Three time windows for counting active users. The window you choose changes the story. This comparison covers all three plus the stickiness ratios between them.
Last updated: 2026-04-01
Daily Active Users. Unique users who perform a qualifying action within a single day, usually a calendar day in a fixed timezone. The right metric for products people are expected to use daily.
Best for daily-use products: messaging, social feeds, productivity tools, news. Tracks habit formation and reacts quickly to changes.
Weekly Active Users count unique users in a rolling 7-day window. Monthly Active Users count unique users in a rolling 30-day window. Both smooth out daily noise and forgive less-frequent usage.
WAU best for weekly-cadence products (banking, fitness, project tools). MAU best for episodic products (tax software, travel) and investor reporting.
DAU = unique users active in a 24-hour calendar dayA user who opens your app five times in a day counts as 1 DAU, not 5. Deduplication by user ID is essential.
WAU = unique users in rolling 7 days. MAU = unique users in rolling 30 days.Rolling windows avoid calendar artifacts. February has 28 days. March has 31. Rolling 30-day MAU keeps the comparison honest.
| Criteria | DAU | WAU / MAU |
|---|---|---|
| Time window | Calendar day (24h) | Rolling 7 days (WAU) or rolling 30 days (MAU) |
| Right for | Daily-use products | Weekly or monthly-cadence products |
| Reaction speed | Fast. Same-day signal | Slower (WAU = days, MAU = up to a month) |
| Volatility | High. Weekends and holidays distort it | Lower. Smoother trend |
| Stickiness ratio | DAU/MAU = % returning daily | WAU/MAU = % returning weekly |
| Cross-industry avg DAU/MAU | 37% (Mixpanel 2024) | N/A |
| Best industry fit | Social, messaging, news, gaming | Banking, fitness, B2B tools, marketplaces |
| Most-cited public metric | Less common publicly | MAU. Standard for earnings reports |
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Score your own data with both frameworks. Compare results and pick the one that fits your team.
Across all industries, Mixpanel's 2024 benchmark report puts the cross-industry average at 37%. By industry: 50% or higher for social and messaging, 40 to 60% for productivity, 13% for SaaS, 10% for e-commerce, around 10% for fintech. Sequoia's 2014 rule of thumb of 10 to 20% is now dated for consumer apps but still reasonable for SaaS.
The one that matches the product's natural usage cadence. A daily-use product reporting MAU is hiding decay. A monthly-use product reporting DAU looks unhealthy compared to peers. Pick the window that lets the metric move when usage moves.
Define one qualifying action and stick with it. For a chat product, that might be sending a message. For analytics tooling, opening a dashboard. Avoid "logged in" as the bar. Logged-in but inactive sessions inflate the number without reflecting real engagement.
DAU is usually a calendar day in UTC. WAU and MAU are rolling 7-day and 30-day windows. Calendar months would make February shorter than March and create artificial fluctuations. Rolling windows give you smoother trend lines.
Because the natural usage cadence varies. Slack and WhatsApp users show up daily. Tax software users show up annually. The ratio reflects how often real users have a reason to come back, not how good the product is.