A comparison between three different process concepts -autothermal oxidative dehydrogenation of propane over a Pt/Al2O3 catalyst, isothermal oxidative dehydrogenation over a V2O5/TiO2 catalyst and the commercial non-oxidative dehydrogenation process of UOP - were performed. The optimal reaction conditions with respect to yield of propylene were derived from literature data for the UOP-process and the autothermal oxidative dehydrogenation. For the isothermal oxidative dehydrogenation over the V2O5/TiO2 catalyst, the optimal reaction conditions were derived based on a kinetic model, which was developed for this purpose. The comparison of processes was focused on the total mass and energy balances and included the steps of catalytic reaction, product separation, propane recycle and product purification. If exclusive propylene production is the objective, both oxidative process variants do not reveal an alternative to the non-oxidative propane conversion neither for consumption of energy nor raw material. On the contrary, if olefins are the desired products, the autothermal oxidative propane conversion might compete with the commercial non-oxidative process while the isothermal oxidative dehydrogenation does not show any advantage.