SF1 and SF2 helicases are important molecular motors that use the energy of ATP to unwind nucleic acids or nucleic-acid protein complexes. They are ubiquitous enzymes and found in almost all organisms sequenced to date. This article provides a comparative analysis for SF1 and SF2 helicase families from three domains of life archaea, human, bacteria. Seven families are conserved in these three representatives and includes Upf1-like, UvrD-like, Rad3-like, DEAD-box, RecQ-like. Snf2 and Ski2-like. The data highlight conservation of the helicase core motifs for each of these families. Phylogenetic analysis presented on certain protein families are essential for further studies tracing the evolutionary history of helicase families. The data supplied in this article support publication "Genome-wide identification of SF1 and SF2 helicases from archaea" (Chamieh et al., 2016) [1].