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Transparent conducting oxides such as ZnO doped with Al or Mg are commonly used in solar cells, light emitting diodes, photodetectors, and ultraviolet laser diodes. In our work, we focus on a comparative study of the structural, optical, and electrical properties of ZnO films highly doped with Al (AZO) and Mg (MZO). These films are deposited on glass substrates by the sol-gel spin coating method. The doping concentrations for Al and Mg are fixed to 5%–30%. The XRD spectra indicate that all the samples are polycrystalline with hexagonal wurtzite structures, exhibiting a preferred orientation along the (002) plane. Low degradation in crystallinity was observed for MZO even at a Mg concentration of 30%. The MgO phase started to appear compared to Al-doped layers where smaller grains are formed inducing a deterioration in the films just after doping but no new phase appeared. This result is in agreement with other experimental results [J. K. Rath, Sol. Energy Mater. Sol. Cells 76, 431–487 (2003); Morris et al., J. Appl. Phys. 67, 1079–1087 (1990)]. By AFM analysis, the results indicate a significantly rough surface for MZO compared to AZO films. For equal Al and Mg dopant concentrations, we observe that the transmittance spectra of MZO thin films are wider than those of AZO, indicating a shift toward shorter wavelengths with an optical gap energy equal to 3.67 eV. The electrical measurements of AZO and MZO thin films were made using the I–V characteristic obtained by the four probe method. All the films present an ohmic behavior. The conductivity and the mobility of AZO films were found to be better than those of MZO.