Pyrrolidine scaffold has been widely used to design a variety of N-heterocyclic derivatives towards various targets. Amongst them, matrix metalloproteins (MMPs) and aminopeptidase N (APN) represent two kinds of important metalloproteinase targets which have been proved to be tightly related to tumor proliferation, invasion, metastasis and angiogenesis. As a result, their respective inhibitors, namely MMP inhibitors (MMPIs) and APN inhibitors (APNIs), have been systematically studied in our group for many years. Recent advances in the elucidation of MMPIs and APNIs based on the pyrrolidine platforms are briefly reviewed in this paper.