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.
You can set a similarity threshold, see a summary of how many values matched, and download or copy the results as a table.
How Similarity Is Scored
Every 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.
Set a threshold to keep everything above it as a likely match, and leave the borderline cases for a quick human check.
Privacy First
Your lists are processed in a background worker inside your browser. They are never sent to a server, never stored and never used for anything else. That makes it safe to compare customer lists and other sensitive data.
How to Use It
- Paste list A (one value per line) and list B.
- Set a similarity threshold. 85% is a good starting point for names.
- Press Match and review the scores, or open the near-duplicates mode for a single list.
- Download or copy the results.
When to Use Something Stronger
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?" Free, private and done in seconds.