Different types of breathers and rogue waves (RWs) are some of the important coherent structures which have been recently realized in several physical phenomena in hydrodynamics, nonlinear optics, Bose–Einstein condensates, etc. Mathematically, they have been deduced in non-linear Schrödinger (NLS) equations. Here we show the existence of general breathers, Akhmediev breathers, Ma soliton and rogue wave solutions in coupled Manakov-type NLS equations and coupled generalized NLS equations representing four-wave mixing. We deduce their explicit forms using Hirota bilinearization procedure and bring out their exact structures and important properties. We also show the method to deduce the various breather solutions from rogue wave solutions using factorization form and the so-called imbricate series.