Since the creation of expanded polystyrene (EPS) in 1949, the market of bead foams experienced a slow rate of innovation until the second millennium. However, the demand for environmentally friendly lightweight materials has pushed the players in the foam market toward the production of innovative and performant bead foams. The interest for these materials comes mainly from their tunable low density and high degrees of freedom in part designing provided by adaptability of bead foams to the molding machines. In the first part of this work, an overview on the commercially available bead foams and a comparison between their typical properties, applications and data market will be presented. This will continue by a general summary on processing methods for producing polymer bead foams. In the second part examples of recent developments in the field of polymer bead foams will be presented. The main examples of these developments will be, expanded polyethylene terephthalate (EBPT) and expanded thermoplastic urethane (ETPU) bead foams. These thermoplastic and thermoplastic elastomer foams are gaining increasing industrial attention due to their wide range of properties. The main focus here will be on the mechanical property of these materials. A whole range of mechanical properties comprising energy absorption behavior, short and long-term mechanical response such as shear, compression and tensile responses, as well as fatigue and hysteresis will be shown. Furthermore, the temperature dependency of some of these mechanical properties will be the subject of discussion.