Geometric and energy metrics are here proposed to gauge the confinement properties of localized electromagnetic beams (e.g., Bessel beams) and pulses (e.g., X-waves) in both the nondispersive and dispersive cases. As is well known, the frequency superposition of Bessel beams sharing the same axicon angle leads to the generation of tightly bounded wavepackets, namely X-waves, with remarkable spatio-temporal confinement properties. In the nondispersive case, the axicon angle does not change with frequency, and these features can be predicted by closed-form expressions. Remarkably, it is found that the volumetric confinement of such pulses can be optimized for a specific axicon angle. Since the geometric metrics do not account for the unavoidable presence of energy tails outside the main spot, energy metrics are here introduced and compared with the purely geometric definition. Finally, the …