Traditional manufacturing operations require a long time and capital for prototype development and small batch production. Forming processes necessitate component specific and expensive dies since their preparation and design are time-consuming. In latest years, incremental sheet metal forming has acquired good attraction owing to its ability for small-batch productions and prototyping with generic tooling and short lead time. In this paper, a review of literature works has been presented describing investigations carried out on the formability of lightweight alloys, mainly Al alloys, Ti alloys and Mg alloys, during single point incremental forming (SPIF) process, considering the deformation mechanism, formability assessment techniques, forming limit curves, effects of influencing factors, and the effect of heating.