Heart failure (HF) is the final stage of various cardiac diseases. It's important to use appropriate biomarkers for identifying heart failure in the early stage, managing patients, and optimizing risk stratification in clinical setting. This review summarizes the important roles of markers related to cardiac stress, myocardial injury, extracellular matrix, micro RNA and inflammatory factors which were reported in literatures in recent years, and assessed their clinical value in the early diagnosis and prevention of heart failure.