Quadrotors are widely applied in many fields, but they often face various external disturbances in actual operation. This makes it necessary to design a controller that can handle disturbances. Disturbance observer and adaptive control techniques are commonly used disturbance rejection techniques, the core idea of which is to estimate the disturbances in real time and incorporate the estimated values into the controller to suppress the disturbances. In this paper, various disturbance observers and adaptive control techniques, including nonlinear disturbance observers, extended state observers, neural networks, and fuzzy logic systems, are introduced, along with their variants or different structures. These techniques improve the adaptability and robustness of quadrotors to complex environments. Finally, future research directions for the disturbance rejection of quadrotors are also presented.