One of the decisions most of the salesforce admins wrestle with is to identify a data quality tool to help in deduplication and maintaining data quality. Here is a small comparison which would help admins to make a decision on which tool to use for data quality. I would like to thank Meghan Digregory from Bentley University who created this research item and was gracious enough to let me share it to the Salesforce community.
| Criteria | Demand tools | Ring Lead | Cloudingo |
| Type of application | Desktop tool | Web based | Web based |
| Ease of use | Takes time to learn it right but robust. | Easy to use. | Easy to use |
| Speed to set up and run dedupe | Fast | Medium | Medium |
| Functionality | Got great features to dedupe. Uses in built logic to handle address, company names, zipcodes, phones.Can dupe contacts only. | Great merge features. | Has a good batch deduping feature which can clean up accounts, contacts and leads. You need to dedupe accounts first to receive contact duplicates. |
| Combine fields values on dedupe | Yes | No | Not sure |
| Unique feature | Can dedupe high volume of records with less time due to desktop infrastructure. | If there is a problem with a merge, it has an undo feature which would fix the merge issues. | Can dedupe imports prior to data load.Cannot recognize lookup or external fields to import.When you import a file, you are loading that file in Cloudingo until you remove it. You must delete jobs not finished or it marks them as a duplicate even though it’s not in Salesforce .You have to keep column size low with only what is needed or it will have issues. |
| Maintenance | MediumNeed to handle desktop installs on multiple client machines | LowIntegrated with sfdc | LowIntegrated with sfdc |
| Login and security consideration | Can do admin level login access only model or switch to designated admins based on SFDC access. | You get one username and password to share among the organization. | You get one username and password to share among the organization. It’s a SFDC Integration user and 1 shared login to Cloudingo. |
| Cost | Free for non profits. | Discounted for non-profits | Discounted for non-profits |
| support | None for non-profits. Free training sessions | Available | Available |
| General Fit | If your data volume is high and you do a lot of data loads on a regular basis, demand tools can fit your needs. | If your data volume is medium and you want to handle everything in the cloud with not much desktop support, ring leads can be a good fit | If your data volume is medium and you want to handle everything in the cloud with not much desktop support, cloudingo can be a good fit |
To summarize, each tool has its own strengths and weakness. You can refer the general fit section to identify which tool would fit in what scenario.
The decision criteria to be used for deciding a data quality tool should be ease of use, data volume, your own security needs, list of objects to be deduped like accounts, contacts , leads etc and running some usecases of deduping with each tool. Please feel free to post your comments or contact me at buyan@eigenx.com for further questions..