The body-force method and the sliding mesh method are applied to numerical simulation of full-scale self-propulsion for a 9 400 TEU container vessel, respectively. The effects of the turbulence model, the meshing, the maximum number of the nonlinear iteration, the time step size, the geometrical parameter of the actuator disk and the size of the rotational domain on the calculation results are investigated successively. The key points affecting the calculation results and the corresponding optimal settings are determined by comparing with the model test results and the sea trial results, and the effectiveness of the self-propulsion numerical simulation at full-scale are validated. The propulsion factors and the flow field at the self-propulsion point of the two methods are analyzed and compared. It is found that both methods can predict the performance of the full-scale ship, but with different wake fields. The flow before the propeller disk of the two methods mainly differs in the axial and tangential flow, whereas the flow after the propeller disk mainly differs in the radial flow.