Systems of polynomial equations arise throughout mathematics, engineering, and the sciences. It is therefore a fundamental problem both in mathematics and in application areas to find the solution sets of polynomial systems. The focus of this paper is to compare two fundamentally different approaches to computing and representing the solutions of polynomial systems: numerical homotopy continuation and symbolic computation. Several illustrative examples are considered, using the software packages Bertini and Singular. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.