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OK so we all need something to represent monsters om our battlegrids, and I have been Reading theese boards for long enough to notice that certain methods stand out. Personally I'm in the midle og choosing my own way. And here is the different methods I know of.

Using actuall minis to show whats what. This Vista not only money but storage. And you would need loads of them. And from certain producers quite random what you get.

Paper minies, cost less, takes up less space, but less durable. And cost increases for every print.

Tokens with pictures. Can be printer or bought. Usually handy and numbered. Dømt take up loads of space. Not as readily vissible as paper and plastic minis.

Tokens with only numbers on. Quote east to run as DM. Hi reusability and cost efficient if made by styret materials. Will either enhance or break imersion since none of them look like anything.

Random stuff you got laying about, dices candy etc. Cheap and reusable, han be a bit confusing whats what from time to time.

So that is the methods I know og, wich one do you guys use, why, and whats the upps and downs that you know of?

I use minis, but i don't use accurate minis. I have probably a hundred or so. I let the players all pick one for their PC, and from there just say "Ok these skeletal archers are the elven bow bandits, the storm troopers are actually elven warriors" and go from there. Its mostly about the visual representation of "Something" instead of being accurate. I try to keep ranged units regulated to ranged guys, melee guys as melee guys, light armored guys as light armored guys, and mages as mages. But within that, whatever. 

I've used tokens for gamma world and didn't think it was annoying. I might recomend that to people who don't own actual minis already. If I did this I'd recomend pewter minis for PCs and reoccuring NPCs. With the intention that eventually you get a solid backlog of decent pewter ones. 

I've also gotten solid use out of a box of d6. www.amazon.com/Chessex-Opaque-White-Blac... like that. I've got a clear yellow with white pip and an orange with black pip set. When fighting 14 goblins, they are represented with die. If using less than 6 foes for a fight, you can even mark them easily. "Goblin 2 has 2 pips" and track goblin 2's HP easily.  

I've always had a lot of fun tracking down bargain miniatures.

But, over the last couple years I've really started warming up to inexpensive, portable alternatives.

One idea I thought was great was to use dollar-store chessboard pieces - a couple sets of those should provide a nice variety of tokens for monsters.  In fact, as long as you aren't looking for an exact replica of any given monster or character, a few bucks at a yard sale could probably buy you a couple of old board games with a handful useful pawns and tokens in them, and it's a great way to recycle parts from any old board games you might have gathering dust in the attic.

Forum member Dakaran has been creating some paper stand-ups in the "Order of the Stick" stick-figure style that I've really been enjoying (link) - they're a lot of fun, and the art style is just general enough that many of the same stand-ups can be repurposed for a variety of NPC mooks and so on.  These are about as free as printer ink and paper can be, and, as another very nice touch, Dakaran also provides black-and-white versions that would be even easier on your printer ink budget.

I think the Wizards of the Coast "Monster Vault" token set, and Paizo's competing "Bestiary Box" set of cardboard stand-ups are another excellent and fairly affordable way to represent a huge variety of monsters without buying thousands of expensive, bulky miniatures.

You can also track down some 1/72 (25mm) historical wargame miniatures - there's typically two or three dozen plastic miniatures to a box that costs about $10, more or less, and hobby stores that sell model railroad, aircraft, and ship kits typically have shelves full of them.  Vikings, Native Americans, Zulus, Greeks, Romans, Normans, Saxons, Ninjas, Pirates, Samurai, Musketeers, Gothic Barbarians, Mongols, and many other armies are represented in this hobby, and would all look right at home in D&D.  They are typically made in a soft plastic that's great for modding and "kit bashing", and the varying quality of work means that it can be fairly easy to find miniatures that are so badly sculpted and molded, that supposedly "real world" human miniatures can look more like Orcs and other monsters than fantasy miniatures do!  There are also model kits in the same scale for sailing ships, wagons, castles, siege engines, and so on that might make great props, if you don't mind getting carried away with it.

I have a gallon baggie full of old D&D minis, and it's usually PCs and recurring NPCs get their own mini, and anything else just gets whatever have the right size. I actually like this method because that army of 10 unnamed orcs becomes easier to fight if each one is obviously different as a mini ("Which orc do you attack?" "The Grimlock.")

Led to a humorous moment recently when the wagon full of captured humans (played by the DM's cell phone) started to ring mid combat, with the ominous tone of the Nyan Cat theme.

Back when I did tabletop, I used starburst.  If you got the kill, you got the starburst.  They fit the squares, and were color coded for role.