The design of efficient transportation networks is an important challenge in many research areas. Among the most promising recent methods, biological routing mimic local rules found in nature. However comparisons with other methods are rare. In this paper we define a common framework to compare network design method. We use it to compare biological and a shortest-path routing approaches. We find that biological routing explore a more efficient set of solution when looking to design a network for uniformly distributed transfers. However, the difference between the two approaches is not as important for a skewed distribution of transfers.