The fast pace of changes occurring in the pharmaceutical world emphasizes the need for powerful technologies that allow checking the quality of pharmaceutical products. Infrared and Raman spectroscopies have shown great potentialities for drug analysis in the last decades and consequently caught the attention of the scientific world as well as of industrial developers, leading to major technological advancements. These fast, eco-friendly, and non-destructive techniques help gather essential information about the samples under examination with consistent advantages. This review focuses on the application of portable/handheld NIR and Raman spectrophotometers in the analysis of pharmaceutical products for both in-process and quality control tests. Moreover, analytical methods developed by several authors are described in order to illustrate the applications explored until now. •There is an increasing interest for handheld and portable vibrational spectroscopy.•Pharmaceutical qualitative and quantitative applications of handheld devices are reviewed.•Handheld devices are not yet designed for quantitative applications.•Several technical developments are ongoing enabling new on-field applications.