In this paper, the fixed-time stability of general impulsive systems and the fixed-time synchronization issue of impulsive complex networks are investigated. First, the fixed-time stability of a class of nonlinear systems with general impulsive effects is analyzed by means of inequality method and using some special functions. Then, the developed fixed-time stability results are used to study the fixed-time synchronization of impulsive complex networks under the saturation controller. Compared with some early published works, in this paper, the estimation accuracy of settling time is improved by calculating the value of improper integral more precisely, and the saturation controller effectively suppresses chattering phenomenon caused by discontinuous signum function. Lastly, some numerical examples are given to verify the feasibility of our theoretical results.