This paper is devoted to yarn tension control problem in winding machines. The passive take-up unit is replaced by active one with ADRC(Active Disturbance Rejection Control) and it was compared with the method using conventional PD(Proportional-Derivative) controller. The main part of ADRC is ESO(Extended State Observer) which continuously estimates nonlinearities of the system, such as intrinsic nonlinearity, external disturbance and sensor noise. Then the estimated nonlinearity is used to compensate the real one, thus making controlled system linear. A number of experiments have been conducted in order to verify the performance of the original winding system to the modified one. Experiments have shown improved efficiency of the system with adopting active yarn tension control. Experimental results show that the ADRC achieves a better tension response than PD controller and is robust to parameters variation.