Extensive power losses of wind farm have been witnessed due to the wake interactions between wind turbines. By applying analytical wake models which describe the wind speed deficits in the wake quantitatively, the power losses can be regained to a large extent through wind farm layout optimization, and this has been extensively reported in literature. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of the analytical wake models in predicting the wind farm power production have rarely been studied and compared for wind farm with both constant and variable wind turbine hub heights. In this study, the effectiveness of three different analytical wake models (PARK model, Larsen model and B-P model) is thoroughly compared over a wide range of wake properties. After the validation with the observation data from offshore wind farm, CFD simulations are used to verify the effectiveness of the analytical wake models for an onshore wind farm. The results show that when using the PARK model the surface roughness value (z(0)) must be carefully tuned to achieve good performance in predicting the wind farm power production. For the other two analytical wake models, their effectiveness varies depending on the situation of wind farm (offshore or onshore) and the wind turbine hub heights (constant or variable). It was found that the results of B-P model agree well with the CFD simulations for offshore wind farm, but not for the onshore wind farm. The Larsen model is more accurate for the wind farm with variable wind turbine hub heights than those with constant wind turbine hub height. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.