The imaginary potential and entropic force are two important different mechanisms to characterize the dissociation of heavy quarkonia. In this paper, we calculate these two quantities in strongly coupled theories with anisotropic Lifshitz scaling and hyperscaling violation exponent using holographic methods. We study how the results are affected by the hyperscaling violation parameter $$ \theta $$
θ
and the dynamical exponent z at finite temperature and chemical potential. Also, we investigate the effect of the chemical potential on these quantities. As a result, we find that both mechanisms show the same results: the thermal width and the dissociation length decrease as the dynamical exponent and chemical potential increase or as the hyperscaling violating parameter decreases.