In nowadays industry, most processes are controlled and automated. Interestingly, PID controllers are major contributors to the control process since they were invented and become quite practical. PID controllers are vital component in the industry and enhancing the component will show an echo effect in today’s technology. Their drawbacks are tuning them for an application, and this provides inspiration to develop advanced optimization methods in tuning PID controllers. This survey aims to review metaheuristic optimization methods of PID controller tuning that were published between 2010 and 2018. The paper was constructed based on 22 research papers and found that 8 metaheuristics optimization methods were used with PID tuning on 5 industrial applications. The papers also extensively provided answers to 3 research questions and assessing the quality of the papers based on 6 parameters.