This survey ¹ fills in an important gap in the literature on CubeSat communication systems’ designs and architectures. The paper ² comprehensively reviews the design details in-depth and ³ critically evaluates the performance and reliability of the reviewed systems by analyzing the demonstration and testing results and illustrating implicit assumptions in the reviewed works. Furthermore, the paper ⁴ proposes an original CubeSat communication system categorization based on the design approach and ⁵ analyzes the features and limitations of each category. Consequently, this leads to identifying the limitations of current CubeSat communication systems and the promising future developments that can boost CubeSat communications capabilities.