Abstract This paper develops and analyses the performances evaluation of different control strategies applied for a nonlinear motion of a ball on a beam system. Comparison results provide in-depth comprehension on the stable ability of different controllers for this real mechanical application. The three different controllers are a conventional PID method, a Mamdani-type fuzzy rule method and a Sugeno-type fuzzy rule method. In this study, the PID shows the fastest sinuous reference tracking while the Mamdani-type fuzzy method proves the highest stability performance for tracking square wave motions.