Ecological footprint is an effective tool for assessing ecological sustainability under the influence of human activities. In this paper, based on 5104 papers on ecological footprint research in CNKI Chinese core journals from 1999 to 2020 and the core collection of Web of Science from 1994 to 2020, the knowledge maps, including time zone division of high frequency words, keywords clustering and temporal distribution of strong citation burst, were drawn with CiteSpace visualization software. The evolution path, basic theoretical framework and dynamic frontier of ecological footprint research were analyzed and summarized according to these maps. The results showed that: (1) The evolution paths of ecological footprint research in China and abroad were divided into three stages. But the evolution modes were different, and the research in China lagged behind the foreign research. (2) A basic framework system was formed in the study field of ecological footprint both home and abroad, which took the ecological footprint models and methods as tools, the footprint measurement as the basis, the ecological security as the foothold, and the coordinated development of human and ecology as the goal for the ecological footprint research. Foreign research focused on basic study framework construction, macro scale research and micro mechanism analysis. However, the optimization of models and methods, and the analysis of external environment were emphasized in Chinese research. (3) The frontier direction of foreign research was the hypothesis verification of environmental Kuznets curve and ecological network analysis, while it was the calculation of carbon footprint and water footprint, the evaluation of natural capital with the three-dimensional ecological footprint model and ecological compensation in China.