What are DAU, WAU and MAU?
DAU, WAU and MAU are the number of unique users who are active in your product in one day, one week and one month. Each person counts once per window, however often they show up.
- DAU: daily active users, unique users in one day.
- WAU: weekly active users, unique users in the last seven days.
- MAU: monthly active users, unique users in the last thirty days.
Someone active every day of a month counts once in MAU, not thirty times. That is what makes them different from session counts.
What does MAU stand for?
MAU stands for monthly active users: the number of unique people who did something you count as "active" in your product over a month.
Most analytics tools use a rolling 30-day window, so the number moves every day. Some teams report by calendar month instead, which makes February look weaker than March for no real reason. Either works if you say which one you used and stick to it.
What is the difference between DAU and WAU?
DAU counts unique users in a single day, and WAU counts them across seven days. A person who uses your product on Monday and Thursday appears in DAU twice that week but in WAU once.
Match the interval to how often your product is meant to be used. A messaging tool lives or dies on DAU. A project board or a reporting tool that people open a few times a week is better read through WAU. A payroll product should not expect daily use, and measuring it that way produces an alarming chart about nothing.
Picking the interval that flatters the number is the most common misuse of these metrics, and it is obvious to anyone reading the deck.
How do you calculate DAU/MAU and WAU/MAU?
Divide the smaller window by the larger one and multiply by 100. The result is called stickiness: the share of your monthly users who come back within a day or a week.
- DAU/MAU = average DAU Ă· MAU Ă— 100
- WAU/MAU = average WAU Ă· MAU Ă— 100
- DAU/WAU = average DAU Ă· average WAU Ă— 100
Use the average DAU across the same 30 days as your MAU. A single day's DAU swings with weekends and holidays.
Worked example. A B2B tool has 12,000 MAU in September. Averaged over the 30 days, DAU is 1,800 and WAU is 5,400.
- DAU/MAU = 1,800 Ă· 12,000 = 0.15, so 15%. The typical monthly user is active on about 4.5 days of the month (0.15 Ă— 30).
- WAU/MAU = 5,400 Ă· 12,000 = 0.45, so 45%. In an average week, almost half the monthly users show up at least once.
- DAU/WAU = 1,800 Ă· 5,400 = 0.33, so 33%. A weekly user is active on roughly two or three days of that week.
For a tool people open a few times a week, 15% daily stickiness says very little on its own. The 45% weekly figure is the one worth tracking month over month.
What does the DAU/MAU ratio measure?
The DAU/MAU ratio measures how often your monthly users come back, expressed as the share of them who are active on an average day. It measures frequency and says nothing about what people did while they were there.
You will often see 20% quoted as a good ratio for SaaS. That figure is a rule of thumb rather than the result of one study, and it means little for a product that isn't meant to be used daily. Comparing your own ratio month over month, with the same definition of active, is more useful than comparing it with someone else's.
Two products can share a 20% ratio and look nothing alike. In one, every user comes in about six days a month. In the other, a small group uses it daily and everyone else comes in once. Andrew Chen's power user curve, a histogram of how many days in the month each user was active, separates the two cases.
What do DAU, WAU and MAU hide?
Active is a definition you choose. Logging in, or doing something that matters? A generous definition inflates every number here and makes comparison with anyone else meaningless.
Stable totals hide churn. Flat MAU can mean a steady base, or heavy churn matched by heavy acquisition. Only cohorts show the difference.
They count presence, not value. A user opening the product daily to check whether a broken thing is fixed is counted the same as a happy one.
DAU, WAU and MAU for enterprise product teams
In a large product, the first argument is about the definition. Each product area tends to count "active" its own way, and the numbers in the quarterly review stop adding up. One written definition per product, owned by one person, saves a lot of meetings.
B2B products also need a second count: active accounts next to active users. A customer with 400 seats can lose 50 daily users and still renew, while a 10-seat account where nobody logs in for a month is a churn risk the user count barely shows.
The metrics tell you that something moved and on which screen. They can't tell you why. Product teams that explain a drop in a roadmap review usually bring both: the chart and what users on that screen said during the same weeks.
How Usersnap adds the missing half
These metrics show what changed and never why. Usersnap collects the why on the screens where the number moved and keeps it next to the rest of your product feedback.
- Ask where activity dropped: in-app widgets and micro-surveys can be limited by URL to the pages you are watching, so a movement in the number arrives with an explanation attached.
- Group the answers: Sentiment Sensor tags each new response with a topic and a sentiment as it arrives, so you can see which topic grew in the week the metric fell. Sentiment Sensor is included on Professional plans and above, and available as an add-on on Starter and Growth.
- Ask your AI assistant: with the MCP connector, ChatGPT, Claude or Cursor can query your live workspace with your own permissions, for example "what did users say about the onboarding flow this month?" The connector sees new data, and Customer Success can index older items.
DAU, WAU and MAU FAQ
How is stickiness calculated?
Divide average DAU by MAU and multiply by 100. With 1,800 average daily users and 12,000 monthly users, stickiness is 15%.
What is a good DAU to MAU ratio?
There is no universal benchmark. Around 20% is often quoted for SaaS, but the right target depends on how often your product is meant to be used. For weekly or monthly products, track WAU/MAU instead.
What counts as an active user?
Whatever you define it as, which is why the definition matters more than the number. A meaningful action, such as creating or sharing something, is a better threshold than a login.
Is MAU the same as total users?
No. Total users counts every account ever created. MAU counts only the people who were active in the last month, so it is always the same or smaller.
Related terms
See how product teams find out why an engagement number moved.
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