Massospondylidae was named by Huene (1914). Its type is Massospondylus.

It was synonymized subjectively with Thecodontosauridae by Kuhn (1946); it was synonymized subjectively with Anchisauridae by Kuhn (1966), Steel (1970), Galton (1973) and Cooper (1981); it was synonymized subjectively with Plateosauridae by Heerden (1979).

It was assigned to Pachypodosauria by Huene (1914), Huene (1914) and Huene (1920); to Plateosauria by Sereno (1998) and Sereno (1999); to Sauropodomorpha by Sues et al. (2004); to Prosauropoda by Knoll (2005); to Plateosauria by Upchurch et al. (2007), Smith and Pol (2007), Martínez (2009), Yates (2010), Apaldetti et al. (2011) and Apaldetti et al. (2013); and to Massopoda by Novas et al. (2011) and McPhee et al. (2015).