Recent progress in magnet design has led to compact permanent magnets capable of resolving the chemical shift, so that small NMR spectrometers are now available, which can measure multi-nuclear and multi-dimensional NMR spectra on the workbench of the chemical laboratory. Although not as powerful as today’s high-field spectrometers, their performance by far exceeds that of spectrometers from former times when high-field instruments were not available. Moreover, they are compact and robust, enabling the use of NMR in studies currently constrained by the demands posed by operating large cryogenically cooled magnets. The current state-of-the-art of compact low-field NMR instruments is reviewed from a methodological point of view making reference to basic NMR theory where needed to characterize their performance.