Mosquitoes are usually targeted using insecticides, insect growth regulators, and microbial agents. Indoor residual spraying and insecticide-treated bed nets. However, these strategies have negative effects on human health, the environment and induce resistance in a number of species. Eco-friendly tools have been recently implemented against mosquito vectors, including plant-based insecticides. To date few studies have adopted World Health Organization (WHO) Pesticide Evaluation Scheme guidelines for repellent testing against mosquitoes. This review presents a summary of recent information on development, and efficacy of plant-based repellents against Anopheles mosquitoes as well as promising new advances in the field. All eligible studies published up to April 2020 were systematically searched in several databases, namely PubMed/Medline, Scopus and Google scholar. The outcomes of interest were percentage repellency, protection time and additional properties identified in repellent compounds. A total of 27 trials met the inclusion criteria. The highest repellency effect against mosquitoes was conferred by citronella, followed by Ligusticum sinense extract, pine, Dalbergia sissoo, and Rhizophora mucronata oils with 100% protection for 8 to 14 hours. Furthermore, essential oils from plants such as lavender, camphor, catnip, geranium, jasmine, broad-leaved eucalyptus, lemongrass, lemon-scented eucalyptus, amyris, narrow-leaved eucalyptus, carotin, cedarwood, chamomile, cinnamon oil, juniper, cajeput, soya bean, rosemary, niaouli, olive, tagetes, violet, sandalwood, litsea, galbanum, and C. longa also showed >90% repellency within 8 hours against different species of Anopheles. Therefore, the review showed, essential oils and extracts of some plants could be formulated for the development of eco-friendly repellents against Anopheles species. Plant oils may serve as suitable alternatives to synthetic repellents in the future as they are relatively safe, inexpensive, and are readily available in many parts of the world.