The impact of heat transfer in MHD flows along a stretching cylinder is playing a vital role for heat exchangers, fiber coating, transportation, etc. Currently, a lot of theoretical models are accessible for illustrating the thermal transfer impact of non-Newtonian liquid flows over a cylinder. Also, an external magnetic force is spot-on to deal with the physical features of the fluids to oversee the nature of thermal and momentum transfer in the system. Considering this fact, we inspect the heat transport behavior of two different non-Newtonian MHD flows due to stretching of a cylinder with heat generation, by taking the advantage of a new heat flux theory conceived by Christov-Cattaneo. The basic PDEs are converted into ODEs with the suitable similarity transformations. These ODEs are solved by fourth order Runge-Kutta based shooting system. Plots are drawn to discern the influence of sundry parameters on the flow fields (velocity and temperature). Along with them the rate of heat transfer and friction factor are bestowed in table. From the results, we notice that the influence of thermal stratification and curvature parameters have a propensity to increase both the velocity and thermal fields. Thermal relaxation parameter effectively lifts the friction factor in the flow of Williamson fluid than that of Casson fluid. Keywords MHD • Heat transfer • Non-Newtonian fluid • Convection • Thermal stratification • Cylinder List of symbols B 0 Applied magnetic field strength b Radius of the cylinder C f Friction factor Gr Grashof number J m Wall shear stress J w The measure of the heat transfer k Thermal conductivity l 0 Characteristic length M Magnetic field parameter m 1 , m 2 Constants Nu Nusselt number Pr Prandtl number p 0 & p ∞ Velocity components c p Specific heat Q l Component of heat source Q Heat source parameter S Thermal stratification parameter T Temperature of the fluid T 0 Component of temperature V r Velocity ratio parameter u, v Velocity components in x, y− directions u e Free stream velocity u w Stretching velocity of the cylinder Greek letters Thermal relaxation parameter Viscosity (kinematic) Electrical conductivity T Thermal expansion coefficient Relaxation time of heat flux Fluid's density Positive time constant Casson fluid parameter Williamson fluid parameter Stream function