Planar laser induced fluorescence (PLIF) is a significant method to study the characteristics of flow field and combustion, owing to the advantages of non-conduction, high spatial and temporal resolutions. In comparison with existing low-speed PLIF, high-speed PLIF has a lot of advantages. High-speed PLIF with repetition rate higher than 10 kHz is necessary to study turbulent and reacting flows in order to capture the dynamics that governs the underlying physics in the fields such as supersonic and hypersonic flows, combustion and plasma physics. The lack of laser sources with high repetition rate and high pulse energy significantly limits the development of high-speed PLIF. A comprehensive overview for the development and the latest achievements of high-speed PLIF and the employed laser sources was given in this article. The characteristics of different laser sources were compared, and the pulse-burst technique was believed to be a promising source for high-speed PLIF technique. The development of pulse-burst laser used as the laser source in high-speed PLIF was predicted.