Porous hierarchical and nitrogen-doped carbon coated ZnFe2O4 (ZnFe2O4@NC) was obtained by combustion method and unique carbon coating technology. Gum Arabic was firstly introduced in the carbon coating process as an additive, which played an important role to control the uniformity of carbon coating layer. The nitrogen-doped carbon layer was obtained through the pyrolysis of glycine. The elemental composition and content of the nitrogen-doped carbon in composites were characterized by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) and thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA). The galvanostatic charge/discharge cycling was used to test the electrochemical performance of ZnFe2O4@NC and pure ZnFe2O4. The sub-micro size ZnFe2O4@NC with unique porous structure showed an excellent electrochemical performance as an anode material, which was higher than that of pure ZnFe2O4. ZnFe2O4@NC could maintain the specific discharge capacity of 1477mAhg−1 at 0.1Ag−1 after 100 cycles and 705mAhg−1 at 1Ag−1 after 1000 cycles, respectively.