Recently, the gauge/gravity duality has been used to describe so-called holographic superconductors and superfluids with the help of black holes and solitons in Anti-de Sitter space-time. In the first part of the talk, I will discuss the basic approach and point out that a number of the qualitative features of these models are in good agreement with experimental results. In the second part, I will discuss holographic superconductors and superfluids away from the probe limit, i.e. taking backreaction of the space-time into account.