The aim of the present paper is to compare two different methods available for reducing the complicated dynamics exhibited by large amplitude, geometrically nonlinear vibrations of a thin shell. The two methods are: the proper orthogonal decomposition (POD), and an asymptotic approximation of the nonlinear normal modes (NNMs) of the system. The structure used to perform comparisons is a water-filled, simply supported circular cylindrical shell subjected to harmonic excitation in the spectral neighbourhood of the fundamental natural frequency. A reference solution is obtained by discretizing the partial differential equations (PDEs) of motion with a Galerkin expansion containing 16 eigenmodes. The POD model is built by using responses computed with the Galerkin model; the NNM model is built by using the discretized equations of motion obtained with the Galerkin method, and taking into account also the transformation of damping terms. Both the POD and NNMs allow to reduce significantly the dimension of the original Galerkin model. The computed nonlinear responses are compared in order to verify the accuracy and the limits of these two methods. For vibration amplitudes equal to 1.5 times the shell thickness, the two methods give very close results to the original Galerkin model. By increasing the excitation and vibration amplitude, significant differences are observed and discussed. The response is investigated also for a fixed excitation frequency by using the excitation amplitude as bifurcation parameter for a wide range of variation. Bifurcation diagrams of Poincaré maps obtained from direct time integration and calculation of the maximum Lyapunov exponent have been used to characterize the system. © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.