The FDA has approved CAR-T cell therapy for the treatment of B cell malignancies. Despite the clinical success of CD19 targeted CAR-T, several barriers limit the wider adoption of CAR-based therapies as viable long-term cancer therapies. Many of the barriers that limit the routine use of CAR-T cell therapies stem from utilizing autologous patient T cells as the starting material to generate CAR-T. Here we will describe the limitations of autologous CAR-T, the advantages and hurdles of allogeneic donor CAR-T, the learnings from clinical trials using allogeneic CART19 and discuss the future direction of the field.