Dedupe
What it is: Python library for fuzzy matching and deduplication. Uses machine learning to find duplicate records even when data is messy, misspelled, or formatted differently.
What It Does Best
Intelligent fuzzy matching. Learns from your examples to identify duplicates. Handles typos, abbreviations, different formats ("NYC" vs "New York City").
Active learning. You label a few examples as matches/non-matches. It learns patterns and scales to millions of records.
Record linkage. Match records across different databases. Join customer data from CRM and billing systems even without perfect IDs.
Pricing
Open source: Free, MIT license
Dedupe.io: Commercial support and hosted API available
When to Use It
✅ Finding duplicate customer/company records
✅ Merging data from multiple sources
✅ Data contains typos and inconsistent formatting
✅ Need better than exact string matching
When NOT to Use It
❌ Simple exact matches (SQL DISTINCT faster)
❌ Real-time matching (preprocessing takes time)
❌ Can't provide any training examples
Bottom line: The smart way to find duplicates. Simple string matching misses too much. ML-based approach catches duplicates humans would recognize but computers miss. Essential for data integration projects.