This paper presents a comparison of two finiteelement programs developed for accurate cross-sectional analysis of arbitrary optical and microwave waveguiding structures.Both techniques were developed in response to the growing demand from scientists and engineers for application-specific expert systems, and employ advanced interactive pre-and postprocessing facilities. They show good agreement, strongly complement one another, and could form the core of a whole library of similar "intelligent" software for computer-assisted analysis and design, with a wide range of possible applications within both supercomputer and workstation environments.