Abstract. Hybrid optical amplifiers (HOAs) are crucially important for broadband band amplification, and are widely deployed in high-capacity dense wavelength division multiplexed systems. We summarize the present state-of-the-art in this rapidly growing field. In addition, theoretical background and various inline configurations of optical amplifiers have been presented. Various issues such as gain flatness, gain bandwidth, transient effect, and crosstalk were presented in HOAs. Results show that the HOAs provide better gain flatness without using any expensive gain flattening techniques, and an acceptable range of gain, noise figure, bit error rate, and transience.