The economic sustainability of an industrial enterprise is a prerequisite and a chance for sustainable development. Despite the fact that the problem of economic sustainability of industrial enterprises is given considerable attention in domestic and foreign scientific literature, a number of its aspects should be recognized as insufficiently studied. These include the issues of criteria and indicators of the economic sustainability of an industrial enterprise, taking into account industry specifics, the formation of a systemic toolkit for assessing the ability of an enterprise to survive and develop. The purpose of the article is to reflect the results of a comparative analysis of domestic and foreign diagnostic tools of strategic management for the formation of the preferred tools for recognizing the economic sustainability of an industrial enterprise. When performing the study, systemic, situational and resource-targeted approaches were used. Adequate to the purpose and topic of the article, research methods are the dialectical method, the method of scientific abstraction, the method of induction and deduction, the method of analysis and synthesis, the monographic method (comparative analysis of methodological and theoretical provisions. The necessity and possibility of including a number of methods of strategic analysis and forecasting in an unchanged or modified form as a complex of non-independent research methods in the methodology for diagnosing the economic sustainability of an industrial enterprise are revealed. The special role of assessing and forecasting the economic potential in the framework of diagnosing the economic sustainability of an industrial enterprise is proved. A theoretical approach to determining the weights of the integral diagnostic indicator of relevant parameters of the situation in the branche of industry as a whole and at an individual enterprise has been formed. The assessment of the economic sustainability of industrial enterprises at the present stage of economic thought suggests its synthetic nature. Quantitative-qualitative static-dynamic assessment in the absence of the use of duplicating tools is most adequate to the modern conditions of industrial enterprises.