High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) and capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) are compared with respect to their usefulness in drug analysis. Factors discussed include efficiency, performance, sensitivity, optimization parameters, method development time, sample preparation, technical difficulties, orthogonality of the information obtained and the possible application to various substance groups. It is concluded that HPLC can be applied successfully in virtually all areas of pharmaceutical analysis. CZE has a promising future in the analysis of drugs and in the field of biotechnological analysis, where a high number of plates is required together with a short analysis time. Nevertheless improvements in detection are still necessary for most applications. SFC is particularly suitable for moderately polar compounds or substances for which mass-sensitive detection is required. SFC and CZE can be considered as complementary to HPLC owing to the orthogonality of the acquired data, and as a result more information can be obtained from the analysis.