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. Free replays reset monthly, and do not rollover to subsequent months.

Implementation

Session Replay is supported on four primary platforms: Web, iOS, Android, and React Native. 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:

UI Controls

With UI Controls, teams can manage Session Replay sampling directly from the Mixpanel UI — no code changes or redeployment required. This is available exclusively to customers with the paid Session Replay Add-On. Changes take effect within an hour.

Prerequisites

To use UI Controls, your project must meet the following requirements:

• Paid Session Replay Add-On: UI Controls is available exclusively with the paid Session Replay Add-On.
• Remote configuration enabled in your SDK: Your SDK must have remote configuration enabled so it can receive sampling updates from the UI. See the platform-specific guides for setup instructions:
  • JavaScript
  • Android
  • iOS

Baseline Sampling Rate

Set a global sampling rate that applies to all SDK initializations. This is the default capture rate before any conditional rules are applied. For example, you might set a baseline of 1% to capture a small portion of all traffic.

Conditional Rules

Layer rules on top of the baseline rate using any event, property, or URL you’re already tracking. Conditional rules are additive only: if a session isn’t being captured, a matching rule can start capturing it; if a session is already being captured, rules have no additional effect.

For example, you can sample 1% of all sessions globally, but capture 100% of SDK initializations where checkout_error fires or where users land on your pricing page.

Entry Points

Session Replay is particularly valuable for understanding user frustration and identifying problematic user experiences. To find relevant replays, you can focus on interesting users (power users, purchases), interesting trends (KPIs spikes or dips), or replays where certain events or sentiment signals (like dead clicks/rage clicks) occur.

There are several ways to find and watch replays in Mixpanel:

1. From the Session Replay home
2. From Mixpanel reports
3. From User profile pages

From the Session Replay Home

Select Session Replay from the side navigation in your Mixpanel project. Here, you’ll see your most recent replays and can easily filter them by events, properties, or custom time ranges to focus on the replays that matter most to you. Pro tip: when getting started with implementing Session Replay, you can use this view to check if replays are coming in as expected.

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 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.

Watching Replays

The Replay Player has three main areas: the Replay Feed, the Player Area, and the Details Panel.

Replay Feed

The Replay Feed on the left side of the player lets you browse and find replays. It works out of the box with the Mixpanel events and properties you already track (including server-side events) — no extra setup required. Each cell represents a single user journey: a group of replays for a specific user that happened within ~30 minutes of each other. A single journey can contain several replays.

The replay feed allows you to:

• Filter by any event, property, or time period
• Search by user name/email, replay date, user ID, or event name
• Sort by recency, activity, or duration
• Hover over replay cells to reveal more details

Player Area

The Player Area is the central area where you watch replays. It includes the following controls:

• 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
• Bookmark a replay to save it for later
• Enable server-side stitching (revealing replays and events for the same user that were not captured with the same SDK that captured the replay. This is particularly useful for discovering replays, as well as moments of those replays where important events you track server-side or via data warehouse occur, like purchase events or sign-up events.)

Details Panel

The Details Panel on the right side of the player provides deeper context about the selected replay. It contains three tabs: Details, Activity Feed, and AI Summary.

Details

The Details tab shows metadata and properties for the selected replay, including user information, session properties, and device details.

Activity Feed

The Activity Feed tab shows a chronological feed of all events that occurred during the session, including Mixpanel track events, console logs, and network calls. You can search and filter events by type, and click any event to see its details and jump the replay to that moment.

Console Logs

Console logs, warnings, and errors are captured during a session and displayed in the Activity Feed timeline. Use the filters to toggle visibility of Errors, Warnings, and Logs. Click any console event to view the full message and stack trace (when available).

Console recording is enabled by default. To configure, see the JavaScript SDK guide.

Network Calls

Network calls made during a session are captured and displayed in the Activity Feed. Use the filters to toggle visibility of Fetch, XHR, and Other request types. Click any network event to inspect headers, request payload, and response details, along with status codes and duration.

AI Summary

The AI Summary tab provides an AI-generated summary of the session, highlighting key moments and summarizing user behavior so you can quickly understand what happened without watching the entire replay. Summaries are powered by your governed event data for accuracy.

Magic Playlists

Magic Playlists allow you to save playlists of replays based on events or properties, making it easy to revisit groups of replays that matter to you over time. A playlist stores your filter criteria (events, recording properties, date range, sort order) and can also hold up to 200 individually bookmarked replays. Key capabilities include:

• Dynamic playlists: Create playlists based on your Mixpanel events and properties that automatically update as new replays meet your criteria
• Bookmarked replays: Pin specific replays to a playlist so you can easily return to them later
• AI-powered insights: Get AI text summaries that identify key patterns and insights across numerous replays at once

Creating a Playlist

1. Access Session Replay from the side navigation in your Mixpanel project
2. Apply filters based on events, properties, or custom time ranges
3. Click Save Playlist in the header and add a name
4. Click Save

Once saved, your Magic Playlist will appear as a playlist card on your selected board. Any time new replays meet your saved criteria, they will automatically appear in your playlist. Modifying filters after saving shows unsaved changes — you can Save to update or Save as New to create a variant.

Bookmarking Replays

Bookmarking pins a specific replay to the current playlist. You can bookmark replays in two ways:

• From the player: Use the bookmark icon in the player’s top control bar to toggle bookmark status
• From the playlist row: Click the bookmark badge on any replay row

A playlist must be saved before you can bookmark replays — the bookmark button is disabled until a playlist is active.

Viewing Bookmarked Replays

Use the bookmark filter toggle in the playlist header to show only bookmarked replays. When this filter is active, other filters are disabled. Bookmarked replays appear in a dedicated section at the top of the playlist.

Expired bookmarked replays appear in a separate Expired Journeys section. You can remove expired bookmarks, but expired replay content can no longer be played. Bookmark lookback searches up to 365 days.

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.

Can I record cross-origin iframes within my page?

Yes, Session Replay supports recording cross-origin iframes embedded within your page (Web only, SDK v2.77.0+). Both the parent page and child iframe must have the Mixpanel SDK initialized with record_allowed_iframe_origins configured to include each other’s origins. For detailed setup instructions, see Cross-Origin Iframe Recording.