This paper addresses Trace-Based Reasoning (TBR) by using Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) as a descriptive framework. TBR is a reasoning paradigm in which inferences are made on specific objects called traces. Traces are sequential records of events observed and stored during an interactive process. We report two contributions. First, we propose a review of the current researches related to TBR. Then, we compare CBR and TBR. From this comparison, we show that the exploitation of traces instead of cases as knowledge sources raises very specific challenges. More precisely, new methods for defining similarity measures and for performing adaptation of traces are required. These new methods have to take into account the sequential properties of traces. In the discussion, we emphasis the benefits of using traces as a knowledge container in a reasoning process and we pinpoint promising applications of TBR.