Coumarins, natural or synthetic, due to their wide range of biological activities, have become an interesting subject of investigation for many researchers. Coumarin scaffold has proven to have an important role in anticancer drug development due to a fact that many of its derivatives have shown an anticancer activity on various cell lines. Action of coumarins on tumour cells is carried out via different mechanisms and some of them show very good selectivity toward the cancer cells. In this work a brief literature review (2010-2015) on coumarins as potential anticancer drugs is given, which can serve as an excellent tool for future investigations on design and synthesis of such derivatives.