Biometrics is the one of the most emerging technology in our day to day life. Biometrics is going to be a future of security and applications. Why we need biometrics? The password is not user-friendly, we could not dump all password in our brain. Sometimes we couldn’t remember which application which password we used. To overcome all those problems, Biometrics provides security “You are the password for your application”. Biometrics provides trustworthiness. Both behavioral and physiological characteristics of biometric features recognize the individuality of a person whether the user is genuine or an imposter. Hand biometrics is one of the traditional biometric systems. Generally, hand biometrics can be either captured by contact and contactless-based approach. Hand biometrics comprises of palm textures, knuckle, hand geometry, fingerprints which can be used for recognition. Hand biometrics consist of more uniqueness and individuality of the person has been identified. In this survey paper, we are going to present the working of the hand geometry and palm print technically. The primary objective is to study in-depth of hand biometric system and architecture of hand biometrics. The secondary objective is to literature survey on hand geometry and palmprint. This paper also studies the pre-processing and feature extraction of various systems used in hand and palm print. Finally paper addresses the performance evaluation techniques of hand biometrics. © 2018, Springer International Publishing AG.