HubSpot merge contacts and merge companies with every pair reviewed first

HubSpot deduplicates contacts automatically on email address and companies on the company domain name. Everything that slips past those two keys stays. A rep creates Daniel Okoro by hand with no email, a form later creates him again with one. A list import brings Megan Foster in under a second address. A sales tool syncs Brightline Logistics with its .net domain while the portal already has the .com. None of those collide on the key HubSpot checks, so all of them become separate records.

The bill and the reports notice before anyone else. Marketing contacts are priced by tier, so a duplicate can push you into the next one. Two reps sequence the same buyer, attribution splits across two records, and the board sees a contact count that counts some people twice.

HubSpot keeps the primary contact values and fills any empty property from the secondary record. The primary email stays primary and the other address is added as a secondary email. The lifecycle stage furthest down the funnel wins, so a Customer merged with a Lead stays a Customer. All timeline activity and every associated record from both contacts appear on the result.

One detail matters for record keeping. The merged record gets a new Record ID, and the old IDs are stored in the Merged contact IDs property. If your billing system, data warehouse or a spreadsheet keys on the old Record ID, keep a log of which IDs went where. The audit log from the pass is that list, written before the merge, with the reason for each pair.

No. HubSpot says it is not possible to unmerge records. The closest repair is removing the secondary email from the merged contact and creating a new contact with it, which leaves the activity history on the wrong record. A wrong merge of two real people, say two Chris Alvarez records at one freight company with two different emails, is a permanent mistake, so pairs like that should be read by a person who knows the account, not merged on a name.

Open the company you want to keep, click Actions, choose Merge, search for the duplicate and confirm. The primary company domain stays primary and the other domain is added as a secondary domain, the lifecycle stage furthest down the funnel is kept, and contacts, deals and tickets associated with either company end up on the merged one.

Two restrictions trip people up. You cannot merge a company that is currently a parent or child company, so remove the hierarchy first and rebuild it after. And records included in 250 or more merges in total cannot be merged again, which only bites on portals that have been merging the same records for years through an integration.

Users with Merge records permission or Super Admin. Merging itself works on every HubSpot plan, free tools included. What changes by tier is the duplicate finder: managing duplicates one pair at a time needs a Professional or Enterprise subscription and shows up to 10,000 pairs, while bulk merging and custom duplicate rules need Data Hub Professional (up to 30,000 pairs) or Enterprise (up to 100,000 pairs).

In practice an ops admin runs the merges while reps own the records. A merge list the reps saw beforehand turns a complaint about a vanished contact into a decision that was already reviewed.

We ran a HubSpot companies export through the engine before writing this page, and two default headers need renaming first. Company Domain Name is read as a company name, so the engine proposes capitalizing the domain, which you must not apply. Company owner is read the same way. Rename them Domain and Owner and both are treated as plain values that show up as conflicts.

With those headers, Brightline Logistics Inc and Brightline Logistics on two different domains came back as one company, the pair HubSpot itself would never propose because its key is the domain. The engine missed three pairs: Lakeview Orthopedics PLLC against Lakeview Orthopedics, because PLLC is not on its suffix list (HubSpot catches that one when the domains match); Cedar & Stone Builders against Cedar and Stone Builders; and Tri-County Dental Group against Tri County Dental Grp. Sort the company export by name and read those yourself.

From the Contacts index, pick a view or saved filter, click Export, choose CSV and include Record ID, First Name, Last Name, Email, Company Name, Phone Number, State/Region, Postal Code, Lifecycle Stage and Contact owner. HubSpot emails a download link. Rename Contact owner to Owner before the pass, for the same reason as on the company file.

Load the file into the demo at the top of this page. Nothing uploads, the records are matched inside your browser tab, and the audit log keeps the Record ID next to every decision. If the duplicates came from a migration, the cleanup belongs before the next load, as set out in Salesforce to HubSpot migration and Zoho to HubSpot migration.

The buyer is the marketing ops or RevOps admin with a duplicate backlog, a contact tier that keeps creeping up, or a migration with a cutover date, and a sales team that will notice every contact that changes owner. They need the merge list decided before the merges, without paying for Data Hub to get bulk tools, and a record of why each pair was merged. The same problem on email platforms is on Mailchimp duplicate contacts.

DataUntangler is a data cleaning tool on the Analyst plan at 59 dollars a month, or 348 dollars a year, with unlimited files up to about 100,000 rows each. It does not connect to your portal and writes nothing to it. You export, review the pairs, and run the merges in HubSpot yourself, two at a time.