In this talk I will discuss various properties of the flux tube in lattice gauge theories using two different effective models. The first one is the so called effective string theory approach, in which the flux tube is modeled using an effective Nambu-Goto string. The second one (which can be applied only to (2+1) dimensional LGT's near a second order deconfinement transition) combines dimensional reduction at high temperature (following the well known Svetitsky Yaffe conjecture) and the power of two dimensional integrable models. After a short introduction on these two approaches I will discuss in particular their application to the study of the width of the flux tube in the vicinity of the deconfinement transition. We shall see that both models predict a linear instead of logarithmic increase of the flux tube thickness as a function of the interquark distance.