The recent discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has contributed to a surge of interest in particle physics and science education in general. Given the conceptual difficulty of the phenomenon in question, it is inevitable that teachers and science communicators rely on analogies to explain the Higgs physics and its meaning. Here, we review two popular analogies for explaining the Higgs boson, field and mechanism and their complex relationships. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these analogies and their pedagogical implications.