The most commonly used measure of stress is the Cauchy stress tensor, often called simply the stress tensor or "true stress". However, several other measures of stress can be defined. Some such stress measures that are widely used in continuum mechanics, particularly in the computational context, are:

1. The Kirchhoff stress ().
2. The Nominal stress ().
3. The first Piola-Kirchhoff stress (). This stress tensor is the transpose of the nominal stress ().
4. The second Piola-Kirchhoff stress or PK2 stress ().
5. The Biot stress ()