High-resolution techniques are the mainstay of structural biologists; however, to address challenging biological systems many are now turning to hybrid approaches that use complementary structural data. In this review we outline the types of structural problems that benefit from combining results of many methods, we summarise the types of data that can be generated by complementary approaches, and we highlight the application of combined methods in structural biology with recent structural studies of membrane proteins, mega-complexes and inherently flexible proteins.