Conserved proteins drive clathrin-mediated endocytosis (CME), which universally involves a burst of actin assembly. To gain fundamental mechanistic insights into this process, a side-by-side quantitative comparison of CME was performed on two distantly related yeast species. Though endocytic protein abundance in S. pombe and S. cerevisiae are more similar than previously thought, membrane invagination speed and depth are two-fold greater in fission yeast than in budding yeast. In both yeasts, Arp2/3 complex activation drives membrane invagination when triggered by the accumulation of ∼70 WASP molecules. In contrast to budding yeast, WASP-mediated actin nucleation activity plays an essential role in fission yeast endocytosis. Genetics and live-cell imaging revealed core CME spatiodynamic similarities between the two yeasts, though two-zone actin assembly is a fission yeast-specific mechanism, which is not essential for CME. These studies identified conserved CME mechanisms and species-specific adaptations and have broad implications that extend from yeast to humans.