8 Best Cohort Analysis Tools for SaaS Retention

The quick answer

Quick answer: for behavioral cohorts (users grouped by what they did) and retention curves, Amplitude and Mixpanel are the most complete self-serve tools: Amplitude's behavioral cohorts start on its Plus plan, which starts at $0 with 2M events a month free, and Mixpanel's Free plan runs retention reports but only lets you save cohorts on Growth. PostHog offers static and dynamic cohorts with 1M free events a month. GA4 has a free cohort exploration for acquisition-date cohorts. Mitzu runs cohorts on your own data warehouse from $149 a month. For revenue cohorts (MRR and logo retention by signup month), ChartMogul is free up to $10K MRR. Kissmetrics and Countly round out the list. Prices are as of October 2026, checked on each vendor's own site.

What a cohort analysis tool does

A cohort is a group of users who share a starting point or a behavior: everyone who signed up in the week of a launch, or everyone who invited a teammate in their first day. Cohort analysis follows each group over time and compares them, usually as a retention grid where each row is a cohort and each column is a period since the start.

SaaS teams use it to answer questions a single churn rate hides. Did the users who joined after the new onboarding flow stay longer? Do accounts that connect an integration in week one retain better? Is churn concentrated in one signup month or one plan? If you need the definitions behind these numbers first, our guide to customer retention rate covers the formula.

There are three kinds of cohorts, and tools differ in which they handle well:

• Acquisition cohorts: grouped by signup or install date. Almost every tool on this list supports them.
• Behavioral cohorts: grouped by an action, such as "created three projects in the first week". These need event-level product data.
• Revenue cohorts: grouped by subscription start, measuring MRR or logo retention. These need billing data, which product analytics tools usually lack.

Cohort analysis tools compared

1. Amplitude

Who it is for: product teams that want rule-based and machine learning cohorts in the same tool as their retention charts.

Pricing: Amplitude Free covers 2M events a month with one-time cohort syncs. Plus starts at $0 with the first 2M events free and adds custom events, formulas and behavioral cohorts. Growth and Enterprise use custom event-based pricing.

Strengths: Amplitude's docs describe two cohort types: behavioral cohorts that match users against event rules you define, and predictive cohorts that use machine learning to forecast who is likely to convert or churn. A cohort used in a chart recomputes whenever the chart runs, and with the Accounts add-on you can build group-level cohorts of companies instead of users.

Limits: custom behavioral cohorts are not on Free, and Plus caps how many you can save. Compare it in our Amplitude alternatives.

2. Mixpanel

Who it is for: teams that want to drop a cohort into any funnel or retention report and get fresh numbers each time.

Pricing: Mixpanel Free includes up to 1M events a month with funnels and retention analysis. Growth starts at $0 with 1M events included and unlimited saved cohorts, metrics and reports. Enterprise is quoted.

Strengths: Mixpanel's cohort docs say cohorts are computed at the time you use them in a query, so they are never a stale snapshot. You can create a cohort by clicking a bar or point in an Insights, Funnels or Retention report, and sync cohorts to other tools.

Limits: Free users can create cohorts but cannot save them, and account-level analysis needs the paid Group Analytics add-on.

3. PostHog

Who it is for: engineering-led teams that want cohorts they can also use to target feature flags, experiments and surveys.

Pricing: PostHog includes 1M analytics events a month free, then product analytics starts at $0.00005 per event and falls with volume.

Strengths: static cohorts (fixed lists) and dynamic cohorts built from behavior, person properties or lifecycle. Its retention insight separates first-time retention, which counts users only the first time they perform the start event, from recurring retention.

Limits: dynamic cohorts update once every 24 hours, and dynamic cohorts with behavioral criteria cannot be used as feature flag targets until you copy them into a static cohort.

4. GA4 (Google Analytics 4)

Who it is for: teams that want acquisition cohorts from the analytics they already run on their website or app.

Pricing: Google describes Google Analytics as free of charge, and lists Analytics 360 as a separate enterprise product.

Strengths: the cohort exploration groups users by acquisition date, an event, transactions or conversions, at daily, weekly or monthly granularity.

Limits: cohorts are based on device data only and do not consider User-ID, an exploration shows at most 60 cohorts, and small demographic groups are thresholded out. For logged-in SaaS users across devices, an event-based product tool is more accurate.

5. Mitzu

Who it is for: data teams whose event data already lives in a warehouse and who do not want to copy it into another vendor.

Pricing: Mitzu Analyst is $149 a month with 3 editor seats, and Team is $749 a month, or $675 a month billed yearly. Every plan includes unlimited events, with a 14-day free trial.

Strengths: funnels, retention and journeys run directly on your warehouse tables, so cohorts can use any column you already have, including billing or CRM data.

Limits: you need clean event tables in a warehouse first, and extra editor seats cost $50 to $75 a month each.

6. ChartMogul

Who it is for: SaaS founders and finance teams who want revenue and logo retention by signup cohort straight from billing data.

Pricing: ChartMogul is free up to $10K MRR. Starter begins at $69 a month billed monthly, or $57 a month billed annually, and the price scales with your revenue; Pro and Enterprise add more sources and features.

Strengths: logo retention by signup cohort, MRR, ARR and churn from your billing system, with revenue segmented by plan, country or cohort.

Limits: it sees subscriptions, not product behavior, so it tells you which cohorts churn but not what they did in the product. Our SaaS analytics tools roundup compares it with other revenue metrics tools.

7. Kissmetrics

Who it is for: growth teams that want signup cohorts tied to named people and the campaigns that brought them.

Pricing: Kissmetrics is free up to 100K events a month with 3 seats. Growth is $99 a month with 500K events, unlimited seats and every report, 20% off when billed annually.

Strengths: the Growth report list includes Cohorts, Revenue, Path, People search and A/B tests, so a cohort can be read next to campaign and revenue data for the same person.

Limits: Kissmetrics labels its cohort report as in preview, so confirm it works on your own data before relying on it.

8. Countly

Who it is for: teams that must keep user data on their own servers or in a chosen region.

Pricing: Countly Lite is free, open source and self-hosted. Flex, a private cloud, starts at $175 a month with a 14-day trial, and Enterprise runs on-premise with custom pricing.

Strengths: Countly's cohorts feature groups users by shared behavior or properties within a timeframe or across their lifetime, regenerates cohorts automatically, and lets you use them as filters elsewhere in the product.

Limits: on Flex, retention and funnels are part of the paid Intelligence add-on, and Countly's pricing page does not say which plans include cohorts, so check before you buy.

How to choose a cohort analysis tool

Decide which cohort question you need answered most often. If it is "did this onboarding change keep more users", you need behavioral cohorts on event data: Amplitude, Mixpanel or PostHog, or Mitzu if your events already sit in a warehouse. If it is "which signup months churn the most revenue", start with billing data in ChartMogul. Many SaaS teams run one of each.

Then check three details: whether cohorts are saved or recomputed (stale cohorts mislead), whether you can build cohorts of accounts rather than users for B2B, and how far back your plan keeps data. To see where a cohort drops out before it even activates, pair this with our funnel analysis tools, and for a wider view of event analytics, see our product analytics tools comparison. Mobile teams can start from our mobile app analytics tools list.

Once a cohort analysis shows which early actions predict retention, the next step is to guide new users to those actions. PLG OS adds onboarding, in-app survey and gamification components to your product, with a free tier of 100 MTUs and any one component.

FAQs

What is the best free tool for cohort analysis?

GA4's cohort exploration is free for acquisition cohorts. For behavioral cohorts, Amplitude includes 2M events a month free and PostHog 1M; Mixpanel's Free plan lets you build cohorts but not save them, as of October 2026.

What is the difference between a cohort and a segment?

A segment is any group of users that matches a condition right now. A cohort is a group defined by a shared starting point or behavior in a time window, which you then follow over time to compare retention.

Can I do revenue cohort analysis in product analytics tools?

Only if you send billing data to them. Tools such as ChartMogul build MRR and logo retention cohorts straight from your billing system, while product analytics tools work from usage events.

Does GA4 support cohort analysis?

Yes. GA4's cohort exploration groups users by acquisition date, events, transactions or conversions at daily, weekly or monthly granularity, but cohorts use device data only and do not consider User-ID.