These Terms Get Confused—Here’s What You Actually Need to Know

Businesses handle an overwhelming amount of data, and one of the biggest challenges is figuring out who’s who. That’s where identity resolution and entity resolution come in. While these terms are often used interchangeably, they are not the same thing.

If you’re in sales, marketing, customer data management, or fraud prevention, understanding the key differences between identity resolution and entity resolution will help you make smarter decisions about data strategy, targeting, and compliance.

What Is Identity Resolution?

Identity resolution is the process of connecting multiple data points to a single individual. It’s about taking fragmented data—like different emails, devices, or purchase records—and tying them together into one unified profile.

How Identity Resolution Works

• A customer visits a website on their phone but doesn’t log in.
• Later, they sign up for an email offer using their work email on a desktop.
• Eventually, they make a purchase using their personal email and credit card.
• Identity resolution matches all these interactions and creates a single customer profile.

Where Identity Resolution Is Used

✔ Marketing & Advertising – To build complete customer profiles for better targeting.
✔ Sales & CRM Management – To track full customer journeys and interactions.
✔ Customer Experience – To create seamless, personalized engagements across channels.
✔ Fraud Prevention – To prevent duplicate or fake accounts.

The key focus: Resolving data to a known person and tracking their behavior across multiple touchpoints.

What Is Entity Resolution?

Entity resolution is a broader concept that focuses on resolving any kind of entity in a dataset. It doesn’t just deal with people—it also includes companies, devices, locations, and even products.

How Entity Resolution Works

• A company appears in multiple databases under different names (e.g., IBM vs. International Business Machines).
• A government database tracks multiple records for the same location under different formats.
• A fraud detection system identifies duplicate merchant accounts under slightly different business names.
• Entity resolution identifies these as the same entity despite the differences in how they’re recorded.

Where Entity Resolution Is Used

✔ Data Management & Governance – To clean and standardize business data.
✔ Financial & Compliance Systems – To detect duplicate business records and prevent fraud.
✔ Enterprise & B2B Sales – To merge company profiles across different data sources.
✔ Healthcare & Government – To unify patient records, criminal databases, or census data.

The key focus: Resolving businesses, locations, or other non-human entities to eliminate duplication and standardize records.

Identity Resolution vs. Entity Resolution: Key Differences

Why Businesses Need Both

While identity resolution and entity resolution serve different purposes, they are often used together to build better customer data strategies.

For example:

• A B2B company might use identity resolution to track decision-makers within an account and entity resolution to merge duplicate company records.
• A financial institution might use identity resolution to verify an individual’s identity and entity resolution to detect businesses committing fraud.

Businesses that leverage both approaches can ensure their data is clean, accurate, and actionable—which means better sales, marketing, and decision-making.

Final Takeaway: Which One Should You Focus On?

If your goal is to understand and track individual customers, focus on identity resolution.

If you need to clean up business records, manage corporate data, or prevent fraud, focus on entity resolution.

For most companies, the best strategy is to combine both for a more complete and accurate data ecosystem.

Want to See Identity Resolution in Action?

If you’re tired of disconnected customer data and duplicate records, identity resolution can help you create a single, accurate customer view.

View the Identity Resolution Slide Deck to see how it works. If you’re ready to start using identity resolution the right way, you can purchase it here.