Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), as a new type of material analysis technology, has been widely used in many fields such as factory operation and maintenance, garbage collection, rock and mineral analysis, cultural heritage protection, environmental monitoring, biomedicine, food inspection, and homeland security in recent years due to its outstanding advantages such as simple sample preparation, non-contact measurement, strong field-adaptability, fast analysis speed, as well as simultaneous identification and quantitative analysis of various elements. In the process of gradually transitioning from laboratory to practical application, researchers from all over the world have developed various LIBS instruments, which can be roughly divided into three categories according to their size and usage characteristics: desktop, remote and portable LIBS. In this paper, the principle, hardware implementation and development of LIBS are systematically introduced, the existing LIBS instruments are classified and summarized, the advantages and challenges of the various devices are discussed in detail, and the future development is prospected.