[3] Members of this subfamily have diverse habits, including small geophytes, hemispherical cushions, shrubs, trees, and columnar cacti consisting of indeterminate branches or determinate terete or spherical segments.

[4] Synapomorphies of Opuntioideae include small deciduous, barbed spines called glochids born on areoles and a bony aril surrounding a campylotropous ovule (inverted and curved, such that the micropyle almost meets the funiculus).

[5] Other prominent morphological characters for this subfamily are presence of cylindrical, caducous leaves that tend to be shed by maturity and the sectioning of the stem into joints or pads known as cladodes.

Notably, their lack of collapsible cortical cells, ribs, and tubercles mean that they cannot absorb water or transfer it intercellularly as easily as the other cacti, so this may place evolutionary constraints on the aridity of habitats and maximum adult size.

[8] In 2009, a study by Griffith and Porter, based on ribosomal intergenic spacer analysis defined four clades within the Opuntioideae:[5] They noted that the boundaries of some genera as then circumscribed were unclear.