Inequivalent compact closed symmetric monoidal structures on the same category

A pretty interesting class of examples comes about by classifying compact monoidal groupoids. Given a group $G$, a $G$-module $M$, and a (normalized) 3-cocycle $a: G \times G \times G \to M$, one can manufacture a compact monoidal groupoid whose category of objects is $G$, whose morphisms are ordered pairs $(g, m) \in G \times M$ where we define $\text{dom}(g, m) = \text{cod}(g, m) = g$ and where endomorphism composition is defined by addition in $M$, and where we define the tensor product by $(g, m) \otimes (h, n) = (g h, m + g n)$. It's the 3-cocycle that furnishes the associativity data, and we get monoidally inequivalent groupoids whenever the 3-cocycles are not cohomologous. This was observed by Joyal and Street in their paper Braided Monoidal Categories.

Now you were asking about the symmetric monoidal case (where we now assume $G$ is abelian). These are also known as Picard groupoids. In the simplified scenario where we demand strict associativies and consider only the case where $G$ acts trivially on $M$, in which case the underlying category becomes the product $K G \times B M$ of the evident discrete monoidal category $K G$ with the evident one-object category $B M$, any symmetric bilinear pairing $G \otimes G \to M$ can be used to manufacture a symmetry isomorphism for a symmetric monoidal structure on $K G \times B M$, and these examples are generally symmetric-monoidally inequivalent. I can't tell how far away such examples are from the "toy"examples" you have in mind, but Picard groupoids are surely of interest -- see for example applications to 2-stage Postnikov systems of spectra here.


The category $Cat$ of small categories admits two inequivalent tensor products: the Cartesian product and the funny product. This generalizes up to 2-cat, 3-cat, etc. By the way, a word of advise to those like me with a murky memory: googling "cat funny product" is going to just give you pictures of cats.


The large class of examples I have in mind, though I am not sure if it meets your compactness requirement (definition?) are the Lax tensor products on $n$-Cat. It has been constructed in the cases $n=2$ and $n=\omega$ by Gray in the case $n=2$ and Crans, Steiner, and Verity independently in the case $n=\omega$.

Edit: To clarify, these are all biclosed, and their right adjoints are the $n$-categories whose objects are strict $n$-functors and whose higher cells are (op)lax natural transformations and (op)lax modifications between them.