Minor point but arguably both are Yahoo Pipes-type glue provider, which itself is basic no-code glue thing. The difference is that IFTTT erred on the side of dumbing the product down too much, and Zapier erred on the side of being too much B2B-focused - so they both missed the mark on becoming the universal glue.

Then of course we have Node-Red too, which probably is too developer focused (and generally just lacking any sort of focus at the same time, strangely), so also doesn't sit somewhere closer to the middle.

Do we really not having anything coming close to the usefulness of Yahoo Pipes yet? What would a modern alternative look like and how would it work? Someone has to thinking about this.

If we're considering Node-Red, it would not be amiss to also mention N8N - which, mirroring the IFTTT/Zapier split, is basically the opposite of Node-Red on the "let's turn this into an enterprise product" scale.

> Do we really not having anything coming close to the usefulness of Yahoo Pipes yet?

I don't know of anything. There's some new products I saw heavily promoted on LinkedIn, but at first glance they feel like IFTTT with a shiny coat of paint.

> What would a modern alternative look like and how would it work?

At this point I think ComfyUI or the node editor in Blender would be the best; they're oriented for different kinds of workflows, but UIs of both are excellent in their own ways, and the rest is a matter of implementing the right blocks.

And to answer the obvious next question: yes, there is an MCP for IFTTT https://mcp.pipedream.com/app/ifttt

It’s more useful the other way :p

But zapier is easily Google-able and therefore useful as a reference name even if the commenter hasn't heard of it.

Not as easily Goolge’d as “IFTTT” with five characters versus six.