This paper describes the practical implementation of two well known robust control strategies over a non-linear magnetic levitation system for controlling the coil current so as to achieve the desired position. In order to make the controller robust and practically implementable, higher order sliding modes (HOSM) technique is used. Two second order sliding modes (SOSM) schemes are applied on the actual setup, based on adaptive gain super-twisting algorithm (AGSTA) and variable gain super-twisting algorithm (VGSTA). The sliding surface proposed is a linear combination of the error in coil current and its derivative. An extensive performance comparison study for both the proposed controllers on magnetic levitation system is carried out keeping the desired objective same for both the controllers. The robustness of the proposed controllers is validated in presence of disturbances and parametric uncertainties. The required control efforts to achieve the desired performance are tabulated.