Monthly Active Users refers to the number of unique users of an application that have actively engaged with it at least once in a month. An active user can be a paying or non-paying user, for example, taking part in a free trial. Unique users can be identified by a username, an email, or a user id.

Frequency of application usage can vary depending on the nature of the application, the context of usage, and the role of the user. In general, examples of applications used monthly include financial applications that support monthly financial planning and reporting processes, and supply chain applications that enable monthly forecasting and planning.

The Monthly Active User metric indicates the stickiness of an application with individual users. Low or declining user activity can be an early warning sign of potential churn, because it can indicate that users are not using the application often enough to receive ongoing value from it.

It is important to differentiate between tracking the monthly active users and monthly active accounts of an application because users are a subset of accounts, for most SaaS applications. Analyzing active users can highlight how valuable the application is to multiple unique users of an account as opposed to just the account level engagement.

Tracking MAU can bring value by highlighting the activities or features of an application that get used regularly, therefore bringing value to the customer. Conversely, tracking those features of the application that are determined to be the most useful can help predict future retention and churn.