A high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with diode array detector (DAD) method was established for the discrimination of a folk medicine Forsythia suspensa and Forsythia viridissima. Five and three representative metabolites of the lignan and phenolic glycoside classes were selected for the analysis from F. suspensa and F. viridissima, respectively. The optimal chromatographic conditions were obtained on an ODS column (5 ${mu}m$, $4.6{ imes}250$ mm) with the column temperature at $40^{circ}C$. The mobile phase was composed of methanol and 0.3% acetic acid using an isocratic elution with the flow rate 1 mL/min. Detection wavelength was set at 280 nm. All calibration curves showed good linear regression ($r^2$ > 0.996) within test ranges. Limits of detection (LOD) and limits of quantitation (LOQ) values were lower than 0.096 and 0.291 ${mu}g/mL$, respectively. The developed method provided satisfactory precision and accuracy with overall intra-day and inter-day variations of 0.07-0.63% and 0.14-0.62%, respectively, and the overall recoveries of 97.79-102.46% for all of the compounds analyzed. In addition, effectiveness of diverse extraction methods was compared to each other for the development of standard analytical method. The verified method was successfully applied to the quantitative determination of representative metabolites in fifty-three commercial F. suspensa samples and fifteen commercial F. viridissima samples from diverse sources. The overall analytical results showed the unequivocal differences in bioactive constituents between F. suspensa and F. viridissima.