The process of drug design and discovery demands several man years and huge investment. Computer-aided drug design (CADD) technique is an aid to speed up the drug discovery process. De novo drug design, a CADD technique to identify drug-like novel chemical structures from a huge chemical search space, helps to find new drugs by the optimization of multiple pharmaceutically relevant parameters required for a successful drug. As the search space is very large in the case of de novo drug design, evolutionary algorithm (EA), a soft computing technique can be used to find an optimal solution, which in this case is a novel drug. In this paper, various EA techniques used in de novo drug design tools are surveyed and analyzed in detail, with particular emphasis on the computational aspects.