Sift Data cleaning for CRM imports

Comparison

Looking for a Flatfile alternative?

First, an honest question, because it decides everything: are you a developer who wants to embed a file-import experience into your own product, or an ops person with one messy export to clean before a CRM import? Flatfile is built for the first job and is genuinely good at it. Sift is built for the second. If that is you, Sift cleans and dedupes your file in the browser, free, with nothing uploaded.

Clean your file in Sift, free →

Who Flatfile is really for

Flatfile is an embeddable data-import SDK for SaaS product teams. You are a developer, and you integrate Flatfile so that your customers can upload, map, and validate their files inside your product's onboarding flow. It is infrastructure you build on, not a tool you open to clean a file.

That is a real, valuable job, and for it Flatfile (or OneSchema) is the better tool. It also prices like enterprise infrastructure. Flatfile does not publish rates; the pricing page routes to a sales call. A swovo.com analysis puts entry pricing at roughly 6,000 dollars a year, scaling to 50,000 dollars a year or more. G2 reviews include complaints about reliability. That is the trade-off of adopting a platform, and it makes sense when import is a feature of the product you ship. It makes no sense when you just have a file to clean.

Who Sift is for

Sift is a standalone file cleaner for the person, not the product. You are in ops, revenue operations, or marketing, you just pulled a messy export out of one system, and you need it clean and deduped so it imports into your CRM today. No integration, no sales call, no annual contract. You drop the file in, approve each fix with a before/after diff, and export a clean file. It is free and it runs entirely in your browser.

FlatfileSift
Buyer: developer embedding import into a SaaS productvsBuyer: ops person cleaning one file before import
Pricing: sales-gated, roughly 6k to 50k+ per yearvsPricing: free
Where data goes: uploaded into a hosted import servicevsWhere data goes: nowhere, processed on your device
Setup: developer integration, then a sales callvsSetup: open a web page, drop in the file

The same job in Sift

  1. Drop the file in. Sift profiles every column in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
  2. Approve the cleanups with a before/after diff: trim, name-safe casing, email repair, mojibake repair, dates, phone normalization to E.164, countries and postcodes standardized.
  3. Dedupe fuzzily, matching on email, phone, or a name-and-company fingerprint, and merge duplicates into one golden record with survivorship rules instead of deleting rows.
  4. Map to your CRM's template (HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Dynamics 365, Zoho, Mailchimp) and run the import pre-flight: required fields, types, and allowed values, flagged before you import.
  5. Export a clean file, an accounts file, a change log, and a hygiene report, plus a "needs your eyes" list for the judgment calls Sift will not make for you.
Privacy note: Sift is a static web app with no backend. Your file is processed entirely on your device, never uploaded, and it keeps working offline once the page has loaded, which you can verify by disconnecting your internet. Nothing leaves your machine.

When Flatfile (or OneSchema) is the better tool

Be honest with yourself about the job. If you are building software and you want your own users to import their data through a polished, validated onboarding flow inside your product, that is an embedding problem, and Sift cannot help. Sift has no API and does not embed into apps; it is a tool a person opens, not infrastructure you build on. For that job, Flatfile or OneSchema is the right choice, and worth the price. Sift is for the other job: one person, one messy file, cleaned and imported now, for free.

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