Niobium and its alloys have high melting point, moderate density, excellent weldability and high temperature strength as well as good machinability, and are considered as ideal candidates for hotcomponents widely applied in high temperature range of 1200~1500 ℃. Unfortunately, the weak oxidation resistance severely restricts their engineering applications especially in the oxygencontaining environment. In present paper, oxidation behaviors and thermal protection approaches of niobiumbased alloys in hightemperature oxygencontaining environment are reviewed. It points out that the coating technique is the significant method to promote the hightemperature application of niobiumbased alloys to prevent oxygen penetration. The antioxidation coating systems built on the niobiumbased alloys are introduced according to the variety of coating techniques. Silicide coating, which exhibits the best oxidation resistance among all coating systems, has attracted great interests due to its advantages of generating a thermalstable, homogeneously phasedistributed and low oxygen penetration rate silicate glass on the surface. Different preparation methods and microstructure characteristics of the silicide coatings are mainly illustrated, such as the slurrysintering, halide activated pack cementation, spark plasma sintering and thermal spray, meanwhile the oxidation resistance of the obtained silicide coatings has been comparatively analyzed. The combined preparation technology is seen as an efficient way to deposit ultrahigh temperature antioxidation silicide coating for future development although it still now presents complicated process and numerous influencing factors. Suppressing mutual elemental diffusion between the silicide coating and niobiumbased alloy matrix, further increasing the operation temperature, improving the thermal insulation performance and lowering the thermal emissivity of silicide coatings are the important scientific issues to be solved in the future.