Session Replay: Watch playbacks of user digital experiences

Mixpanel Session Replay provides the fastest way to gain a comprehensive understanding of your customers and make informed product decisions by combining both quantitative and qualitative insights.

While analyzing customer journeys using Mixpanel’s analytics, you can identify where customers drop off. Now, with Mixpanel Session Replay, you can quickly follow up by exploring why customers drop off.

Plan Availability

Session Replay is available for customers on Free, Growth, and Enterprise plans. Customers must be on the latest Mixpanel plans to access free replays.

Implementation

Session Replay is supported on three primary platforms: Web, iOS, and Android. You can use Session Replay with CDPs (e.g., Segment and mParticle) on both Web and Mobile. We also support Electron desktop apps.

See our developer guides on implementing Session Replay for these platforms below:

Watching Replays

Replays can be viewed in three places:

1. From the User Profile page
2. From Mixpanel reports
3. On the Home page for your project

From User Profile page

In any user’s profile page, Click the “View Replays” button to watch replays from that user. From here, you will be taken to our Replay Player.

From Mixpanel reports

Click any point on a chart for Event, Funnel, and User Profile, and select “View Replays” to view replays that show that event being fired. From here, you will be taken to our Replay Player.

From the Home page

Find the Latest Replays card and click on individual replays to view them or click on “View All Replays” to see up to 100 of your latest replays.

Replay Player

The Replay Player allows you to watch replays, as well as:

• Expand the player to full-screen
• Copy a URL with or without a timestamp to share with your teammates
• Change the playback speed
• Automatically skip periods of the replay where user is inactive
• See events in the replay timeline
• Jump to different parts of the replay by clicking in the timeline

The Replay Feed on the left of the player also allows you to:

• Sort replays by recency, activity, or duration
• Search for replays by user’s name / email, replay date, user ID, or the name of an event in the replay
• See a feed of events that occurred during each replay
• Display properties and their values within the event feed

Best Practices

Session Replay is a powerful way to understand and debug user behavior by showing exactly what users see on their screens. This visibility is core to its value—but also introduces inherent privacy and security risks, especially when sensitive information appears in the UI.

Mobile platforms add some unique challenges:

• SDKs are installed directly on end-user devices, making them harder to roll back or patch quickly.
• Android’s fragmented ecosystem demands broader testing across different devices and OS versions.

These risks are common across all session replay tools, but well-established industry practices exist to help mitigate them. With careful planning and the right safeguards, teams can more confidently use session replay to improve their products.

Key Considerations

To ensure successful implementation, we recommend:

• Defensive programming, including safe initialization, graceful error handling (try/catch), and sensible fallback behavior
• Thorough QA, including testing across device types and sensitive screens
• Staged roll out, using feature flags to safely test and enable or disable Session Replay as needed

Session Replay is a powerful feature that should be implemented with care. Following best practices can help you gain valuable insights into user behavior. We recommend thorough testing in your development environment before deploying to production.

Performance Considerations

Our Session Replay SDKs are designed with performance in mind, utilizing optimized capture algorithms that reduce CPU and memory usage. However, as with any SDK integration, there may still be some risk of performance impacts. We recommend thorough testing and monitoring your app’s performance during initial deployment.

Incident Handling

If you encounter an unexpected or urgent issue, please reach out to our support team promptly so we can help resolve it as quickly as possible. Examples of situations that require immediate attention include:

• Performance / stability issues with the SR SDK
• Accidental ingestion of sensitive user data

For these cases, submit a request to our Support team and include the following information:

If you’re experiencing performance / stability issues with the SR SDK:

• Whether your issue is with Web, iOS, Android, or multiple platforms
• Your Session Replay (SR) code snippet
• Where you initialize the Session Replay SDK
• Any relevant logs or performance metrics

If you accidentally ingested sensitive user data:

• Whether your issue is with Web, iOS, Android, or multiple platforms
• Affected user IDs (if known)
• Time range of the incident (if known)

Our team will prioritize and address these issues as quickly as possible.

FAQ

What happens when I reach my Session Replay limit?

Customers who have purchased the Session Replay add-on will be billed for replays ingested beyond the purchased amount at your per-unit rate. Customers using Session Replay without purchasing the add-on (e.g., those using complimentary replays included with the Free, Growth, or Enterprise plans) will be unable to view replays once they reach the data allowance, unless they upgrade. We will send email notifications to organization Owners and Billing Admins as your projects approaches the data allowance of your subscription plan.

Mixpanel reserves the right to stop ingesting replays once a customer collects replays beyond their purchased/allocated amount. To minimize disruption to your team, we recommend monitoring your data usage in the organization settings and working with your Account Manager (if applicable) to ensure you have the right plan for your needs.

How soon are Replays available for viewing after a session begins?

Replays are available for viewing in Mixpanel ~1 minute after the recording is captured.

How long are replays stored?

By default, replays are stored for 30 days after the time of ingestion. Once a replay is expired, there is no way to view that replay. Enterprise plan customers with the paid session replay add-on can customize this retention period between 7 days and 360 days. For more information, reach out to your Account Manager or our sales team.

Why does it say the player failed to load?

To maintain a high level of security, Mixpanel runs your session replays in an isolated domain through an iframe. Occasionally, this domain may be blocked by an ad blocker or specific browser settings. We recommend disabling any ad blockers, or whitelisting the Mixpanel domain.

For extensions like uBlock, go to “My Filters” in the extension settings and add the following custom filter:

@@||mxpnl.com^$domain=mxpnl.com

Why can’t I see the “View Replays” button in the UI?

You will not see the “View Replays” button if your organization is on an older plan. You will need to update to the latest plan to use Session Replay (see here for details).

Can I use Session Replay with a CDP?

You can use Session Replay with CDPs (e.g., Segment and mParticle) on both web and mobile.

How does Session Replay work differently on web versus mobile?

Session Replay works differently on web versus mobile in Mixpanel:

• Web: Captures DOM changes to reconstruct user interactions, tracking elements, clicks, and navigation. This provides an event-based replay of user activity.
• Mobile: Captures actual screen pixels since native apps don’t use a DOM. This visual approach records all on-screen activity as it appears to users, including scrolls, carousels, and auto-scrolling elements.

How can I estimate how many Replays I will generate?

If you already use Mixpanel, the Session Start events are a way to estimate the rough amount of replays you might expect. This is especially true if you use timeout-based query sessions. However, because our sessions are defined at query time, we cannot guarantee these metrics will be directly correlated.

When you enable Session Replay, use the above proxy metric to determine a starting sampling percentage, which will determine how many replays will be sent. You can always adjust this as you go to calibrate to the right level.

Am I able to sample our Session Replay collection rate?

Yes, you can configure the percentage of total replays that our SDK will capture as a sampling rate or manually trigger/end replay capture. See the developers guide for implementing Session Replay to learn more about sampling and manual capture.