Wireless ad-hoc networks are growing in popularity every day. MANETs, VANETs, and SENSOR are the examples of such networks. People are often unaware of the use of those different networks and sometimes it is not clearly understood which network type to deploy according to the requirements of users. Another problem is about which protocols best suits each type of wireless network’s issues. To fill this gap, we compare these three types of networks and finally show that MANET is the best suitable for almost all user’s requirements as it is easy to deploy anywhere at any time. Then using Energy, Accuracy, and Lifetime network parameters, we compare three types of routing protocols available in MANET PROACTIVE, REACTIVE, and HYBRID and choose the hybrid as the best routing protocol because it combines the features of both proactive and reactive protocols and is the only one which is provided with all these three parameters. These two performance evaluations finally lead us to the last evaluation with which, using three performance metrics, such as packet delivery ratio, throughput, and average end-to-end delay, we conduct a performance evaluation of four popular hybrid routing protocols ZRP, TORA, OORP, and ARPAM. The simulations are carried out using NS-2 simulator. The simulation results obtained for low- and high-density networks confirm that TORA performs better for networks with low node density in term of packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, and throughput whereas ZRP outperforms other protocols in term of the same metrics but in highly dense networks.