The focus of this study is the reconstruction of a penetrable obstacle in acoustic medium from the knowledge of incident time-harmonic waves and corresponding scattered fields. The problem is investigated by way of two competing approaches: the method of topological sensitivity and that of linear sampling, that have been successfully developed for a variety of physical settings (acoustic, electromagnetic, elastodynamic) as non-iterative tools for solving the inverse scattering problem. On adopting a particular scattering configuration -- plane waves impigning on a spherical obstacle -- that permits analytical treatment as the testing platform, a parallel is drawn between the two methods to evaluate their relative performance in reconstructing the obstacle from the scattered field data. For completeness, the comparison is made by considering a range of input parameters in terms of material properties of the scatterer, frequency of illuminating waves, and noise in the data.