The aim of this research is to investigate multi-criteria decision making [spatial multi-criteria evaluation (SMCE)], bivariate statistical methods [frequency ratio (FR), index of entropy (IOE), weighted linear combination (WLC)] and machine learning [support vector machine (SVM)] models for estimating landslide susceptibility at the Wuning area, China. A total of 445 landslides were randomly classified into 70% (311 landslides) and 30% (134 landslides) to train and validate landslide models, respectively. Fourteen landslide conditioning factors including slope angle, slope aspect, altitude, topographic wetness index, stream power index, sediment transport index, soil, lithology, NDVI, land use, rainfall, distance to road, distance to river and distance to fault were then studied for landslide susceptibility assessment. Performances of five studied models were evaluated using area under the ROC curve (AUROC) for training (success rate curve) and validation (prediction rate curve) datasets, statistical-based measures and tests. Results indicated that the area under the success rate curve for the FR, IOE, WLC, SVM and SMCE models was 88.32%, 82.58%, 78.91%, 85.47% and 89.96%, respectively, demonstrating that SMCE could provide the higher accuracy. The prediction capability findings revealed that the SMCE model (AUC = 86.81%) was also the highest approach among the five studied models, followed by the FR (AUC = 84.53%), the SVM (AUC = 81.24%), the IOE (AUC = 79.67%) and WLC (73.92%) methods. The landslide susceptibility maps derived from the above five models are reasonably accurate and could be used to perform elementary land use planning for hazard extenuation.