The estimation of dynamic parameters in mechanical systems constitutes an issue of crucial importance both for inverse dynamics based control strategies and dynamic simulation applications where high accuracy is required. The identification procedures can be classified in two main groups: indirect and direct procedures. The first ones act sequentially in several steps in each of them parameters of different nature (basically friction and inertial parameters) are identified by means of specifically designed experiments, while the direct procedures allow the identification of all parameters defining de dynamic model in a single stage. In this paper, the implementation and comparison of an indirect and a direct identification procedures on an industrial robot provided with an open control architecture is addressed.