Abstract: Coal pitch as a derivative of coal thermal conversion not only contains high carbon content, low cost and large production, which provides a broad prospect for the research and development of coal pitch-based porous carbon electrodes, and is expected to crack the current dilemma of the high investment cost and difficulty of large-scale production of supercapacitors. The preparation methods and performance enhancement strategies of coal pitch-based porous carbon electrode materials and their applications in the field of supercapacitors are summarized to provide a reference for the development of low-cost and high-performance supercapacitor electrode materials using coal pitch. Firstly, the energy storage mechanism of supercapacitors is introduced and the structural factors and laws affecting the electrochemical performance of supercapacitor porous carbon materials are listed, and the key performance indexes for evaluating the electrochemical performance of supercapacitors are summarized, which provide a theoretical basis for the subsequent design and performance optimization of coal pitch-based porous carbon electrode materials, and further illustrate the advantages of the application of coal pitch-based porous carbon in the field of supercapacitors. Subsequently, the characteristics and progress of the preparation of coal pitch-based porous carbon based on the activation method, template method and molten salt method are discussed in detail; on this basis, the important roles of the strategies of pore structure adjustment, morphology design, modulation of surface chemistry, and complexation of transition metal compounds in enhancing the electrochemical performance of coal pitch-based porous carbon electrode materials are further comprehensively sorted out, and the effects of the strategies of component separation and oxidative modification on the pore space of coal pitch-based porous carbon electrode materials are highlighted. The advantages of component separation and oxidative modification strategies on the pore regulation of coal pitch porous carbon are highlighted, and based on the new concept of multidimensional carbon materials engineering and the coupling mechanism of coal pitch porous carbon and transition metal compound composites, the problems faced by coal pitch porous carbon at present, such as the complexity of the precursor molecules, the low controllability, and the synthesis process to be optimized, are discussed. Finally, focusing on the bottlenecks that need to be solved in the large-scale application of coal pitch-based porous carbon in supercapacitors, the future development prospects of coal pitch-based porous carbon are discussed in the light of different modification strategies.