Recovery of pure cobalt and nickel from diverse resources is important due to the increased demand for these metals. In order to get cobalt and nickel with high purity, separation of them from other metal ions is necessary. In this review, several methods to obtain pure cobalt or nickel solution, such as solvent extraction, ion exchange, precipitation were introduced and compared. For solvent extraction, the advantage and disadvantage of the separation process together with detailed process conditions were investigated.