A dditive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, is a digital manufacturing technology based on discrete stacking principle. Due to its high flexibility and rapidity, additive manufacturing has received widespread attention. It can reduce the production cost, shorten the manufacturing cycle, and quickly respond to the personalized needs of customers for molded products with additive manufacturing technology to manufacture mold or die. Rapid tooling based on additive manufacturing(AM) is also known as rapid tooling technology. According to whether the part based on additive manufacturing is directly used as a mold or die, rapid tooling is divided into indirect rapid tooling and direct rapid tooling. According to the hardness of the mold or die material, rapid tooling is divided into hard tooling and soft tooling. Indirect rapid tooling has developed from indirect soft tooling such as silicone tooling, to indirect hard tooling. Due to the complex process and low precision of indirect rapid tooling and short life of soft tooling, with the development of additive manufacturing and material, more and more attention has been paid to direct rapid tooling in recent years. This article mainly reviews the development history, process principle and typical process of rapid tooling based on additive manufacturing, and compares and analyzes these processes of rapid tooling. Meanwhile, it summarizes the basic principles, typical processes and characteristics of rapid tooling based on additive-subtractive hybrid manufacturing, and new materials used in rapid tooling. For rapid tooling, there are many drawbacks such as low precision, poor surface quality, internal defects of the mold or die, anisotropy of mechanical properties, limited size of mold or die and high cost. Therefore, rapid tooling will trend to high precision, high surface quality, high mechanical properties and low cost. The additive and subtractive hybrid manufacturing will be applied more than additive manufacturing. At the same time, the defect detection and control in the rapid tooling will become a research hotspot. © 2022 Cailiao Daobaoshe/ Materials Review. All rights reserved.