Hydrogen has been regarded as one of the most promising future fuel that would help in reducing emission pollution, as its combustion generates only water vapor besides its high energy value. On the other hand, there are still some technical challenges that need to be solved, such as energy efficiency, high energy costs, safety issues, slow kinetics, transferring, and storage. Finding efficient, safe and low cost storage methods is the basic impediment for the adoption of hydrogen as fuel. Hydrogen can be stored mainly by methods such as compression, liquefaction, physisorption and chemisorption. Among those, while compressing and liquefying methods have some disadvantages, effective application of the storage technology requires the necessity of using high efficiency, environmentally friendly, cheap materials. Material based hydrogen storage has proven to be a realistic alternative to compression and liquefaction. Until recently, several porous materials have been investigated extensively for the storage of hydrogen. An overview related to hydrogen storage techniques, comparative evaluation of hydrogen storage performances of various materials and correlation between the surface characteristics, affecting factors, perspectives and challenges will be presented.