Parabolic multilayers (PMs) are widely used in synchrotron radiation, X-ray free electron lasers, laboratory X-ray sources, and so on, and therefore, how to expediently and effectively determine their performance is important for the designers, manufacturers, and users of them. This paper designed a method based on a laboratory X-ray source and polycapillary parallel X-ray lens to characterize the performances of one Al2O3/HfO2 PM. The results showed that a monochromatic X-ray beam with a width of 97.76 µm and a divergence of 0.667 mrad at Cu-K
α
(8.04 keV) was obtained with the PMs used in the paper based on a laboratory X-ray source with a focus size of 50–100 µm at various working powers, and its X-ray reflectivity for Cu-K
α
and Cu-K
β
was 43.71% and 38.62%, respectively.