Cold spray (CS) technology has shown many advantages over the traditional thermal spray methods, such as lower deposition temperature, higher deposition efficiency and lower coating porosity. The inherent deficiencies such as the oxidation, decomposition, phase transformation and grain growth in the nano structured materials associated with fusion of materials can be thus avoided, which allow the deposition of oxidation sensitive materials, thermal sensitive materials and phase transformation sensitive materials. It is worth noting that as the development of cold spray systems it is used as one solid state rapid manufacturing method to realize the industrial applications of metal additive manufacturing and repairing the damaged aerospace component and parts. Due to the fact that cold spray has been increasingly attracted more and more attention from domestic researchers and industries, a detailed summary and discussion on the advancement of cold spray technology and its system based on the literature survey and a long-term tracking of domestic and foreign CS systems were presented. Firstly, the main components for a conventional cold spray system, the sprayed materials and the microstructures-properties of the corresponding deposits were briefly described. Then, the systems and applications of the traditional cold spray technologies, such as high pressure cold spray, low pressure cold spray and vacuum cold spray were discussed. In addition, the novel cold spray technologies developed based on the spray gun design or spray nozzle design (such as the inner diameter cold spray, the pulsed gas dynamic spray, the shock tunnel produced cold spray and the radial supersonic spray), and the hybrid processes of other techniques assisting cold spray (such as, the laser assisted cold spray, the electrostatic force assisted cold spray, the magnetic assisted cold spray and the friction stir processing assisted cold spray additive manufacturing) were analyzed. Finally, the existed key problems of cold spray technologies and its system were pointed out, and the prospect of its material research and industrial application was given.