This paper is concerend with tackling the L 1 performance analysis problem of continuous and piecewise continuous nonlinear systems with non-unique solutions by using the involved arguments of set-invariance principles. More precisely, this paper derives a sufficient condition for the L 1 performance of continuous nonlinear systems in terms of the invariant set. However, because this sufficient condition intrinsically involves analytical representations of solutions of the differential equations corresponding to the nonlinear systems, this paper also establishes another sufficient condition for the L 1 performance by introducing the so-called extended invariance domain, in which it is not required to directly solving the nonlinear differential equations. These arguments associated with the L 1 performance analysis is further extended to the case of piecewise continuous nonlinear systems, and we obtain parallel results based on the set-invariance principles used for the continuous nonolinear systems. Finally, numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness as well as the applicability of the overall results derived in this paper.