A Dedupely alternative that never sees your address book

By Michael, founder of ContactAttic · October 2026 · 4 min read

Dedupely is the name that comes up for cleaning duplicate contacts in Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, and for a company with one shared directory it makes sense. It works by connecting to the account. ContactAttic works the other way round, and that is the whole difference.

How Dedupely works

You grant it access to your Google Contacts or Microsoft 365 contacts, it reads them on its servers, finds the duplicates, and merges them back into the live account. It is a subscription web service, convenient for an organisation that keeps one directory in one place and wants it kept clean on an ongoing basis. The price is on its site and depends on what you connect.

What that requires

• Account access. A third party reads and writes your contacts, which for many people and most small businesses is the thing they least want to grant.
• One live account. It cleans what it is connected to. The old iPhone's export, the CSV from a previous job's Outlook, the vCard your partner sent you: those are not in the account and are not merged.
• A subscription for what is, for most people, a one-off clean-up.

How ContactAttic works

You export contacts from wherever they live, which every phone, mail service and address book can do, and point ContactAttic at the files. It reads vCard and VCF in versions 2.1, 3.0 and 4.0, and CSV exports from Google Contacts and Outlook, and it works out which entries across all of them are the same person. Matching is transitive, so a card that matches another that matches a third collapses all three into one, keeping every phone number, address and email rather than picking one. The result is a standard contacts.vcf you import into any phone, mail client or address book, plus a report of what was read and merged. It runs on your computer, makes no network connections, and never touches a live account.

When Dedupely is the right choice

• A team shares one directory in Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 and wants it policed continuously.
• You are comfortable granting a service read and write access to that directory.

When ContactAttic is

• Your contacts are split across accounts, phones and old exports, and you want them merged into one clean set.
• You would rather nothing left your computer, and nothing had the keys to your account.
• It is a clean-up you want to do once, properly, and own the result as a file.

What about the price?

Dedupely is a subscription priced on its site. ContactAttic is a one-time $59.99 with a free trial that keeps up to 100 contacts and never expires. You are paying for a merge across everything you have, done privately, once.

Questions people ask

Does ContactAttic connect to Google Contacts or iCloud?

No. It reads files you export from them and writes a standard contacts.vcf you import back. It never signs in to anything and makes no network connections.

Will I lose information when contacts are merged?

No. When two cards are the same person, every phone number, email and address from both is kept on the merged card. Nothing is discarded to resolve a conflict.

Can it merge contacts from an old iPhone and an Android phone?

Yes. Export each as a vCard, or Google Contacts as CSV, and point ContactAttic at both files. It matches people across them regardless of which phone they came from.