Electrical control of magnetism (ECM) is defined as a method to modulate magnetism intrinsically by electrical means, providing an alternative avenue for data storage. ECM is attracting increasing interest and exciting significant research activity due to its profound physics and enormous potential for applications. This review article aims to provide a comprehensive review of recent progress in ECM, including materials, device configuration, magnetoelectric performance, and development trend. We summarize the recent understanding of the mechanisms responsible for the observed ECM behavior, including carrier density modulation, strain control, orbital reconstruction and electrochemical effect. That is, carrier density modulation and electronic structure variation are mainly responsible for the ECM in the ultrathin thin ferromagnetic metals; in ferroelectric/ferromagnetic bilayers the strain introduced by the piezoelectric behavior of the ferroelectric layer accounts for the magnetoelectric coupling; the charge transfer and orbital reconstruction between 3d transitionmetal ions affect the ferromagnetic behaviors at the oxide interface; the oxygen ions motion provides an avenue for the ECM in the system with high oxygen mobility or ionic liquid gating. Furthermore, we describe the potential applications of ECM in magnetic tunnel junctions and 180° magnetization switching with pure electric field effect, and the role of ECM on the spintronics with low power consumption. Finally, we discuss the recent progress of the works combining ECM and antiferromagnetic spintronics.