Overhead cranes play a pivotal role in various industrial applications. This paper presents two methodologies for suppressing the payload’s swing and completing the accurate positioning. The original crane model is initially transformed into a chained form. Two nonlinear controllers are devised to regulate the trolley’s position and achieve the payload’s anti-swing control. The first approach utilizes backstepping, extended state observer, and filter technique to effectively estimate system state and disturbance and make the closed-loop system uniformly ultimately bounded. In contrast, the second method involves sliding mode control and finite-time disturbance observer to ensure the finite-time convergence of the resulting closed-loop system and the accurate disturbance estimation. Finally, simulation results are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.