Permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSMs) are widely applied in industry, and proportional integral (PI) controllers are often used to control PMSMs. Aiming at the characteristics of the poor anti-disturbance ability and speed ripple of traditional PI controllers, a novel composite speed controller for PMSMs is proposed in this paper that uses a novel sliding mode control (SMC). To improve the chattering problem of traditional SMC, a high-order approaching law super-twisting algorithm (STA) is applied. Considering the internal and external disturbance of motor driver systems, such as motor parameter drifts and load torque changes, a disturbance estimator based on an extended state observer (ESO) is proposed, and it is used for the feed-forward compensation of the current. The composite super-twisting integral sliding mode controller (ST-ISMC) with a nonlinear ESO is tested by simulations and experiments, and the comparative results verify that the proposed controller has the higher control accuracy, smaller speed ripple and stronger robustness.