This document compares different genomic DNA alignment methods, including a classic semi-global algorithm and heuristic tools like sim4 and Spidey. It analyzes the performance of these aligners on subsets of human gene and mRNA data, evaluating metrics like number of gaps, exon differences, sequence similarity, and runtime. The results show that the classic semi-global aligner produces very high-quality alignments but is slow, while sim4 achieves good accuracy faster than other external tools and outperforms them on most metrics.