The research progress of self-healing anti-corrosion coatings and classifies the existing self-healing anti-corrosion coating systems into two kinds. One is by embedding the film-forming material or corrosion inhibitor in the coating to achieve the autonomous repair of the coating’s anti-corrosion property. The other is the non-autonomous mechanism that uses temperature, light or other external stimulus to achieve the repair of coating defects. The combination of the autonomous and non-autonomous healing mechanisms to achieve long-term repair performance over the anti-corrosion and functional properties of the coating will be the direction of development of next-generation self-healing coatings for corrosion protection.