We get a lot of emails asking various questions, and among the most frequent is “what should I order, Dobies or Sifters?” 

The question usually includes a fairly detailed explanation of the living habits of the prospective customer. We sift through the information and try to make a good guess at which product would work best.
Obviously a sensible person would order both, but not everybody has that much sense, or cents.
If we had any sense we would have produced some sort of ‘pros and cons’ list we could cut and paste. 
So far we haven’t, so here are the sweeping generalisations, which you can tailor to suit your lifestyle requirements:

Dobies are an outlier. When we thought them up there was no accepted design for mountain bike shorts. Over the ensuing decades the industry has settled on a general design, and nearly every brand’s offering is pretty close to it, including some of ours.
Dobies are different. 
They have an elasticised waistband with a drawstring. No zips, no rubber doodads, infinite adjustment. If you can tie a bow you are sorted for any seasonal size fluctuations. They have padding that is dead basic, just a thin layer of fleece, but actually in the real world of sitting on a mountain bike it is all you need. Big tyres, padded saddles and dual suspension are all things that take the edge off and make riding with minimal padding very liberating. 
For the utmost comfort in a loose fit mountain bike short, we think they are hard to beat.
But Dobies are not much like regular shorts. Sifters are. Sifters don’t have the built in pad, but they do have a zip fly, and a snap fastened waist band. They have features that make them great for just about any activity: adjusters on the waistband, seamless crotch gusset, stretch knit panel, they are tailored for action and built for durability. What I like most about them is that they don’t really look like mountain bike shorts unless you are actually mountain biking.
Sifters are up for wearing 24/7, and are great bike shorts too.
As we said at the start, you could really use both, but we hope that the above settles your concerns about which Nzo shorts to choose.