This paper examines the universal quantitative properties of the fractional- and integer-order Chen-Lee systems. A series of bifurcation diagrams of the system were generated in order to measure Feigenbaum's constants. It was found that the measured values of the integer-order system were accurately approaching their universal constants, while the errors between measured values of the fractional-order system and the universal constants were not very large. The results showed that both the fractional- and integer-order Chen-Lee systems belonged to a quadratic map. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first paper to measure Feigenbaum's constants in fractional-order systems. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.