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Manual calculation of the compressive strength of concrete (CSC) is an expensive and time-consuming process. Soft computing methods outperform the statistical methods used to resolve these problems. Nonetheless, complicated prediction models are still incomplete and require more exploration. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) provide a better and faster technique featuring solitary hidden layers and have improved the generalization capacity. The present paper presents three ANN-based (shuffled complex evolution, evaporation rate based water cycle algorithm (ERWCA), and Cuckoo optimization algorithm) prediction models to anticipate the compressive strength of concrete efficiently. An available database from the UCI repository is employed to develop and access the model performance. A comparison is made between the prediction accuracies of the above three techniques. Using all models, a comparative investigation has been conducted to predict the compressive strength of concrete at the curing ages of 91, 56, and 28 days. The experimental findings obtained from the ERWCA-MLP method indicate its capability of robust CSC prediction. On average, this method achieves the minimum RMSE of 0.55314 and 0.43329 and R2 of 0.99803 and 0.99824. The statistical significance test and the comparative analysis of simulation results indicate the superiority of ERWCA-MLP in predicting the compressive strength of concrete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]