The eta photoproduction near threshold has a number of similarities and differences in comparison to the pi‐zero photoproduction near threshold. Both processes probe Born amplitudes involving the s‐ and u‐ channel nucleon exchanges. While eta production is also sensitive to the vector meson contribution in the t‐chennel and excitation of several baryond resonances the pi‐zero process is not. The former has a large s‐channelS11 (1535) excitation amplitude, but the latter has a relatively small contribution from the &Dgr;(1232) excitation. We discuss the implications of our analysis on the recent Bates data presented at this conference, and report the value of theA1/2amplitude for theS11 → N&ggr;transition that we can extract from the existing eta photoproduction experiments. The latter is of interest to the test of hadron models.