The physics and technological prototypes of imaging electromagnetic and hadronic calorimeters developed and operated by the CALICE collaboration have provided an unprecedented wealth of highly granular data of hadronic showers for a variety of active sensor elements and different absorber materials. The main goal of the CALICE research and development activities is to validate the performance of high-granular systems and study different reconstruction schemas. The very high longitudinal and transverse granularity of the constructed calorimeter prototypes opens the possibility to study the hadronic shower development and substructure and perform a detailed validation of the Geant4 simulations. In this paper, the energy reconstruction and resolution for single hadrons in the analog and semi-digital hadron calorimeters is discussed. A comparison is provided of the standard and software compensation reconstruction in individual detectors and combined electromagnetic and hadronic systems. Several observables from test beam measurements, which characterise hadronic shower development, are confronted with the predictions of the simulations using Geant4 hadronic physics models