Calibration transfer (CT) refers to the set of chemometric techniques used to transfer (near-infrared) calibration models between spectrometers. The requirement of traditional CT methods to measure calibration standard samples has been a challenge as such measurements are difficult in real-world applications, e.g. when the instruments are located far apart or chemically stable standard samples are not available. In recent years, major developments have taken place in the domain of CT, hence, this work provides a concise but critical review of all the main recent chemometric techniques available to perform CT. Particularly this work explains some newer concepts for standard-free CT, where the standard samples are not required to attain the CT. We conclude that CT approaches that do not rely on standard sample measurements hold promise to help making calibration models sharable between similar analytical devices and to increase the applicability of CT to real-world problems in the analytical sciences.