Dyes as one of organic pollutants have received increasing attention due to its harmful effects on many forms of life, in which methylene blue (MB) is often considered as a model organic pollutant for experimental measurement. In this work, we synthesize three ZIF-derived N-doped porous carbon adsorbents and further investigate their performance of removing MB from wastewater. Results indicate that MB saturated adsorption capacities of Carbon-ZD, Carbon-ZS, Carbon-Z are 1148.2, 791.3 and 505.3 mg/g, respectively, which means that Carbon-ZD is a better MB adsorbent, compared to the other two. Moreover, when the excessive adsorbents are used to treat wastewater containing MB pollutant, Carbon-ZD can almost completely remove the MB pollutant, because the removal percent of CarbonZD is almost 100%, which means that Carbon-ZD is an excellent candidate for MB removal from wastewater. Further experiments indicate that Carbon-ZD also possesses excellent regeneration and reusability, as well as anti-interference ability when MO and MB pollutants coexist in wastewater. To explore adsorption kinetic and thermodynamics, we also found that the pseudo-second order model can satisfyingly describe MB adsorption kinetics and the Langmuir model can well describe MB adsorption isotherm. The excellent performance of Carbon-ZD for MB removal from wastewater is mainly attributed to the high BET specific surface area, suitable pore size distribution and nitrogen-doping. It is expected that the strategy of rationally designing ZIF or MOF template to prepare nitrogen-doped porous carbon adsorbents can open a new way to develop highly efficient adsorbents for removing pollutants in wastewater. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.