Cohorts

What are cohorts?

Cohorts enable you to easily create a list of users who have something in common, such as completing an action or having the same property.

Here are a few examples of the cohorts you can create:

Users who work at the same company.
Users who used your app in the last week.
Users who churned from your product.
Users who signed up recently.
Users who viewed the signup page, but didn't convert.

Your cohorts are available in the People page under the Cohorts tab.

Note: Cohorts rely on person properties, so you need to capture identified events to create them.

Where can you use cohorts?

You can use cohorts in many different ways, such as:

In trends, funnels, retention, user paths, stickiness, and lifecycle insights
As a filter on any product analytics dashboard
To target feature flags, experiments, and user surveys
To filter the session replay list and create playlists
Filter live events on the activity page
Filter users on the People page

You can use cohorts to answer questions like:

"Are people at company X using our app frequently?"
"What percentage of the users who signed up last week are still using our app?"
"Which features are power users using the most?"

How are cohorts different from groups?

Cohorts are sometimes confused with groups, but they each serve different purposes:

Cohorts represent a specific set of users – e.g., a list of users whose email contains a certain string (like a company's domain).
Groups aggregate events based on entities, such as organizations or companies, but do not necessarily connect to a user. They enable you to analyze trends, insights, and dashboards at an entity-level (like a company or organization), as opposed to a user-level.
If your only goal is to create a list of users with something in common, we recommend cohorts instead of groups.

Groups require additional code in your app to set up, while cohorts are created in PostHog and don't require additional code. This makes cohorts easier to use and quicker to get started.

How to create a cohort

Once you've captured identified events, there are two ways to create a new cohort:

Method 1: Create a new cohort directly from an insight

You can create cohorts using data from insights such as trends, funnels, user paths and lifecycles.

Go to insights and open any insight that's aggregated at a user-level, like unique users or weekly active user.
Click a data point in the visualization to view the persons represented in the underlying data.
In the modal popup, click Save as cohort at the bottom.

The video below shows how to create a new cohort from a trend, although you can similarly create a cohort from a funnel, user path, or any other insight.

Method 2: Create a new cohort from the cohorts page

Navigate to the People page within the sidebar, then click on the Cohorts tab.
Click + New Cohort on the top right.

Static and dynamic cohorts

You have two options when creating a cohort:

Static cohorts, lists of users that don't change over time (unless you update them manually). For example, all the users who signed up to your app in January 2024.
Dynamic cohorts, which are automatically updated based on a specific condition – e.g. all users who have performed a specific event or action in your app.

Static cohorts

Static cohorts are created from insights, by uploading a CSV of users, or by duplicating a dynamic cohort.

When creating cohorts from CSVs, the person profile associated with each row must already exist in PostHog.

You can identify users using either:

Distinct IDs: The identifiers you send to PostHog (e.g., email addresses, user IDs from your system)
Person IDs: PostHog's internal unique identifiers for persons (useful when exporting data from PostHog or other analytics tools)

You can upload CSV files in two formats:

Single-column CSV: Include one identifier per row. For distinct IDs, no header is necessary (for backwards compatibility):

csv

user123
user456
test@example.com

If you identify users with Person IDs, include a header (person_id, person-id, or Person .id):

csv

person_id
01234567-89ab-cdef-0123-456789abcdef
fedcba98-7654-3210-fedc-ba9876543210
11111111-2222-3333-4444-555555555555

Multi-column CSV: Include a header row with a column containing the user identifiers. Supported column headers are:

distinct_id or distinct-id for distinct IDs
person_id, person-id, or Person .id for person IDs

csv

email,distinct_id,name,segment
user1@team.com,user123,Alice Johnson,premium
user2@team.com,user456,Bob Smith,standard
user3@team.com,test@example.com,Carol Davis,premium

Or using person UUIDs:

csv

email,person_id,name,segment
user1@team.com,01234567-89ab-cdef-0123-456789abcdef,Alice Johnson,premium
user2@team.com,fedcba98-7654-3210-fedc-ba9876543210,Bob Smith,standard
user3@team.com,11111111-2222-3333-4444-555555555555,Carol Davis,premium

For multi-column files, PostHog will extract the user identifiers from the specified column and ignore all other columns, making it easy to upload exported cohort data without modification.

Column precedence rules:

If both distinct_id and person_id columns exist, the person_id column takes precedence
For single-column uploads without matching headers, PostHog assumes distinct IDs (backwards compatibility)

To update the list, you can upload another CSV to add more users. You can also remove users by deleting their person profile from the list, noting that this will completely remove the person from PostHog.

Dynamic cohorts

Dynamic cohorts can be based on existing cohorts, and support the following criteria:

Behavioral

Event or action	Example
Completed event or action	Completed `user signed up` in the last 30 days
Did not complete event or action	Did not complete `user signed up` in the last 2 months
Completed event or action multiple times	Completed `watched video` 5 times in the last 2 weeks
Completed a sequence of events or actions	Completed `user signed up` in the last 5 days followed by `watched video` within 1 day of the initial event
Did not complete a sequence of events or actions	Did not complete `user signed up` in the last 5 days followed by `watched video` within 1 day of the initial event

You can select days, weeks, months or years time ranges here.

Person properties

Has or doesn't have a person property with the following operators:

Operator	Example
`equals` or `does not equal`	`Pineapple on pizza` property `does not equal` "true"
`contains` or `does not contain`	`email` property `does not contain` "gmail"
`matches regex` or `does not match regex`	`Country code` property `matches regex` "us
`greater than` or `greater than or equal to`	`Age` property is `greater than` "21"
`less than` or `less than or equal to`	`Age property is` less than or equal to` "21"
`is set` or `is not set`	`UTM Source` property `is not set`
`between` or `not between`	`Age` property is between "18" and "30"
`minimum` or `maximum` value	`Organization size` property `minimum` of "5"

Lifecycle

Criteria	Example
Completed an event for first time	Completed `shared insight` event for the first time in the "last 30 days"
Completed an event regularly	Completed `shared insight` at least "3 times per week" for at least "3 of the last 5 periods"
Stopped doing an event	Stopped doing `shared insight` event in the "last 5 days" but had done it in the "5 days prior"
Started doing event again	Started doing `shared insight` event in the "last 5 days" but had not done it in the "5 days prior"

You can select days, weeks, months or years time ranges here.

FAQ

How often are dynamic cohorts updated?

Dynamic cohorts are updated once every 24 hours.

Can you use a dynamic cohort as a feature flag target?

You cannot use dynamic cohorts that include behavioral or lifecycle criteria as a feature flag target. To target these dynamic cohorts for a feature flag, A/B test, or survey, you must first duplicate them into a static cohort. Dynamic cohorts with only person property criteria can be used.

Can you use groups in cohorts?

Not yet, but we are working on rewriting cohort calculations in SQL which will unlock your ability to do this.

Community questions

Was this page useful?

Questions about this page? or post a community question.