How to merge duplicates in Pipedrive (and what you can't undo)

To merge duplicates in Pipedrive, go to Tools and apps > Merge duplicates (people and organizations only), choose which record is the primary, click Preview and then Merge. For deals or records Pipedrive didn't flag, open one of them, click More (...) > Merge, search for the other one, pick the primary, preview and merge. For leads, use the three-dot menu at the bottom left of the lead. Pipedrive merges one pair at a time, and the primary's values win most conflicts. There is no undo: Pipedrive says merged items "can't be un-merged", and in our test its Restore data page didn't show them.

Tested in a Pipedrive sandbox, October 2026. Last checked: October 30, 2026. What we couldn't verify.

What a merge does, by record type

For people, organizations and deals, the record you don't keep leaves your lists, and its notes and activities move to the one you keep.

How to merge duplicates in Pipedrive, step by step

You need permission to merge. Admins have it. Regular users need the matching one in their permission set (Manage users > Permission sets): Merge duplicate people and Merge duplicate organizations under global permissions, Merge duplicate deals and Merge duplicate leads under the Deals app (permission sets, updated September 3, 2026). A regular user only sees the duplicates they're allowed to see, so Pipedrive suggests leaving merges to admins.

How to merge contacts and organizations Pipedrive flagged

1. Go to Tools and apps > Merge duplicates. You'll see pairs of people and organizations, with their deals, activities, creation date, owner and visibility.

2. In each pair, pick the primary: the record whose values you want to keep when the two disagree.

3. Click Preview and read the result. If a value is wrong, click Back and switch the primary.

4. Click Merge.

It flags people with the same name plus the same email, phone or organization, and organizations with the same name and address (how it identifies duplicates, updated September 3, 2026). Admins can edit those rules since September 2026 (product updates). The rules we tested, default and edited, compared exact values, ignoring capital letters. In our sandbox it found 1 pair where our own prototype found 14, 4 of them deal pairs it never checks. It missed "240-707-3884" against "2407073884", "Gómez" against "Gomez" and "Moveer Limited" against "Moveer Ltd".

How to merge deals, leads and records Pipedrive didn't flag

1. Open the deal, person or organization you want to merge.
2. Click More (...) > Merge.
3. Search for the other record at the top right and select it. Both appear side by side.
4. In the banner at the bottom, choose which one wins in case of conflict.
5. Click Preview, check it, then Merge.

For leads, open the lead in the Leads Inbox, click the three-dot menu at the bottom left and choose Merge (Leads Inbox guide, updated September 23, 2026).

You choose the winning record as a whole, not field by field. If you want the deal value from one and the phone from the other, copy the value onto the primary first, then merge.

What you can't undo

Pipedrive's Merge duplicates article (updated September 3, 2026) says merged items "can't be un-merged". Here is what that meant in merges we ran through Pipedrive's API in a sandbox, October 2026.

Values the primary overwrote are gone. On deals, every conflicting value keeps the primary's: the other deal's value (250) was lost and 200 stayed, and the same happened to a text field ("LinkedIn" lost to "Web") and a multi-option field. On people, text fields are joined ("Web, LinkedIn") and multi-option fields are combined. Single option, currency, date and number fields keep the primary's value on both. The preview shows the result, not what it dropped.

The contact keeps every email and phone, duplicates included. Merging two people kept both "570-809-7197" and "+1 (570) 809 7197" on the same contact. Pipedrive's help article says the primary's phone is kept; that's not what we saw through the API.

Someone else can lose a deal or a contact. The merged record keeps the primary's owner. When the duplicate belonged to another salesperson, it became the first salesperson's, and Pipedrive didn't notify either of them in our test. Followers from both records are added together.

Related records move and stay moved. Notes, activities, files and Google Drive files go to the record you keep. When we merged organizations, their people and deals moved too (in one of two runs, a person moved only on the second try). When you merge people, the deals where the duplicate was the contact person move to the one you keep, and emails linked to the duplicate's address show up on the merged contact.

After 30 days the other record is gone for good. For people, organizations and deals, Pipedrive marks the other record inactive, and the merge window for contacts warned that it's deleted permanently after 30 days. Leads don't wait: in our test the merged lead was gone right away.

Restore data doesn't bring it back. Pipedrive's Restore data page (Tools and apps > Restore data) brings back deleted items for 30 days and, since March 2026, lists bulk edits you can revert (how that works). After we merged an organization, the page's "Deleted items" tab showed 0 organizations, and none of its tabs (deleted items, bulk edits, bulk conversions) is meant for merges.

Links to the old record break. A spreadsheet link or a Zap that used its ID now points to an inactive record, or to nothing for a lead.

Could someone rebuild it? Partly. Within those 30 days, a developer can reactivate the other person or deal through the API, then move each note and activity back, remove the added followers and write the old values back. Files return only as copies. It worked end to end in our sandbox, but it's a developer job, not a button. A merged lead would have to be recreated, with a new ID.

A safe routine before you merge

1. Export both records. In the list view, add the ID column and the fields you care about, search for the name so only the two records show, and export (needs the "Export data from list views" permission). Keep the file: if a value turns out to be lost, you type it back from here.
2. Write down both IDs and both owners. If the owners differ, tell the other salesperson before you merge.
3. Open both records side by side and compare every field that has a value in both: deal value, custom fields, labels, phone, email.
4. Pick the primary on purpose. Choose the one with more history or the owner who should keep it. Copy any value you want from the other record onto it first.
5. For deals, check the products and value on both. The preview is the only warning before the other deal's value is overwritten.
6. After merging, open History > Changelog on the merged record to check what changed.

For hundreds of pairs, tools like Dedupely and Insycle merge in bulk through Pipedrive's API. Dedupely says "No merge can be undone", in Pipedrive or in any tool that merges through it.

Merging duplicates with AI today

• Pipedrive's official AI connector (its MCP server) can't merge. Of its 51 tools (list, updated October 22, 2026), none merges, deletes or edits in bulk. Claude or ChatGPT can find likely pairs; you merge in Pipedrive. Setup for Claude and ChatGPT; the full list of limits in what Pipedrive's MCP can and can't do.
• Some community MCP servers and Pipedream can. Servers such as nubiia-dev/mcp-pipedrive have tools to merge people, organizations and deals, and Pipedream lists "Merge Persons" and "Merge Deals" actions. The risks: they usually run with an API token that can change everything, the merge is immediate with no undo, and the AI has to get the direction right, because one of the two IDs it sends is the record that disappears. Each merge costs 40 API tokens (measured), so 1,000 merges use 40,000, more than a one-seat Lite account gets in a day (how the daily budget works).
• Zapier has no merge step. Its Pipedrive actions on Zapier MCP (checked October 30, 2026) create, update and find records, with no merge or delete action. Its generic API Request action could call the merge endpoint, with the same risks.

The safe split today: the AI finds and explains, you merge in Pipedrive.

Prompts to copy

Common mistakes

• Picking the newest record as primary because it looks cleaner, and losing the older one's deal value or custom fields.
• Merging two deals that are really two sales to the same company: one deal's value is overwritten, and you can't split them again.
• Merging another salesperson's deal into yours without telling them. It moves to the primary's owner.

What we couldn't verify

• Whether a merged lead appears in Restore data. We only checked organizations.
• Which Pipedrive plans include Merge duplicates. The help articles don't say.
• Whether edited matching rules other than the ones we tested can match phone numbers in different formats or names with and without accents.
• What happens to a merged deal's products and participants, and whether a merge made in the app keeps both phone formats like the API did.

Where Pipehand fits

Pipehand is planned to launch in April 2027 as a replacement for Pipedrive's MCP. Your AI will be able to merge people, organizations, deals and leads, and before writing, Pipehand will show field by field what stays, what's lost and whose owner changes, and let you pick the value of each conflicting field. It's designed to keep a copy of both records before every merge it runs, so you can undo it, and on the Growth plan and above, to undo merges made by hand in Pipedrive too. At launch, deals and leads won't merge on their own: they'll always wait for a review.

If you want to merge duplicates from your AI with a preview and an undo, join the waitlist on pipehand.com.

FAQ

How do I merge duplicates in Pipedrive?

Tools and apps > Merge duplicates, pick the primary, Preview, Merge. For deals or unflagged records, use More (...) > Merge on the record; for leads, the three-dot menu at the bottom left. You need the merge permission for that record type.

Can you undo or unmerge a merge in Pipedrive?

No. Pipedrive says merged items "can't be un-merged", and in our test Restore data didn't list the merged record. The other record stays inactive for 30 days and a developer can reactivate it through the API, but its notes, activities and field values have to be moved back one by one. Export both records before merging.

What happens when you merge contacts in Pipedrive?

The contact you keep gets the other's notes, activities, files, deals, emails, phones and followers. Its own values win conflicts, except text fields, which are joined, and multi-option fields, which are combined. The other contact becomes inactive and is deleted after 30 days.

Can you merge deals in Pipedrive?

Yes, but only from the deal: More (...) > Merge. Merge duplicates never lists deals. The primary deal's value and fields win and the other deal's conflicting values are lost, so check both values before you merge.

Can I merge more than two records at once in Pipedrive?

Not natively. Pipedrive merges one pair at a time. Bulk merging needs a tool that uses the API, such as Dedupely or Insycle. Dedupely says no merge can be undone.

For developers

Merge endpoints, costs and what comes back

• Endpoints: PUT /v1/persons/{id}/merge, PUT /v1/organizations/{id}/merge and PUT /v1/deals/{id}/merge, body {"merge_with_id": n}. The record in the path (id) is absorbed; merge_with_id stays. x-token-cost is 40 in the OpenAPI spec and we measured 40. There's no v2 merge, and these endpoints aren't on the list Pipedrive moved out of support on August 1, 2026 (changelog).
• Leads: PUT /v1/leads/{id}/merge with merge_with_id returned 200 in our sandbox, but it isn't in the public spec. POST /v2/leads/{id}/merge returned 405. The absorbed lead returns 404 afterwards.
• Reactivating the absorbed record: PATCH /api/v2/persons/{id} or /api/v2/deals/{id} with is_deleted: false returned 200 within the 30 days (we didn't test organizations). Notes move back with PUT /v1/notes/{id}, activities with PATCH /api/v2/activities/{id}; remove the added followers from the kept record with DELETE /v1/{object}/{id}/followers/{row_id}. Files can't be reassigned (PUT /v1/files/{id} returned 500); download and upload them again. Linked emails relink only if you remove the address from the reactivated duplicate and add it back.
• Webhooks v2: a person merge, including one made by hand in the app, sent a delete event for the absorbed record with meta.merged_to_id and the full record in previous, and, if the kept record changed, a change event with meta.merged_from_id, all with one correlation_id. A lead merge sent lead delete with merged_to_id.