The purpose of this paper is to compare complexity and to assess flexibility of competing transponder architectures for satellite communication services. For performance comparison, we consider three channelization techniques: digital down converter(DDC) based on the use of the cascaded integrator-comb(CIC) filter, tuneable pipeline frequency transform(T-PFT) based on the tree-structure(TS) and variable oversampled complex-modulated filter banks(OCM-FB) based on the polyphase FFT(P-FFT). The comparison begins by presenting a basic architecture of each channelization method and includes analytical expressions of the number of multiplications as a computational complexity perspective. The analytical results show that DDC with CIC filter requires the heavy computational burden and the perfect flexibility. T-PFT based on the TS provides the almost perfect flexibility with the low complexity over DDC with the CIC filter for a large number of sub-channels. OCM-FB based on the P-FFT shows the high flexibility and the best computational complexity performance compared with other approaches.