Previous studies on insect DNA barcoding provide contradictory results and suggest not consistent performances across orders. This work aims at providing a general evaluation of insect DNA barcoding and mini-barcoding by performing simulations on a large database of 15,948 DNA barcodes. We compared the proportions of correctly identified queries across a) six insect orders (Coleoptera, Diptera, Hemiptera, Hymenoptera, Lepidoptera and Orthoptera), b) four identification criteria (Best Match: BM, Best Close Match: BCM, All Species Barcodes: ASB, tree-based identification: NJT), and c) reference databases with different taxon coverage (100, 500, 1,000, 1,500 and 1,995 insect species).