As we are facing increasing challenges of diminishing fossil fuel and global warming, there is increasing interest in developing advanced and cost effective electrochemical energy storage devices for diverse applications including mobile power supply to portable electronics, electric vehicles (EVs) or hybrid EVs (HEVs). To this end, layered double hydroxides (LDHs) have gained considerable attention in the past decade as a unique class of electrode materials due to their multiple cations, flexible ion exchangeability and tunable compositions. With abundant slabs and electrochemically active sites, the LDHs can used to produce energy storage devices with both the double-layer capacitance and Faradaic pseudo-capacitance. In this review, we summarize and discuss recent progress in the synthesis of LDHs based materials for electrochemical energy storage devices including lithium ion batteries and electrochemical supercapacitors.