In the present work, we made a comparative study of \(f(R,{\mathcal {T}})\) gravity over general gravity regarding the parameter estimation of the strange star. For this purpose, we used the Durgapal IV metric as the inner space–time of the strange star. In this work, we applied \(f(R,{\mathcal {T}})=R+2\beta {\mathcal {T}}\) where R is the Ricci scalar, \({\mathcal {T}}\) is the trace of the energy–momentum tensor and \(\beta \) is the coupling term between them. For the isotropic model of the compact star, the field equations were solved and the corresponding astrophysical aspects were discussed. We have shown that a sharp difference arise on the physical parameters like central density ( \(\rho _{0}\) ), central pressure ( \(p_{0}\) ), surface redshift ( \(Z_{s}\) ), compactness and radius of the compact stars 4U 1702-429, 2A 1822-371, PSR J1756-2251, PSR J1802-2124 and PSR \(J1713+0747\) in two distinct gravity theories.