Summary: We present the bifurcation analysis of Chua’s circuit equations with a smooth nonlinearity, described by a cubic polynomial. Our study focuses on phenomena that can be observed directly in the numerical simulation of the model, and on phenomena which are revealed by a more elaborate analysis based on continuation techniques and bifurcation theory. We emphasize how a combination of these approaches actually works in practice. We compare the dynamics of Chua’s circuit equations with piecewise-linear and with smooth nonlinearity. The dynamics of these two variants are similar, but we also present some differences. We conjecture that this similarity is due to the central role of homoclinicity in this model. We describe different ways in which the type of a homoclinic bifurcation influences the behavior of branches of periodic orbits. We present an overview of codimension 1 bifurcation diagrams for principal periodic orbits near homoclinicity for three-dimensional systems, both in the generic case and in the case of odd symmetry. Most of these diagrams actually occur in the model. We found several homoclinic bifurcations of codimension 2, related to the so-called resonant conditions. We study one of these bifurcations, a double neutral saddle loop.