The cinnamon leaf is widely used in flavoring, cooking, essences and medicine. In this work, we systematically detected and identified the volatile compounds of the leaves from five cinnamon species ( Cinnamomum cassia (Xijiang type), C. cassia (Fangcheng type), C. loureirii , C. verum and C. burmannii ) collected in China by using the methods of GC–MS and FTIR analysis, and compared the correlation between the density of oil cells and the yields of essential oils among above detected samples. The results indicated that the variation of the yields of essential oils was significant positively correlated with the density oil cells of five cinnamon leaves. Based on the results of GC–MS, trans-cinnamaldehyde was the primary components in the four cinnamon species except for C. verum. Notably, the highest contents of trans-cinnamaldehyde in the essential oil are C. loureirii (72.49%), followed by C. cassia (Xijiang type) (60.65%). Eugenol (83.26%) was the main substance of C. verum leaves. In addition to trans-cinnamaldehyde, isoamyl benzoate (7.02%) and α-thujene (6.28%) were the main volatile compounds in C. burmannii leaves. Finally, through analyzing the FTIR data by using hierarchical cluster and similarity analysis were further revealed that the chemical compositions of essential oil were similar of C. loureirii , C. cassia (Xijiang type) and C. cassia (Fangcheng type), and they were significantly different from C. verum and C. burmannii . All these results confirm that species and cultivated environment can lead to the changes in essential oil composition.