In this paper, we establish the comparison between Brauer-type eigenvalue inclusion set given by Bu et al. (Linear Algebra Appl 512:234-248, 2017) and a Brualdi-type eigenvalue inclusion set given by Bu et al. (Linear Algebra Appl 480:168-175, 2015), and investigate the relationship of some Brauer-type eigenvalue inclusion sets provided by Li et al. (Linear Multilinear Algebra 64:587-601, 2016a) and Bu et al. (2017). In particular, we provide a sufficient condition such that the Brualdi-type eigenvalue inclusion set is tighter than some Brauer-type eigenvalue inclusion sets. Moreover, some sufficient conditions depending on entries of the given tensor for identifying strong M-tensor and the positive definiteness of an even-order real symmetric tensor are presented. To verify our theoretical results and show their effectiveness, some numerical examples are given. Keywords Brauer-type • Brualdi-type • The eigenvalue inclusion set • Strong M-tensor • Positive definiteness Mathematics Subject Classification 15A69 • 15A18 1 Introduction Let C(R) be the set of all complex(real) numbers, and [n] = {1, 2,. .. , n}. An order m dimension n complex(real) tensor A = (a i 1 i 2 •••i m) is a multidimensional array with n m entries a i 1 i 2 •••i m ∈ C(R), Communicated by Jinyun Yuan.