Heuristic evaluation is a popular inspection method principally used for the assessment of usability according to expert-based criteria. Since its (practical) emergence in the early 90s, it has become one of the most widely-used method, mainly utilized for formative usability assessments at large. In this paper, an overview of the different approaches for heuristic-based usability evaluation is presented. To this end, a Systematic Literature Review has been carried out, together with a comparative study to analyze different existing tools for supporting heuristic evaluation. In this way, different research questions have been proposed, which have been answered by means of the evidences found, providing an extensive analysis of different typologies, classifications, outcomes and tools related to heuristic evaluation. In general, the study concludes that there is a lack of supporting tools with advanced software architectures, featuring client/server and database facilities for further analytics that encourage comparison and benchmarking of heuristic evaluations, lacking also advanced statistical processing for helping in decision-making. According to that, this study represents a starting point for the construction of a complete supporting tool intended to provide support for usability evaluators and usability engineers overall to carry out heuristic evaluation.