Abstract There is a severe tension between the observed star formation rate (SFR) - stellar mass (M⋆) relations reported by different authors at z = 1 − 4. In addition, the observations have not been successfully reproduced by state-of-the-art cosmological simulations which tend to predict a factor of 2-4 smaller SFRs at a fixed M⋆. We examine the evolution of the SFR−M⋆ relation of z = 1 − 4 galaxies using the SKIRT simulated spectral energy distributions of galaxies sampled from the EAGLE simulations. We derive SFRs and stellar masses by mimicking different observational techniques. We find that the tension between observed and simulated SFR−M⋆ relations is largely alleviated if similar methods are used to infer the galaxy properties. We find that relations relying on infrared wavelengths (e.g. 24 μm, MIPS - 24, 70 and 160 μm or SPIRE - 250, 350, 500 μm) have SFRs that exceed the intrinsic relation by 0.5 dex. Relations that rely on the spectral energy distribution fitting technique underpredict the SFRs at a fixed stellar mass by -0.5 dex at z ∼ 4 but overpredict the measurements by 0.3 dex at z ∼ 1. Relations relying on dust-corrected rest-frame UV luminosities, are flatter since they overpredict/underpredict SFRs for low/high star forming objects and yield deviations from the intrinsic relation from 0.10 dex to -0.13 dex at z ∼ 4. We suggest that the severe tension between different observational studies can be broadly explained by the fact that different groups employ different techniques to infer their SFRs.