Nonlinear systems are ubiquitous in nature and their effective control usually involves careful design of the controller and its parameters. This choice can involve a trial and error process that depends on the specific system. However, several hints on the behavior of general controllers can help the design process. This paper aims at providing hints for this design by presenting a comparison of two approaches, with two variants, for the control of a nonlinear system. These approaches are an input-output linearization with static-state feedback and dynamic-state feedback, and a sliding mode control with both fixed and adaptive gain. The obtained results for each method allow a discussion of their behavior in the presence and absence of disturbances.