At present, laser cladding technology has been widely used in the automotive and aerospace fields, which has great advantages in high-value material repair and material surface enhancement. Continuous laser and rectangular pulse waveform laser are commonly used in the laser cladding process, but few researches focus on the influence of other different laser waveforms on the performance of the cladding layer. This paper studies the geometric characteristics, microstructure, and microstructure of 316L stainless steel by different laser waveforms (continuous, rectangular pulse, ramp-up, ramp-down, mixed ramp) single-channel monolayer experiments. The effect of hardness. The results show that the molten pool generated by the continuous laser waveform has the largest cladding layer size, the coarsest microstructure, and the lowest hardness due to the low cooling rate. The two waveforms of ramp-up and ramp-down have low heat input, small size of cladding layer, and the characteristics of gradual heating and gradual cooling, so that the cooling rate of the molten pool is limited and the grain size is slightly larger. The size difference of the cladding layer produced by the rectangular pulse waveform and the mixed waveform is not significant, but the cladding layer exhibits the most detailed microstructure and the highest hardness due to the highest cooling rate of the molten pool under the rectangular pulse waveform.