The Verdict: IFTTT Is Best for Most People, Zapier’s Great for Business Users, and Avoid Flow for Now

The winners here are pretty easy to declare. If you’re a casual user looking to automate a few basic things, go with IFTTT. If you’re a business user, or you’ve been using IFTTT for a while and wish you could do more with it, then go with Zapier.

IFTTT is powerful enough for most people, but more importantly, the massive database of pre-made recipes work like an instruction manual for how to use it.

You can look through “popular zaps” on Zapier too, but it’s not as intuitive or fun to browse. Implementing the popular zaps you find isn’t as easy either. Regardless, if you want to tweak, fiddle, and futz about with the specifics of triggers and actions, Zapier’s the webapp you want. That’s all beside the fact that Zapier’s extensive amount of enterprise apps makes it the obvious choice for anyone who uses niche business software.

We’ll cut Flow some slack here because it’s a preview build, but it’s still pretty hard to tell why it exists in the first place, or why Microsoft even released it in this state. At a glance, it works exactly like IFTTT, but in an extremely limited capacity. It doesn’t add anything new to the table other than Wunderlist integration, which is easy enough to get around by using any of these hacky integrations on IFTTT. Right now, there’s no reason to use it other than pure curiosity.