During the past few years, we are witnessing the emergence of 5G and its high-level performance targets. Waveform (WF) design is one of the important aspects for 5G that received considerable attention from the research community in recent years. To find an alternative to the classical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), several multicarrier approaches addressing different 5G technical challenges, have been proposed. In this paper, we focus on critical machine-type communications (C-MTC), which is one of the key features of the foreseen 5G system. We provide a comparative performance study of the most promising multicarrier WFs. We consider several C-MTC key performance indicators: out-of-band radiations, spectral efficiency, end-to-end physical layer latency, robustness to time and frequency synchronization errors, power fluctuation, and transceiver complexity. The investigated multicarrier WFs are classified into three groups based on their ability to keep the orthogonality: in the complex domain, e.g., most of the OFDM-inspired WFs, in the real domain like offset-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM)-based techniques, and non-orthogonal WFs like generalized frequency division mul-tiplexing and filter bank-based multicarrier-QAM. Finally, the performances of these WFs are thoroughly discussed in order to highlight their pros and cons and permit a better understanding of their capabilities in the context of C-MTC.