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.
You need a formula with no baking soda in it, 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 thing to know is that it's carrying the whole load there. Sodium bicarbonate dissolves readily, so in sweat it goes into solution fast and essentially completely, and when it's the only active in the stick, how you get on comes down to how much of it your skin is happy with. That's why Native sells a separate sensitive line without it.
Zaffré starts somewhere else. Zinc is the core active in all three of our formulas, capturing the odor compounds right at the skin where bacteria break down sweat. Max and Tea Tree layer baking soda in alongside the zinc rather than asking it to do the job by itself, and Sensitive leaves it out altogether. Sensitive and Max are Dermatologist Tested. Full mechanism in How Zinc Deodorant Works.
Sensitive skin
The usual explanation for why baking soda bothers some people 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. A powder sitting in a wax base only becomes active as your sweat dissolves it, so the real questions are how much is in there and how evenly it comes out. Baking soda releases steadily and predictably through a wax stick, which is why it earned its place in Max and Tea Tree after eight years of trying the alternatives. The substitutes either never really released through the wax at all, or came on so hard they got in the zinc's way.
Native's answer to sensitive skin is a separate sensitive line. Zaffré's answer is Sensitive, which runs zinc alongside a plant-derived ester and no alkaline active at all, because that's what reactive skin tends to need.
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 $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.