In this paper, the modified simple equation method, the exp-function method, the soliton ansatz method, the Riccati equation expansion method and the $$\left( G^{\prime }/G\right)$$ G ′ / G -expansion method are used to construct exact solutions with parameters of the nonlinear foam drainage equation. When these parameters are taken to be special values, the solitary wave solutions and the trigonometric function solutions are derived from the exact solutions. The obtained results confirm that the proposed methods are efficient techniques for analytic treatments of a wide variety of nonlinear partial differential equations in mathematical physics. We compare our results together with each other yielding from these integration tools. Also, our results have been compared with the well-known results of others.