The Zapier founder's primary talent seems to be self-promotion (and they built a cool thing too). They've managed to land guest articles on Techcrunch, I heard they ask other new founders to mention Zapier on YC demo days, I have seem them exploit rivalry among competitors to get them all signed up (X is on Zapier, maybe you should be too), and they've put a lot into the SEO optimization of their pages, generating nearly unique landing pages for every possible combination of the services they offer. This is not criticism, this is praise. I'm kind of in awe.
I've never tried IFTTT, but I have used Zapier and the service is pretty good. My take is that engineers can set up scripts that can connect APIs themselves, which has benefits and drawbacks. Like it takes time to build a script that does this, and you have to keep it up to date as those APIs change, but on the other hand Zapier and probably IFTTT's integrations are very shallow and don't allow you to do much automatic processing of data.
> Zapier and probably IFTTT's integrations are very shallow and don't allow you to do much automatic processing of data.
Given their target market, I see that as their competitive advantage. It's all too easy to appeal to the very technical, and allow them to plugin scripts and filters and whatnot into the pipeline, but by reducing all of that complexity down to "if this, then that" they are much more approachable by a huge audience.
I've never tried IFTTT, but I have used Zapier and the service is pretty good. My take is that engineers can set up scripts that can connect APIs themselves, which has benefits and drawbacks. Like it takes time to build a script that does this, and you have to keep it up to date as those APIs change, but on the other hand Zapier and probably IFTTT's integrations are very shallow and don't allow you to do much automatic processing of data.