Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) are highly tunable, versatile, and functional materials that can be used for energy storage, water remediation, air purification, gas sensing, and gas storage. In the field of electrochemical energy storage, MOFs have a huge potential for rapid electrification of transport and industry. It is a great necessity for grid-level storage technologies that deliver fast response, high power, and long cycle life to stabilize increasing renewable-heavy electricity systems. This review approaches the MOFs used for electrochemical energy storage applications systematically, discussing the fundamentals of charge storage and transport, conventional and novel synthesis techniques, characterization of the MOFs, and evaluating their performances, critically approaching their applications in recent literature, addressing their limitations, and providing suggestions for better practices. For MOF-based supercapacitors, a critical need is to reduce the gap between reported capacitance values and device-level realities. Recent literature approaches this problem by adding conductive additives and using conductive substrates, which negates the use of MOFs as the principal charge storage and transfer mechanism, arising from the additives and substrates rather than the MOFs themselves. This review advocates standardized benchmarking and material innovation in MOFs synthesis and characterization without relying on the large conducting additive fractions. This review also explores the use of MOFs to stabilize and extend the lifespan of Aqueous Zinc Ion Batteries (AZIBs). It discusses the applications of MOF in AZIB, such as anode protection layer, Cathode electrode materials in AZIB, Fillers for gel-based electrolytes, and MOF separators. MOF-based materials were compared against other electrode materials for energy storage devices, and their properties were tabulated.
