Abstract: A periodic intermittent control protocol is designed to achieve the leader-following quasi-consensus of nonlinear heterogeneous multi-agent systems with external disturbances in this paper. A new periodic intermittent control protocol is designed, which can control both the communication between the leader and the follower and the internal coupling between the follower agent systems. Then, the feedback gain and coupling weights are analyzed by inequality technique and Lyapunov function method. In order to save cost, a periodic intermittent pinning protocol is further designed. The leader-following quasi-consensus of the whole heterogeneous multi-agent system is realized through the interaction between agents. Finally, the convergence range of the error is obtained and the numerical simulation verified the correctness of the proposed protocol.