Heavy quarks are effective probes of the hot and dense nuclear matter, the quark-gluon plasma, produced in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions. Due to the short time scale characterising their production, heavy quarks experience the whole evolution of the system. In particular, measurements of heavy-flavour hadron production in Pb-Pb collisions at LHC energies give insight into the mechanisms of heavy-quark transport in the deconfined matter.
In small hadronic systems, pp and p-Pb collisions, heavy-flavour measurements provide the baseline for observations of hot-medium effects in heavy-ion collisions, as well as tests of perturbative quantum chromodynamic calculations and measurements of cold-nuclear-matter effects. In this contribution, recent ALICE results on open heavy-flavour hadron production in pp, p-Pb and Pb-Pb collisions at various energies are discussed. New measurements are presented both for fully-reconstructed charmed hadrons and for single electrons from heavy-flavour hadron decays, also investigating the beauty-quark production via the measurement of D mesons and electrons from beauty-hadron decays.