Path views Analysis

The flow visualization shows you the paths that customers take before/after certain touchpoints, including entries and exits. It's a bit different though depending on if you start with a "middle" touchpoint or a "start"/"end" touchpoint. 

If you start with a touchpoint in the middle, it will show you all of the instances, depending on the settings you have selected, including the entries and exit. For that middle column, there will be a piece on the left showing the entries and a piece on the right showing the exits. So if someone comes in, sees only that page, and then leaves, it will still count them in the middle column, they will also be a part of the number of entries and exits.

One of the things to keep in mind are the different settings. You can set your path to be at a visit or visitor level, and you can choose to include or exclude repeat instances (such as page reloads). This can change the numbers that you see in the visualization. If you don't have repeat instances turned on, it will likely show a number lower than a freeform table.

If you're using the "start with" option, it's a bit different. I did some testing with one of the pages on my site, and it looks like from that first column there is no "exits" that show up. There was another question about that recently too, it looks like it's a feature not a bug. I looked at the numbers and it appears that because there are no exits, anything that is a single page visit will not be counted in that first column, because it only shows stuff that moves onto another page.

I did a test using a segment to exclude single page visits, and it does appear that the flow visualization, when using "starts with" doesn't include single page visits. So yes, that is why the number is lower than what you're seeing in a table. 

I'm not sure why Adobe chose to do it this way, including them and having the "exits" for that first column would make it more consistent with the rest of the visualization, but it is what it is.