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Abstract Pneumatically actuated soft continuum manipulators (SCMs) are constructed by combining several extending or contracting fiber reinforced elastomeric enclosure (FREE) actuators in series, parallel and a combination thereof. While it is well known that architectures with serial combinations of FREEs yield large workspace and dexterity, they suffer from design and control complexity, increased number of valves and inertia. Recent advances in exploring the FREE design space has demonstrated using parallel combinations of dissimilar FREEs (bending and rotating) to improve workspace and dexterity. This paper presents a comprehensive investigation of SCM design architectures by enumerating possibilities of serial and parallel combinations of similar and dissimilar FREEs. A novel dexterity metric is proposed to enable objective comparison of different SCM designs based on shape similarity and end-effector tangent. Given a fixed resource of control inputs (actuator and valve inputs), the paper systematically selects the best architecture of the SCM (serial, parallel, similar or dissimilar FREE) that maximizes dexterity and workspace. It is seen that optimal designs are heavily dependent on the context of the application, which may change how these manipulators are deployed. The paper presents two practical design applications that demonstrate the usefulness of the enumeration framework. While in general, serial design combinations using symmetric bending actuators result in larger workspace and dexterity, some architectures with asymmetric combinations of FREEs may see similar levels of dexterity and workspace.