Summary The declining reserves and environmental concerns related to the use of fossil fuels have made the global think tanks to pursue for the technologies considered to be renewable as well as sustainable. Fuel cell technology is emerging and a green way to produce electricity, provided sufficient amount of hydrogen (fuel) is available that directly convert chemical energy to electrical energy. Despite of being an efficient and eco‐friendly source of energy, commercialization of fuel cells is still difficult to attain. Techno‐economic challenges like high manufacturing and assembly costs, water management, system size, nondurability, and instability of the system need to be addressed. In order to resolve these issues, considerable research has been carried out for the development of novel and inexpensive materials for the fuel cells. In this article, we have reviewed the development of electrodes and electrolyte materials for different types of fuel cells. A detailed description of applications, challenges, and improvement of electrodes/electrolytes materials of different types of fuel cells (polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells, direct methanol fuel cells and solid oxide fuel cells) have been reported in this review article. A brief review of the development of materials for electrode of molten carbonate fuel cells has also been presented in the review.