Key Takeaways
- The free fuzzy matching tool compares two lists and returns a similarity score for every match.
- Every pair gets a clear percentage score, so you can see exactly how close two values are.
- Everything runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
- For full dataset matching inside Google Sheets, Flookup adds phonetic and semantic matching.
Introduction
"John Smith" and "Jon Smyth". "Acme Corporation" and "Acme Corp". "Miriam K." and "Miriam Kamau".
Exact matching sees four different people. A human sees the same record written four ways.
We built a free fuzzy matching tool to settle those comparisons instantly: paste two lists, press Match and see how similar every value is, as a percentage, in your browser, with nothing uploaded. Open the Fuzzy Matching Tool.
What Is Fuzzy Matching?
Fuzzy matching is the process of finding values that are similar but not identical. Instead of asking "are these two strings exactly the same?", it asks "how close are these two strings?" and returns a score.
That one question is behind a huge share of real data work: cleaning customer lists, reconciling vendor names , merging leads from two systems and deduplicating CRM records.
What the Tool Does
The tool supports two modes:
- Best match : for every item in list A, find the closest item in list B and its similarity score.
- Near-duplicates : within a single list, find every pair that looks similar.
Each mode answers a different need. Best match is for comparing two lists. Near-duplicates is for finding duplicates within one list, like duplicate customer names in a spreadsheet.
How It Works
How Similarity Is Scored
Similarity scoring combines character matching with weightings that prioritise whole words, matching order and character proximity. The tool supports three common scoring algorithms:
- Levenshtein Distance : counts the minimum number of edits required to transform one string into another. Simpler but less context-aware.
- Jaro-Winkler : emphasises matching characters at the start of strings, which helps with names like "Jon Smith" vs "John Smyth".
- Cosine Similarity : treats strings as bags of words and measures overlap, better for longer text or sentences.
Users can adjust a threshold to filter matches. A 90% threshold returns only the most confident matches. Lower the threshold to catch more potential matches, then review the borderline rows by hand.
Use Cases
- Cleaning customer lists by reconciling names, addresses and phone numbers across multiple systems.
- Finding duplicate records in a CRM when two salespeople entered the same contact separately.
- Matching product descriptions across catalogues from different vendors.
- Verifying that payroll exports have no unexpected additions or changes.
- Comparing user lists across two applications to detect account merging.
When to Use Something Stronger
When you need matching across entire CSV/Excel datasets with AI enrich and fuzzy dedupe, save the workflow as a reusable cleaning template in Flookup Data Wrangler.
The tool compares text similarity. Real datasets often need more: matching across an entire spreadsheet, handling abbreviations and word order or reconciling thousands of rows against a master list. That is what Flookup Data Wrangler does inside Google Sheets, with configurable thresholds, phonetic matching and AI-powered semantic matching. See the data cleaning tools for the full range.
Final Thoughts
The Fuzzy Matching Tool is the fastest way to answer "are these the same?" Paste two lists, set a threshold and every value comes back with a percentage score you can act on. Because everything runs in your browser, it is safe for customer data, lead lists and any other sensitive comparisons.
Use it for quick checks and one-off merges. When matching needs to happen inside Google Sheets at dataset scale, with phonetic and semantic matching, scheduled runs and a similarity score on every row, Flookup Data Wrangler is the next step.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is fuzzy matching?
Fuzzy matching finds values that are similar but not identical, such as "John Smith" and "Jon Smyth". It scores how close two strings are so you can spot near-duplicates that exact matching misses.
How does the free Fuzzy Matching Tool work?
Paste two lists, press Match and the tool compares every item in list A against list B, returning the best match and a percentage score for each item.
Is the Fuzzy Matching Tool private?
Yes. Everything runs in your browser in a background worker. Your lists are never uploaded to a server.
How is similarity scored?
Each pair of values is compared and given a single percentage score, so you can see at a glance how close two entries are. The score is high for values that look alike and low for unrelated ones.