The simulation and discussion of five MPPT techniques for a PV system under various conditions of uniform and partial shading conditions (PSC) is presented. The techniques considered are hill climbing (HC), fuzzy logic control (FLC), perturbed extremum seeking control (PESC), firefly algorithm (FA), and cuckoo search algorithm (CS). Based on models previously stated in the literature, and inspired in a photovoltaic (PV) system in Cundinamarca, a comparative analysis is done based on the efficiency which measures performance in steady state, and the integral absolute error (IAE), which facilitate the analysis in both transient and steady state. Under uniform shading conditions fuzzy logic performs better than the other techniques under both mentioned criteria, followed by CS which shows a high efficiency but a slower convergence time. Also, PESC has shown a good performance, while being less complex than FLC. Under partial shading conditions cuckoo search demonstrates better performance in efficiency and convergence time than the firefly algorithm.