A client identification method, an apparatus, a storage medium and a network device. The method includes: acquiring, when any client is associated with a network device, a MAC address of the client; searching and matching the MAC address from a user information table, which includes MAC addresses of all clients that have ever been associated with the network device and characteristic information corresponding to each of the MAC addresses; marking the client as successfully identified when the matching of the MAC address is successful; and marking the client as to be detected when the matching of the MAC address is failed, acquiring the characteristic information of the client from a data packet sent by the client, searching and matching the characteristic information of the client from the user information table, and identifying the client according to the matching result.