Preventing Duplicate Leads in HubSpot: Best Practices and Tips

Amisha P. · 2025-07-02T11:24:46.994Z

Hi everyone, I’m new to HubSpot and trying to understand this. We have leads coming in from different sources, and I’m concerned about duplicate records coming in. What’s the best way in HubSpot to make sure incoming leads aren’t duplicated? Are there specific settings, workflows, or best practices I should set up from the start?

Preventing Duplicate Leads in HubSpot: Best Practices and Tips | RevGenius

13 comments

· Sorted by Oldest

Andrea F.
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We're currently revamping ours and for us it starts with deduping contacts - we use Salesforce so for us this looks like:
Clean SF integration so existing contacts come through to SF already associated to their accounts
Dedupe tools
Weekly markops/revops audit
I'm interested to know how others do this too though!
Pat H.
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HubSpot, by nature, will not duplicate contacts so long as they have the same email address.
👍1
☝️1
Pat H.
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Andrea F. you shouldn’t need weekly audits if you have proper workflows and alerting setup with tools in place like Koalify
Tom W.
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Duplicates can come up in many ways in HubSpot Amisha P., particularly around contacts and companies. You have a couple of options:
1.
You can merge duplicates manually, one-by-one, on any plan in HubSpot
2.
You can purchase Ops Hub Pro for £800/month to bulk merge duplicates (would not recommend as value for money)
3.
Install Koalify, a third party plug-in, which is exceptionally cheap.
I'm a HubSpot certified provider, so if you need help, feel free to drop me a message
Affan A.
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+1 on Koalify
Pat H.
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If we all back up an second, I think we need to understand the problem you're experiencing with duplicates and your "happy path" aka what do you want as an end result.
Faizan S.
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HubSpot offers a built-in tool that helps identify and merge duplicate contacts and companies.
💯1
Pat H.
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It only does the fist 2k then you're on your own...and it's not automation-friendly or alert based.
✅1
Paris P.
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Just fyi - In HubSpot the differentiator for Company records is Domain URL and the differentiator for Contact records is their email address. In addition to what others recommend, I also recommend using an import guide and limiting who can do imports, otherwise your HubSpot will always have duplicates because a lot of IC's don't know how to do the imports properly or check for duplicates...
💯1
Benjamin M.
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Paris P. - I learned the hard way recently that while email is a unique key for the Contacts object, the Domain is not a unique key for the Company object. When syncing records through Segment or an API, Hubspot will reject duplicate emails if there is a match but it will allow duplicate companies to be created with the same domain value, and a separate unique key must be used through data pipelines and integrations. This was also confirmed by Hubspot.
🤔1
Amisha P.
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Hi everyone, I really appreciate you taking the time to help. Your replies cleared things up for me.
Pat H.
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Wow, I hadn't really checked in on that in quite some time Benjamin M. and can confirm it will let me create two companies with the same domain. There's a UI flag to help raise dupes, but imports would just bulldoze through.
Paris P.
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Thank you Benjamin M. and Pat H.!

Andrea F.
·
·
We're currently revamping ours and for us it starts with deduping contacts - we use Salesforce so for us this looks like:
Clean SF integration so existing contacts come through to SF already associated to their accounts
Dedupe tools
Weekly markops/revops audit
I'm interested to know how others do this too though!
Pat H.
·
·
HubSpot, by nature, will not duplicate contacts so long as they have the same email address.
👍1
☝️1
Pat H.
·
·
Andrea F. you shouldn’t need weekly audits if you have proper workflows and alerting setup with tools in place like Koalify
Tom W.
·
·
Duplicates can come up in many ways in HubSpot Amisha P., particularly around contacts and companies. You have a couple of options:
1.
You can merge duplicates manually, one-by-one, on any plan in HubSpot
2.
You can purchase Ops Hub Pro for £800/month to bulk merge duplicates (would not recommend as value for money)
3.
Install Koalify, a third party plug-in, which is exceptionally cheap.
I'm a HubSpot certified provider, so if you need help, feel free to drop me a message
Affan A.
·
·
+1 on Koalify
Pat H.
·
·
If we all back up an second, I think we need to understand the problem you're experiencing with duplicates and your "happy path" aka what do you want as an end result.
Faizan S.
·
·
HubSpot offers a built-in tool that helps identify and merge duplicate contacts and companies.
💯1
Pat H.
·
·
It only does the fist 2k then you're on your own...and it's not automation-friendly or alert based.
✅1
Paris P.
·
·
Just fyi - In HubSpot the differentiator for Company records is Domain URL and the differentiator for Contact records is their email address. In addition to what others recommend, I also recommend using an import guide and limiting who can do imports, otherwise your HubSpot will always have duplicates because a lot of IC's don't know how to do the imports properly or check for duplicates...
💯1
Benjamin M.
·
·
Paris P. - I learned the hard way recently that while email is a unique key for the Contacts object, the Domain is not a unique key for the Company object. When syncing records through Segment or an API, Hubspot will reject duplicate emails if there is a match but it will allow duplicate companies to be created with the same domain value, and a separate unique key must be used through data pipelines and integrations. This was also confirmed by Hubspot.
🤔1
Amisha P.
·
·
Hi everyone, I really appreciate you taking the time to help. Your replies cleared things up for me.
Pat H.
·
·
Wow, I hadn't really checked in on that in quite some time Benjamin M. and can confirm it will let me create two companies with the same domain. There's a UI flag to help raise dupes, but imports would just bulldoze through.
Paris P.
·
·
Thank you Benjamin M. and Pat H.!