In this paper multigrid smoothers of Vanka-type are studied in the context of Computational
Structural Mechanics (CSM). These smoothers were originally developed to solve saddle-point
systems arising in the field of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). When treating (nearly) incompressible
solids, similar equation systems arise so that it is reasonable to adopt the Vanka idea
for CSM. While there exist numerous studies about Vanka smoothers in the CFD literature only
few publications describe applications to solid mechanical problems. With this paper we want to
contribute to closing this gap. We depict and compare four Vanka-like smoothers, two of them are
oriented towards the stabilised equal-order Q1/Q1 finite element pair. By means of different test
configurations we show on the one hand that the efficiency of all Vanka-smoothers heavily depends
on the proper parameter choice, but only some of them are able to robustly deal with certain difficulties
as, for example, mesh anisotropies. Furthermore, we illustrate how the enclosure of the
multigrid scheme by an outer Krylov space method influences the overall solver performance, and
we extend all our examinations to the nonlinear finite deformation case.