This article presents new elliptic gradient estimates for positive solutions to nonlinear elliptic equations on smooth metric measure spaces involving the Witten Laplacian. The estimates are derived under natural lower bounds on the associated Bakry-\'Emery Ricci curvature tensor and find utility in proving fairly general Harnack inequalities and Liouville type theorems to name a few. The results here unify, extend and improve various existing results in the literature for special nonlinearities already of huge interest and applications. Some consequences are presented and discussed.