See pages for tribes, genera and species for more discussion.
The subfamily is separated into tribes here due to the large number of genera & species, and to help group similar genera together. Even so, each tribe contains some genera that look very different.
Netrosoma is not grouped into any of the tribes, and may not belong to the Melanoplinae at all (perhaps it is in the Proctolabinae or Copiocerinae?). The arrangement of these tribes varies from author to author, and authors have commented on the difficulty of understanding relationships between genera. Arrangements will probably change greatly as molecular studies help to show these relationships more clearly. The arrangement of
Orthoptera Species File, has been mostly but not entirely followed here, with earlier authors' arrangements sometimes favored because the OSF treatment places some genera that are very similar into different tribes.