Several methods have been proposed to address active distribution network (ADN) and microgrid (MG) protection. Since many tools from different areas (such as data analytics) can be applied to this matter, this paper presents a qualitative analysis of current ADN and MG protection schemes based on optimization techniques, clustering, and classification. This analysis establishes the conceptual basis to recognize standard practices and gaps on which future research should focus by displaying a detailed review of different applications and a bibliometric evaluation. This work contributes to the assessment and implementation of ADN/MG protection to furnish economical, robust, and reliable solutions since it was found that several approaches are not intended to be real field implementations.