Nano composite brush plating coating based on nickel and its alloy, with its excellent resistance to wear, high temperature, and corrosion, has become the main research topic of nano composite brush plating technology, and attracted considerable worldwide attention. In this paper, research progress in coating with nickel and nickel-tungsten alloy, nickel-cobalt alloy, nickel-molybdenum alloy, nickel-iron alloy was reviewed. The paper pointed out that the limitation of the current studies on nano composite brush plating coating included partiality on nickel base, limited type of nano particles in the plating solution, sole nano particles contained in the coating, and low composite volume, little improvement of the coating performance. The difficulties in future research will be the quantitative relationship between the nano particle types, content, size and the hard-strengthening effect of nano particles, and the deposition mechanism of the composite in electron brush plating process as the researches on these subjects have achieved little progress. Researches on nano composite brush coating with nickel alloys, multi-particle and special functional coating, as well as coating with wide range of particles, will give people greater initiative to control the material performance, which will be an important direction in future research.