During the last decade, the name 'smart city' has been trending around the world playing a role in urban strategic planning. The concept has been recently introduced to embrace and contain modern urban challenges (Dameri, 2017).  Chatterjee and Kar, (2015) said that the smart city definition varies concerning the context and perspective through which it is being conceptualised and applied. After a comprehensive literature review; Yin et al., (2015) defined it as ‘A system integration of technological infrastructure that relies on advanced data processing with goals of making city government more efficient, citizens happier, business more prosperous and the environment more stable’. This is based on technical infrastructure, application domain, system integration and data processing. Smart cities contribute to urban sustainability, this urban sustainability relies on several elements and their mutual relationships, including natural resources, human, technological, social and cultural. Interactions of these have economic growth, social equity and environmental issues. In their assessment of how future studies will be applied to cities, Miguel et al., (2016) noted that long-term planning for modern cities is difficult due to the increased complexity and diverse nature of the cities that rise due to cities' operational processes and diversity. Since cities differ from country to country and city to city the inception of smart cities has seen flooding of the literature with many frameworks. In order to develop a sustainable smart city, one needs to make no mistake in choosing the correct framework to work with, hence the purpose of this research is to carry out a swot analysis on different smart cities frameworks.