Mashups currently come in three general flavors: consumer mashups, data mashups, and business mashups.

The best known type is the consumer mashup, best exemplified by the many Google Maps applications. Consumer mashups combine data elements from multiple sources, hiding this behind a simple unified graphical interface.

Other common types are "data mashups" and "enterprise mashups". A data mashup mixes data of similar types from different sources (see Yahoo Pipes), as for example combining the data from multiple RSS feeds into a single feed with a graphical front end. An enterprise mashup (see JackBe), usually integrates data from internal and external sources - for example, it could create a market share report by combining an external list of all houses sold in the last week with internal data about which houses one agency sold.

A business mashup is a combination of all the above, focusing on both data aggregation and presentation, and additionally adding collaborative functionality, making the end result suitable for use as a business application.

A Telecom mashup is a telecommunications service where service elements come from more than one source and are combined into an integrated experience. For example, one could get the base service from company A, a ringback tone from company B, a voicemail service from company C, etc.