During the last few decades, digital communication has played a vital role in various sectors such as healthcare departments, banking, information technology companies, industries, and other fields. Nowadays, all data are transmitted over the Internet, which needs high protection for transmitting the original data from source to destination. In order to secure digital communication, cryptography and steganography methods are used to achieve data security over insecure and open networks like the Internet. Cryptography is the method of encrypting secret information in an unreadable structure. Based on the cryptography method, the original message can be distorted before data transmission. On the other hand, steganography covers secret data such as audio, image, text, and video. It can hide the message while transmitting the original information from one end to another. The data combines images, texts, audio and videos, which are communicated worldwide through the Internet. This review paper gives an analysis based on the concept of cryptography and steganography. It also presents a comparative approach using several encryption algorithms with several factors such as block size, key size, encryption speed, memory usage, and security level. © 2023 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.