Esophageal cancer is one of the most common digestive tract cancers in our country. Although multimodality therapy has been used in the treatment of esophageal cancer, such as radiotherapy, chemotherapy and targeted therapy, surgery plays its irreplaceable role. With the development of techniques and innovation of instruments, minimally invasive esophagectomy is introduced into practice worldwide. Due to its less trauma and fewer complications, minimally invasive esophagectomy draws great attention, however, controversy exists in the question whether minimally invasive esophagectomy has similar efficacy to open esophagectomy. With the aim of providing suggestions for selecting optimal surgical procedure, this review discusses differences between minimally invasive esophagectomy and open esophagectomy in the following three aspects: perioperative mortality and morbidity, margin status and harvested lymph node number, and postoperative survival. Nowadays, the advantage of minimally invasive esophagectomy has been widely recognized in reducing perioperative morbidity and mortality, however, in the aspect of radicality and prognosis, it is far from reaching a definite conclusion for lack of multicenter, large sample, prospective, randomized controlled trials. Such trials are warrented so as to show the strength and weakness of minimally invasive esophagectomy.