Two optical methods, namely surface plasmon resonance imaging and frustrated total internal reflection, are described in the paper in terms of comparing their sensitivity to change of refractive index of a thin boundary layer of an investigated medium. It is shown that, despite the fact that the theoretically calculated sensitivity is higher for the frustrated total internal reflection method, and the fact that usually in practice the surface plasmon resonance method, on the contrary, is considered more sensitive, under the same experimental conditions both methods show a similar result.