Secret sharing is the technique in which secret is distributed among n participants. Each participant has unique secret share. Secret can be recovered only after sufficient number of shares (k out of n) combined together. In many circumstances secret sharing has to provide additional capabilities to satisfy certain requirements. Such capabilities include proactive redistribution of shares, verifiability of the shares, robustness against cheating shareholders and general access structure.In this paper various secret sharing schemes are discussed and critically analysed with the strengths and weaknesses introduced into these schemes on the basis of additional features, storage space, share size.