short: IFTTT is a good fit for lightweight personal use and smart home automation, while Zapier is a far more capable choice for businesses. Here’s a full comparison to help you choose between them.

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Zapier vs. IFTTT at a glance

IFTTT is built for simple personal automation, while Zapier focuses on connecting business apps, building reliable workflows, and creating holistic business systems.

Here’s a quick overview, but read on for more details.

Zapier is built for business; IFTTT is for personal use

IFTTT is one of the internet’s original automation tools. Originally launched in 2011, it’s grown to 27 million users and hundreds of integrations. IFTTT is primarily designed to enable personal productivity and automate smart devices, and there are some pretty interesting ways to use it.

For example, IFTTT can:

• Turn on your Philips Hue smart lights when your home’s security camera detects motion

• Create personalized Spotify playlists when you click “like” on YouTube music videos

• Automatically start your iRobot when you leave the house (using your phone’s location service)

IFTTT also has a mobile app that lets you add buttons to your phone’s homescreen that initiate automations. If you want to change your smart lights to “party mode” or start tracking time on Google Sheets, you can just press the button. Want to secretly request a phone call to extract yourself from meetings and awkward conversations? IFTTT has a button for that, too.

While IFTTT has plenty of fun, time-saving automations, it’s far less focused on the world of business apps. You can find “Applets” (IFTTT’s term for workflows) for business-oriented tools like QuickBooks, Airtable, and Notion, but even those are still largely set up for personal use cases. For example, one popular IFTTT workflow uses Airtable to log your daily Fitbit activity.

Zapier, by contrast, was designed from the ground up for work. It’s used by 3.4 million teams of all sizes, including real estate brokers, SaaS companies, and major global brands. With 8,000+ app integrations, you can find prebuilt connections for nearly any business app you use.

For example, Zapier can:

Any of Zapier’s thousands of prebuilt workflows can be customized to the specific needs of your business by simply chatting with Copilot, Zapier’s AI assistant—or you can easily create your own. (You can also go much further and create full business systems, which we’ll explore in the next section.)

Unlike IFTTT, which doesn’t offer team plans, Zapier is designed for collaboration. Everyone on your team can access automations through a shared workspace, and you can set up role-based permissions to clarify who can see what. Larger teams will appreciate Zapier’s admin center, which makes it easy for IT to monitor organization-wide automation activity and set up guardrails that define what can (and can’t) be automated.

By giving everyone on your team access to AI and automation tools, Zapier empowers each person to dream up workflows that make their life easier and launch them independently. This democratized approach to AI automation often speeds up growth. Andrew Harding, VP Marketing & Content Partnerships at Slate Magazine, says, “We’re training the team to build for themselves. That’s the magic—going from idea to execution without waiting on anyone. The more AI-first builders we have, the faster we grow.”

Zapier offers full AI orchestration; IFTTT handles simple workflows

IFTTT is all about simplicity. For most people, using IFTTT is a matter of searching for the app you want to connect, clicking an automation, connecting the apps, and launching. It’s painless and quick.

If you can’t find what you need as a prebuilt Applet, you can create your own automations. Beyond selecting the trigger and action, you can also add delays, run queries, and add JavaScript filter code to give you more control over your automation.

IFTTT also offers a “build with AI” feature that streamlines the process of creating simple automations.

That’s pretty much the extent of IFTTT’s features. For basic personal use cases, this simplicity is probably a good thing: it’s easy to navigate, and there aren’t a lot of options to overwhelm beginners. But if you ever need anything more advanced than single-step automations, IFTTT isn’t the sort of platform that can grow with you.

Zapier makes it equally user-friendly to launch simple automations, but you can also get as complex as you need to.

For example, you can:

This makes Zapier much more adaptable to real business scenarios like creating customer support workflows, which might involve assessing whether an issue is urgent, assigning it to the right team member, and posting updates and notifications along the way.

Beyond automation, Zapier is a full AI orchestration platform that includes:

• Tables to store and manage business data

• Interfaces to create forms, dashboards, and portals

• Chatbots to embed AI-powered chat into websites or internal systems

• Agents for AI-powered decision-making that you can embed within workflows

• Canvas to visually map your business processes and create multi-product workflows

Coordinating between all these products remains surprisingly easy because of Zapier Copilot. Non-technical users can get started with almost no learning curve by simply describing what they need, whether that’s a single-step automation or a complex multi-product business system.

The ability to ask Copilot for the outcome you want—rather than having to specify each step along the way—means Zapier makes it incredibly easy and fast to deploy AI systems in your business. For the “applicant tracking system” prompt above, for example, Copilot automatically created an application form, designed a database with fields matching the form, wrote instructions for an Application Scorer Agent, created an automation to tie everything together, and mapped it out visually in Canvas.

Zapier is designed for business-grade reliability

When you’re automating personal tasks, like saving Instagram posts or turning on smart lights, it’s ok for workflows to fail every once in a while. But in a business context, the stakes are higher. You can easily miss out on sales opportunities, drop the ball with customers, or throw a wrench in your internal systems due to a processing error or an API change.

Zapier is built with this reality in mind. Each integration is tested and QA’d regularly, and Zapier manages connector updates in-house when APIs change to make sure your workflows keep running smoothly.

If an API is temporarily unavailable or a service is experiencing downtime, Zapier automatically attempts to run the errored steps again rather than just failing and moving on. You can also set up custom error handling for specific scenarios, like sending yourself a Slack notification when an important automation fails or triggering a backup workflow when the primary path doesn’t work.

Zapier’s built-in redundancies mean you always have options even if something goes wrong. Every Zap includes detailed task histories that show exactly what ran, when it ran, and whether it succeeded. If something breaks, you can see the error logs, understand what went wrong, and fix it quickly. And with version history and version rollback, you can quickly restore to a prior version of your automation.

Zapier connects with 8,000+ apps; IFTTT is popular for smart home and IoT

IFTTT connects with 900+ apps including Spotify, Slack, and Instagram. Its competitive edge is consumer smart home products and IoT apps: if you want to automate your smart lights, speakers, cameras, or alarms, IFTTT is a great option.

You can:

• Reduce volume on your Sonos speakers when your Ring doorbell rings

• Start an iRobot cleaning job when you leave your house

• Turn off your smart power switch when it’s bedtime

However, once you leave the world of smart home products and consumer apps, you’ll find limitations pretty quickly—especially if you want to connect with business apps.

While IFTTT includes some handy features for local businesses, like workflows that use AI to respond to your Google reviews, it’s missing a lot of basic business apps. There’s no integration with Shopify, Zendesk, Intercom, or Canva, for example. And even when you do find the business workflows you need on IFTTT, there’s a good chance they’ve been created by individual users rather than the brands themselves.

Zapier’s 8,000+ app connections are either created by Zapier or designed by the brands themselves and approved by Zapier; all of them are managed in-house and tested regularly, making them far more reliable for business use. You can find integrations for pretty much any business app you can think of, from foundational business platforms like HubSpot to newer AI apps like ElevenLabs.

You also get access to an impressive depth of triggers and actions with Zapier, which means you can almost always rely on prebuilt options rather than dealing with custom webhooks. For example, Zapier’s HubSpot integration offers 25+ trigger events: you can start automations when there’s a new deal, a new contact, an updated deal stage, and much more.

While it’s sometimes workable to use IFTTT for business-adjacent tasks, like duplicating Instagram posts to your Google Business Profile, Zapier’s reliability and breadth of coverage means it’s the only real choice for anything that’s business-critical.

IFTTT is priced for lightweight individual use; Zapier’s pricing is competitive and scales flexibly

Cost is the biggest driver for many people considering IFTTT. It’s a uniquely affordable automation solution: for $2.99/month, you can set up 20 Applets (as IFTTT calls their integrations), and for $8.99/month, you get unlimited Applets and the ability to connect AI services.

There’s also a free plan including two Applets and unlimited automation runs, though this plan has gotten progressively more limited over time. (IFTTT once offered unlimited Applets for free, then shrank to three and now offers two.) Still, casual IFTTT users automating smart home features or sending daily reminders to themselves can handle up to two basic automations without upgrading.

One notable absence is any sort of IFTTT team plan. It’s simply not a platform that’s designed for collaboration; while IFTTT’s $8.99/month Pro+ plan positions itself toward small business owners, it really only works for owner-operators like freelancers and service business owners.

Zapier’s pricing starts higher, but it offers far more value. The free plan gives you 100 tasks per month with unlimited Zaps, Tables, and Interfaces, plus access to Zapier Copilot. Professional is $19.99/month for 750 tasks and multi-step workflows, while Team is $69/month for 2,000 tasks and up to 25 users. Enterprise plans offer custom pricing with unlimited users.

If you’re growing your business, Zapier is designed to scale with you gradually based on your task consumption, so you’re never paying more than you need to. You can start for free, upgrade to an individual account to run a pilot project, and switch to Zapier’s Team plan whenever you’re ready to add collaborators.

IFTTT vs. Zapier: Which is best?

IFTTT works well for personal productivity hacks and smart home automation. But once you’re running a business—whether that’s a solo operation or a growing team—Zapier’s reliability, feature depth, and collaboration options make it a much better option.

Choose IFTTT if:

• You want to automate lightweight personal tasks or smart home devices

• You’re comfortable with simple, single-step workflows

• You’re on a barebones budget and can accept less reliability

• You don’t need team collaboration features

Choose Zapier if:

• You’re running a business and need reliability

• You want the flexibility to create advanced workflows

• You need access to Zapier’s 8,000+ integrations

• You’re building full AI business systems with agents, forms, and databases

• You want to empower your team to create AI automations

Start with Zapier’s free plan to see how it handles your business workflows, or upgrade to a paid plan starting at $19.99/month when you’re ready to scale.

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