In this study, we discuss a design of an optimized cascade fuzzy controller for the rotary inverted pendulum system and ball & beam system by using an optimization vehicle of differential evolution (DE). The structure of the differential evolution optimization environment is simple and a convergence to optimal values realized here is very good in comparison to the convergence reported for other optimization algorithms. DE is easy to use given its mathematical operators. It also requires a limited computing overhead. The rotary inverted pendulum system and ball & beam system are nonlinear systems, which exhibit unstable motion. The performance of the proposed fuzzy controller is evaluated from the viewpoint of several performance criteria such as overshoot, steady-state error, and settling time. Their values are obtained through simulation studies and practical, real-world experiments. We evaluate and analyze the performance of the proposed optimal fuzzy controller optimized by Genetic Algorithm (GA), and DE. In this setting, we show the superiority of DE versus other methods being used here as well as highlight the characteristics of this optimization tool