Abstract: OBJECTIVE To develop a high performance capillary electrophoresis (HPCE) method and high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method for the quantitative determination of berberine in Daochi pills and evaluate two methods to find out the differences between them. METHODS Daochi pills were extracted with hydrochloric acid-methanol (1∶100) solution and measured by HPCE and HPLC. An uncoated fused silica capillary(67 cm×75 mm, valid length of 60 cm) was used with a running buffer contained 60 mmol·L^-1 sodium dihydrogen phosphate and methanol(65∶35) under the voltage of 30 kV at 25 ℃, moderating pH 3.5 through phosphoric acid, and the detection wavelength was 254 nm. The injection time was 5 s. In HPLC method, the separation was performed on a C18 column(250 mm×4.6 mm, 5 μm) under the temperature of 25 ℃ with potassium dihydrogen phosphate-methanol (60∶40) as mobile phase at flow rate of 1.0 mL·min^-1. The detection wavelength was set at 254 nm. RESULTS The linear calibration range of HPLC and HPCE was 5.03-30.18 μg·mL^-1, 30.18-80.48 μg·mL^-1, relatively. Their average recoveries were 99.0% and 100.8% with RSD 1.4% and 0.6%, respectively. CONCLUSION Both methods can be applied to determine the berberine in Daochi pills, but there is a slight difference between their determination results, HPCE earned more benefits on column efficiency, shorter separation time and resolution among seperation of multicomponent.