<p>With the development of nanodelivery systems, significant breakthroughs have been achieved in tumor diagnosis and treatment. These systems effectively address the limitations of traditional anti-tumor drugs, such as poor solubility, lack of targeting, and systemic toxicity, which often lead to suboptimal therapeutic outcomes. In particular, environment-responsive drug carriers, triggered by the unique tumor microenvironment, enable precise and controllable drug release at tumor sites, improving the efficiency of drug accumulation in tumors and reducing off-target distribution, thus minimizing unnecessary side effect on normal tissues. Among various nanocarriers, porous nanocarriers have distinct advantages, including high surface area, large drug loading capacity, tunable pore size, and easy surface modification. These features made them have unique advantages in the field of drug delivery and tumor diagnosis and therapy. Combination therapy designs using porous nanocarriers can effectively overcome the limitation of monotherapy, leading to synergistic effect in tumor treatment. Especially, a tumor multi-modal combination therapy strategy designed by porous nanocarriers can effectively overcome the limitation of single therapy, and thus generate a cascaded amplification effect in tumor therapy. This paper reviews and summarizes recent advances in porous nanocarriers for tumor diagnosis and therapy discusses their advantages and challenges, and provides insights for the development of more intelligent and diversified composite drug systems based on porous carriers.</p> Graphical abstract <p></p>