We investigate nonlinear extensions of the holographic soft wall model proposed by Karch et al. [Phys. Rev. D 74, 015005 (2006)] with a positive quadratic dilaton. We consider a Higgs potential for the tachyonic field that brings a more natural realization of chiral symmetry breaking in the infrared regime. Utilizing the $\mathrm{AdS}/\mathrm{CFT}$ dictionary and holographic renormalization, we find the chiral condensate as a function of the quark mass. The nonlinearity of the Higgs potential leads to a nonlinear relation between the chiral condensate and the quark mass. Solving the effective Schr̈odinger equations for the field perturbations, we estimate meson masses and decay constants and evaluate their dependence on the quark mass. In the axial and pseudoscalar sector we find an interesting behavior for the decay constants as the quark mass increases. We also investigate the effect of a five-dimensional running mass for the tachyonic field. We conclude that nonlinear soft wall models with a Higgs potential for the tachyon and a positive quadratic dilaton do not provide spontaneous symmetry breaking in the chiral limit.