The objective of this paper is to present and make a comparative study of several inverse kinematics methods for serial manipulators, based on the Jacobian matrix. Besides the well-known Jacobian transpose and Jacobian pseudo-inverse methods, three others, borrowed from numerical analysis, are presented. Among them, two approximation methods avoid the explicit manipulability matrix inversion, while the third one is a slightly modified version of the Levenberg-Marquardt method (mLM). Their comparison is based on the evaluation of a short distance approaching the goal point and on their computational complexity. As the reference method, the Jacobian pseudo-inverse is utilized. Simulation results reveal that the modified Levenberg-Marquardt method is promising, while the first order approximation method is reliable and requires mild computational costs. Some hints are formulated concerning the application of Jacobian-based methods in practice.