Fish sauce is a widely used seafood condiment in East and Southeast Asia. Fresh fish or shrimp is generally used as raw material, and mixed with a lot of salt (usually 20%-30%), and then produced by long-term fermentation in an open environment. Fish sauce is characterized by delicious taste, nutrient-rich and so on. There are some problems of traditional fish sauce such as too long fermentation time, bio-amine accumulation, product quality inconsistencies and so on, however, the use of specific microbial starters is expected to solve these problems. On the basis of summarizing the traditional fish sauce production process, this paper focused on the enzyme-producing microbial species in traditional fish sauce, as well as researches and applications of using microorganisms to promote fish sauce fermentation and improve the quality of fish sauce products.