The main reason of increasing mortality rate among women is the breast cancer. It makes several hours with the less availability of systems to identify the diagnosis of cancer manually. Hence there is a need to develop an automatic system for early detection of cancer. Several researchers have focused in order to improve performance and achieved to obtain satisfactory results. But unfortunately it will be very difficult to detect the cancer in beginning stages because the symptoms may be inappropriate.Therefore, there is a need to determine and acquire a new knowledge to prevent and minimizing the risk of getting effected with cancer. Machine learning (ML) is algorithms are widely used in detecting breast cancer patterns and predict the grading level. Machine learning techniques can be used to classify the stage of cancer, where machine can be trained from past data and build a model so that it can predict the category of new input.In this paper we used K-nearest neighbors (K-NN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) on the dataset collected from UCI repository to detect breast cancerwith respect to the results of accuracy the efficiency of algorithm is also measured and compared.