Electricity has become a part of day to day life of the people. With the increase in population, electricity demand is also raised. The development of distribution systems (DSs), the optimal utilisation of shunt capacitor banks (SCBs) and distributed generators (DGs) in the DSs are heightened. In this paper, a methodology is proposed to allocate both DGs and SCBs simultaneously on the DS. The objectives are to minimise power loss, improving the voltage profile and voltage stability index (VSI) of the DS. First locations of DGs and SCBs are found out by loss sensitivity factor (LSF) technique. Next grasshopper optimisation algorithm (GOA) is used to determine the rating of these sources. The methodology is implemented on IEEE 33 and 69 bus test systems considering optimal allocation of multiple DGs without and with placement of capacitors. Finally, the results obtained by the proposed method are compared with GA/PSO and PSO methods. Copyright © 2020 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.