Reliental vs. Zakeke
Zakeke is ecommerce personalisation — a capable, genuinely affordable subscription platform, reported from around $68/month, that lets shoppers customise how a product looks before adding it to the cart. Reliental builds B2B specification tools — custom configurators that encode real manufacturing rules so a dealer produces a buildable spec with a real part number. If your product is personalised, Zakeke is very likely the right call. If it's engineered, the gap shows up fast.
Personalisation and specification are different problems
Both produce a configurator-shaped thing on a website, which is why they get compared. But they solve opposite halves of the buying process.
Personalisation is about preference. The buyer already knows the product works; they're choosing how it looks. Every combination is valid. The tool's job is to make the choice feel good and reduce hesitation.
Specification is about validity. The buyer doesn't yet know whether what they want is possible, and most combinations are not valid — that beam won't carry that load, that gate won't fit that opening, that finish isn't available in that material. The tool's job is to stop a wrong order from ever being submitted.
A tool built for the first problem doesn't naturally do the second, because blocking things is not a feature ecommerce personalisation is optimised around.
Side by side
| Dimension | Zakeke | Reliental |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | Ecommerce personalisation — customise a product before adding to cart | B2B specification — produce a valid, buildable spec for a complex product |
| Typical buyer | Shopify / WooCommerce merchants selling configurable consumer goods | Manufacturers selling through dealers, distributors, and quote requests |
| Entry price | Reported from ~$68/month (Starter), up to ~$340/month (Scale) | From $12,000 one-time; $25,000–45,000 with pricing and integrations |
| Product limits | Published-product caps by tier — reported around 5 / 25 / 50 | No caps. A 100+ variation catalogue is the normal starting point |
| Transaction fees | Reported 1.5–1.9% per order on higher tiers | None. It's your software |
| Time to live | Days — you do the setup yourself | 4–5 weeks — we do the modelling, rules, and visuals |
| Rule complexity | Conditional logic and attribute dependencies; not aimed at industrial B2B | Arbitrary manufacturing rules, load tables, dimensional and physical constraints |
| Ownership | Subscription. Stop paying and the configurator stops | You own the code and content outright |
Zakeke pricing, product caps, and transaction fees are as reported by third-party review platforms in 2026 and vary by plan, platform, and region. Check Zakeke's current published pricing before making a decision on these figures.
The two line items that catch manufacturers out
Nothing here is hidden — both are documented. They just matter far more to a manufacturer than to the ecommerce merchants the pricing was designed around.
Published-product caps
Tiers cap how many products you can publish — reported at roughly 5, 25, and 50. For a merchant with a dozen SKUs that's generous. For a manufacturer whose catalogue runs to 100+ variations across several product lines, the top tier can be the constraint rather than the starting point.
Per-order transaction fees
Higher tiers carry a reported 1.5–1.9% fee per order. On a $60 t-shirt that's a rounding error. On a $30,000 racking order it's about $450 — every time. The structure was built for consumer basket sizes, and B2B order values scale it in a direction that doesn't favour you.
Worked example
A manufacturer doing 30 configured orders a year at an average $30,000 order value, on a plan with a 1.5% transaction fee: roughly $13,500 a year in fees, plus around $4,000 in subscription. Over three years that's in the region of $52,000 — for a tool you don't own, on a catalogue that may not fit the tier cap. The same three years on a $25,000 custom build with hosting lands near $32,000, and you own the result.
Illustrative arithmetic using reported public rates, not a quote. Flip the inputs — high volume, low order value — and the comparison genuinely reverses. That's the point: run it on your own numbers.
Where Zakeke is the better buy
- You sell on Shopify or WooCommerce and want customisation live this week
- Your products are personalised rather than engineered — text, colours, artwork, monograms
- Your catalogue fits comfortably inside a tier's published-product cap
- Order values are consumer-scale, so a percentage transaction fee stays small
- Budget is genuinely tight and a monthly subscription is the only viable structure
We mean this without hedging: if your products are personalised rather than engineered, paying $12,000 for a custom build would be a waste of your money. Zakeke and tools like it are a genuinely good answer to that problem, and they ship fast.
Where Reliental is the better buy
- Your buyers need to know it will physically work, not just what colour it is
- Your rules are manufacturing rules: clearances, load ratings, incompatible combinations
- Your catalogue runs to hundreds of variations across multiple product lines
- Your order values are four, five, or six figures — where percentage fees really bite
- Distributors need your tool on their own sites, under their own branding
The clearest single test is what happens when a buyer picks an invalid combination. If the answer is “it looks a bit odd,” you're in personalisation territory. If the answer is “we manufacture the wrong thing, or something fails inspection,” you need a rules engine that treats blocking as its primary job — and you probably need it built around your actual engineering constraints rather than expressed through a general-purpose option builder. See the racking example for what that looks like in practice.
Questions, answered
What is the difference between Reliental and Zakeke?
Zakeke is an ecommerce personalisation platform: a subscription tool, strongest on Shopify and WooCommerce, that lets shoppers customise a product's appearance — colours, text, artwork, materials — before adding it to the cart. Reliental builds custom B2B product configurators: bespoke tools that encode a manufacturer's actual build rules so a dealer or distributor can produce a valid, buildable specification with a real part number. Zakeke answers 'what will it look like?'. Reliental answers 'will this actually work, and what exactly am I ordering?'
Is Zakeke good for B2B manufacturers?
It can be, for simpler catalogues — and it's genuinely capable, with conditional logic, attribute dependencies, dynamic pricing rules, and a quote-request mode. But it isn't primarily designed for industrial B2B or highly complex product configuration, and two structural details catch manufacturers out: published-product caps by tier (reported around 5, 25, and 50 products) and per-order transaction fees on higher plans (reported at 1.5–1.9%). A manufacturer with 100+ variations and five-figure order values runs into both quickly.
Is Zakeke cheaper than a custom configurator?
Upfront, yes, and substantially — roughly $68 a month versus $12,000 or more. Over three years the comparison narrows and can invert, depending on your order values. Subscription alone might total $2,500–12,000, but the transaction fee is the variable that matters: at a reported 1.5% on a $30,000 racking order, that's $450 per order. Thirty such orders a year is $13,500 annually in fees alone. For low-value, high-volume products Zakeke stays cheap; for high-value B2B orders the percentage structure works against you.
Is Zakeke faster to deploy than Reliental?
To a first working state, yes — Zakeke can be live in days because it's a self-service platform, versus four to five weeks for a custom build. But the comparison isn't quite like for like: with Zakeke you do the product modelling, rule setup, and visual preparation yourself, and that work is the bulk of the effort in any configurator project. Reliental's four to five weeks includes that work being done for you. The honest framing is days-to-start versus weeks-to-done.
Can Zakeke handle complex manufacturing rules?
It handles conditional logic and attribute dependencies well for its intended use case — an option that appears only when another is selected, or pricing that varies by material. Where it isn't aimed is genuinely industrial constraint logic: load tables, dimensional clearances, structural ratings, or rules where a combination is invalid for a physical reason rather than a catalogue reason. If an invalid configuration on your product is a safety problem rather than an aesthetic one, that's the line where a purpose-built rules engine matters.
Can I start on Zakeke and move to a custom build later?
Yes, and it's a reasonable path — plenty of manufacturers validate demand cheaply before committing to a build. Two things to plan for: your product data and rules live inside Zakeke's structure, so budget time to export and restructure them, and the visual assets you prepare may need reworking. Starting on a subscription platform to prove buyers will self-serve is a sensible, low-risk experiment. Just treat it as a pilot rather than a foundation.
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