Control of the amplitude and rotation of low-frequency kink or tearing perturbations in a tokamak plasma is crucial to disruption avoidance. For many actuator solutions (e.g. direct application of coupled magnetic fields or current drive), accurate knowledge of the instantaneous location of the mode is a requirement. This work demonstrates that equivalent real-time control of mode frequency using applied resonant magnetic fields can be obtained through tracking the rotating mode using either simple tomographic analysis of optical fluctuations, or by using previously proven tracking of edge magnetic fluctuations. In these experiments, the HBT-EP tokamak observes coupled 2/1–3/1 tearing-kink modes, the phase of which is determined magnetically by an array of toroidal by poloidal Bθ Mirnov probes, with the angle extracted by real-time projection of the signal onto an ideal 3/1 shape on a GPU in a s control loop. Alternatively, the phase of the 2/1 internal tearing mode is extracted using real-time tomographic inversion of signals from the poloidal extreme ultraviolet (pEUV) diagnostic on the GPU, using fixed-weighting Tikhonov regularization. In offline computations, this implementation choice performs as well or better with respect to the magnetic scheme than regularization kernels of Gaussian process tomography or lower order finite difference operators, as well as iterative optimized weighting routines or directly fitting an m = 2 shape to the incoming pEUV signals. Using either magnetic or optical phase tracking, mode rotation changes of are obtained in real-time experiments by applying a resonant magnetic field with fixed temporal phase offset to the rotating mode.