We characterize and compare the axial and lateral performance of fluorescence confocal systems imaging in turbid media. The aperture configurations studied are a single pinhole, a slit, a Nipkow disk, and a linear array of pinholes. Systems with parallelized apertures are used clinically because they enable high-speed and real-time imaging. Understanding how they perform in highly scattering tissue is important. A Monte Carlo model was developed to characterize parallelized system performance in a scattering media representative of human tissues. The results indicate that a slit aperture has degraded performance, both laterally and axially. In contrast, the analysis reveals that multipinhole apertures such as a Nipkow disk or a linear pinhole array can achieve performance nearly equivalent to a single pinhole aperture. The optimal aperture spacing for the multipinhole apertures was determined for a specific tissue model. In addition to comparing aperture configurations, the effects of tissue nonradiative absorption, scattering anisotropy, and fluorophore concentration on lateral and axial performance of confocal systems were studied.