Three Galerkin methods —continuous Galerkin (CG), Compact Discontinuous Galerkin (CDG) and Hybridizable Discontinuous Galerkin (HDG)— are compared in terms of performance and computational efficiency in two-dimensional scattering problems for low and high-order approximations. The total number of degrees of freedom and the total runtime are used for this correlation as well as the corresponding precision. The comparison is carried out through various numerical examples. The superior performance of high-order elements is shown. At the same time, similar capabilities are shown for CG and HDG, when high-order elements are adopted, both of them clearly outperforming CDG.