Nowadays, Aluminium (Al) based hybrid surface composites are amongst the fastest developing advanced materials used for structural applications. Friction Stir Processing (FSP) has emerged as a clean and flexible solid-state surface composites fabrication technique. Intensive research in this field resulted in numerous research output; which hinders in finding relevant meta-data for further research with objectivity. In order to facilitate this research need, present article summarizes current state of the art and advances in aluminium based hybrid surface composites fabrication by FSP with in-situ and ex-situ approach. Reported literature were read and systematically categorized to show impacts of different types of reinforcements, deposition techniques, hybrid reinforcement ratio and FSP machine parameters on microstructures, mechanical and tribological characteristics of different Al alloys. Challenges and opportunities in this field have been summarized at the end, which will be beneficial to researchers working on solid state FSP technique. © 2020. The Author(s).