<p>Nowadays, additive manufacturing has a new potential approach to fabricating an intrinsic metallic and nonmetallic structure via various processes such as selective laser melting, electron beam melting, and wire-feed electron beam manufacturing. This process technique manufactures high-quality components with increased functionality, reduces design-to-manufacture lead times, and is suitable for various applications such as automotive, aerospace, biomedical, and structural engineering. In this review paper, there is a focus on aluminum alloy due to the superior strength-to-weight ratio. However, their processing remains challenging because of issues such as porosity, cracking, and inhomogeneous microstructures arising from rapid melting and solidification. Therefore, this research has focused on the optimization process parameters of additive manufacturing, enhanced the post-processing treatments, and analyzed the correlation between the structure and properties to mitigate the arising defects during the fabrication and increase the properties of components. Furthermore, it identifies critical gaps in the understanding of these processes and provides perspectives for future research to exploit their industrial potential fully.</p>