A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a self-organizing temporary autonomous network with set of mobile nodes. MANET provides a platform to host many applications which in turn require rapid development and dynamic reconfiguration. For example defense industry, rescue sites, classrooms, and conventions. These applications lend themselves into multicasting. Multicasting can improve the efficiency of wireless links which is a limited resource by sending multiple copies rather than sending multiple unicast. Thus, it greatly reduces the bandwidth consumption. Hence, scalable and reliable multicast routing is a challenging task due to inherent characteristics of MANET. In the recent past years, many researchers have proposed many multicast routing strategies and they differ by its features and recovery mechanisms. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive study onsome of the existing multicast approaches proposed by the research community with respect to reliable, energy-aware, QoS –supported and secured multicasting.