Natural degeneration or trauma of articular cartilage all can lead to its structural and functional damage. Without blood supply and nerve innervation, chondrocytes in the matrix lacunae obtain essential nutrients and excrete metabolites mainly through osmosis, finally leads to its low metabolic activity and difficulty in self-repair after injury. At present, drug conservative treatment and surgical operation are the main clinical treatment, but both of them can't meet the clinical needs well. The development of cartilage tissue engineering provides a new direction for the repair of articular cartilage injury, in which growth factors plays a very important role. Growth factors, together with seed cells and cell scaffolds, constitute the three elements for the construction of tissue-engineered cartilage. Among them, Growth factors can significantly promote cell proliferation and differentiation and induce their functions. Various growth factors synergistically mediate the differentiation of seed cells into chondrocytes. In recent years, stem cell cartilage tissue engineering developed rapidly, which has opened a new way for repair of articular cartilage damage due to its abundant cell resources, small damage to body itself, strong ability of proliferation and directional differentiation, biological repair and other prominent advantages. Different types of hydrogels and stem cells show different abilities to support chondrogenesis and require different growth factors to induce chondrocyte differentiation. Traditional growth factors for tissue engineering include transcription growth factor β, insulin-like growth factors, bone morphogenetic proteins, fibroblast growth factors and cartilage derived morphogenetic protein. Recently, some scholars found that platelet-rich plasma, platelet-rich fibrin, Kartogenin and Mechano-growth factor can also effectively induce chondrogenic differentiation of stem cells and maintain chondrocyte phenotype. In addition, some synthetic compounds such as dexamethasone and inorganic particles can also promote the differentiation of stem cells into cartilage. This article systematically summarized the new progress of the traditional growth factors, emphatically introduced the new discovered growth factors and some synthetic compounds and inorganic particles, which can induce stem cells into cartilage. Finally classified the different sources of stem cells and its suitable growth factors, and gave an outlook of the next research direction of growth factors.