Four technologies dominate the literature on sustainable recovery of bioactive natural products: ultrasound-assisted extraction, microwave-assisted extraction, supercritical carbon dioxide extraction and extraction with natural deep eutectic solvents. Each is routinely described as green, and each is routinely benchmarked against maceration or Soxhlet extraction on the single axis of yield. That comparison flatters all four and discriminates between none of them. This review reads the four platforms against a common framework drawn from the principles of green extraction, mass-based metrics, published life-cycle evidence, residual-solvent regulation and the small number of studies that place two or more platforms on the same plant matrix under matched analysis. The evidence supports a narrower and more useful claim than the field usually makes. Ultrasound has the lowest energy demand and the cheapest capital entry, and its acoustic intensity attenuates on scale-up while some matrices defeat it outright. Microwave irradiation is the fastest and most productive per batch, and it consumes more than three times the electricity of ultrasound for equivalent antioxidant recovery. Supercritical carbon dioxide delivers a genuinely solvent-free lipophilic extract with unmatched regulatory standing, and recovers polar phenolics poorly without an entrainer. Natural deep eutectic solvents extract labile and poorly water-soluble compounds better than aqueous alcohols, and then hold them: reported recovery from the eutectic spans about 21 per cent by antisolvent precipitation to above 90 per cent by macroporous resin. The four platforms therefore occupy separable regions of a design space set by target polarity, thermal lability, required purity and production scale. The review sets out that mapping and names the comparison the field has still not run.