Native deserves real credit: it made aluminum-free deodorant a mainstream product. So why does Zaffré exist? Because a meaningful group of people try the mainstream formula and end up with one of two problems, a burning rash, or odor that breaks through by mid-afternoon. This is for those people, and we'll be straight about where Native wins too.
You want the lowest price, a huge range of scents, big-box availability, and your skin tolerates baking soda without issue.
Baking soda has burned you, natural deodorants tend to quit on you by mid-day, or you've found oil marks on your shirts from butter-based sticks.
How each one fights odor
Native's classic formula is built around baking soda in a base of coconut oil and shea butter. Baking soda neutralizes the acidic compounds bacteria make from sweat, and it works. The catch is how it delivers: sodium bicarbonate dissolves readily, so in sweat it goes into solution fast and essentially completely. Whatever is in the stick becomes available alkalinity, quickly. That's why baking soda is the most common source of natural-deodorant rash, and why Native itself sells a separate sensitive line without it.
Zaffré's BioShield formulas take a different route: a zinc mineral that captures the odor compounds at the skin, where bacteria break down sweat. The BioShield formulas contain no baking soda, and they're Dermatologist Tested. Full mechanism in How Zinc Deodorant Works.
Sensitive skin
The usual explanation for why baking soda burns is a pH gap, and it's not quite right. Underarm skin isn't as acidic as the rest of you to begin with. Controlled measurement puts baseline axillary pH around 6.5 to 6.7 in men and 5.8 to 5.9 in women, well above the forearm figure everyone quotes. The gap is real, just smaller and more variable than advertised.
What actually matters is dose and delivery. An alkaline powder sitting in a wax base only becomes active as your sweat dissolves it, so the question is how much is in there and how fast it releases. Baking soda releases fast and completely. Magnesium hydroxide, the usual replacement, barely dissolves and self-limits, which is why it's better tolerated even though a saturated solution of it reaches a higher pH than baking soda does.
Native's answer to sensitive skin is a separate sensitive line. Zaffré's answer is that the BioShield formulas never contained baking soda in the first place, and Sensitive goes further still: no alkaline active at all, not even magnesium. For skin that reacts, the safest amount of one is none.
Fabric and staining
Formulas built on coconut oil and plant butters can transfer to fabric and leave darkened marks over time. During development, Zaffré tested and rejected coconut-oil bases specifically for this reason, building the glide system on engineered esters instead. More in Does Natural Deodorant Stain Clothes?
Price and value
Native is cheaper, around $13 to $14 per stick against Zaffré's $22 to $32. Two things narrow the gap: Zaffré's high-density sticks are formulated so a thin layer works, so they last longer than the sticker suggests; and if a $13 stick gives you a rash or fails by 2 PM, it wasn't actually cheap.
Not sure which Zaffré? The comparison page takes about a minute.