The recent day’s chemical processes are widely used in industrial applications. These chemical processes are nonlinear in nature. This nonlinearity can cause instability in process. In this paper, different types of control techniques are studied for control of CSTR with external heat exchanger. Control of this type of CSTR is tedious and arduous because of varying system dynamics and handling of chemical process. This paper presents performance evaluation on the comparison of different adaptive control scheme. MRAC scheme is used as adaptive technique. MRAC with Lyapunov, MRAC with MIT rule, and MRAC with a modification in MIT rule are used for developing adaptive law. MATLAB–Simulink™ is used for simulating all the aforementioned control techniques, and results have been analyzed. Results indicate that MRAC with modified MIT gives better performance compared to other techniques. To quantitatively analyze and compare the performance of all techniques performance, measure such as mean square error (MSE), integral absolute error (IAE), integral time absolute error (ITAE) is applied, and result is compared for the same. © 2019, Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.