An enhanced conversion for equilibrium limited reactions is often considered to be an essential advantage, when a chemical reaction and an adsorption separation process are performed together in a chromatographic reactor. In this work the inherent discontinuous character of chromatographic reactor operation and the necessity of an additional desorbent or carrier causing dilution are included in a comparison with conventional fixed-bed operation. For this, a mathematical model was used. Model parameters were determined from experimental data for the reversible hydrolysis of an ester.