Problems caused by power quality have great adverse economical impact on the utilities and customers. Current harmonics are one of the most common power quality problems and are usually resolved by the use of shunt active filters (SHAFs). Control strategies (p–q and Id–Iq) for extracting the three-phase reference currents for shunt active power filters are compared, evaluating their performance under different source conditions. Three-phase reference current waveforms generated by proposed scheme are tracked by the three-phase voltage source converter in a hysteresis band control scheme.The performance of the control strategies has been evaluated in terms of harmonic mitigation and DC link voltage regulation. The proposed SHAF with different fuzzy MFs (Trapezoidal, Triangular and Gaussian) is able to eliminate the uncertainty in the system and SHAF gains outstanding compensation abilities. The detailed simulation results using MATLAB/SIMULINK software are presented to support the feasibility of proposed control strategies. To validate the proposed approach, the system is also implemented on a real-time digital simulator (OPAL-RT) Hardware and adequate results are reported for its verifications.