The level of development of actuator technology and the element base and software of control loops of modern automatic devices makes it possible to use in technical practice complex control algorithms based on the results of mathematical control theory, including with incomplete information about the state. The effectiveness of such algorithms is determined by the presence of an adequate mathematical model of the device under study. For such a widespread class of automatic devices as manipulators with parallel kinematics, the problem of developing methods for creating mathematical models that allow taking into account nonlinear effects, despite the efforts of numerous researchers, remains relevant. To a large extent, the complexity of modeling the dynamics of this class of automatic devices is associated with the presence of parallel kinematic chains, which leads to the need to apply the results of analytical mechanics of non-free systems. In this section of theoretical mechanics, several rigorous methods have been developed, as a result of which mathematical models of different dimensions are obtained with different levels of complexity of the algorithms for their derivation and study. This leads to the need for a critical analysis of both the methods themselves and their possible application in technical practice. In this paper, the main algorithms for obtaining mathematical models of the dynamics of systems with geometric constraints are presented in detail and some comparative analysis of their application to modeling the dynamics of manipulators with parallel kinematics is carried out.