Owing to the types of non-linearities involved, the analysis and the comparison of different anti-windup compensators that are available in the literature become difficult. Towards achieving a better understanding of the mechanisms of these anti-windup compensators, we here expose the observer property inherent in a class of anti-windup compensators. This observer property allows us to unify these anti-windup compensators as special cases of the generalized anti-windup compensator due to Åström and Wittenmark (1984), and provides a general framework to investigate their performance.