In its broadest sense, intracellular digestion is the breakdown of substances within the cytoplasm of a cell. ...Intracellular digestion can also refer to the process in which animals that lack a digestive tract bring food items into the cell for the purposes of digestion for nutritional needs.
Extracellular digestion is a process in which saprobionts feed by secreting enzymes through the cell membrane onto the food. The enzymes catalyze the digestion of the food into molecules small enough to be taken up by passive diffusion, transport or phagocytosis.
