Auto-Merge for Contributors in LinearB
Automatically unify contributor identities across Git and PM tools to keep attribution accurate and avoid duplicate contributors in reporting and billing.
Auto-Merge in LinearB ensures clean, accurate user data by automatically unifying identities across Git and project management tools. This prevents duplicate users and improves visibility into developer activity across the platform.
Summary
- Auto-Merge automatically consolidates duplicate user identities.
- Merging is based on matching emails or external provider identifiers.
- The process runs continuously and requires no admin action.
- Admins can manually merge users when automatic matching is not possible.
Overview
Auto-Merge consolidates user identities across connected systems such as GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Jira, and Azure DevOps.
A single person may appear multiple times due to different email addresses, usernames, or authentication methods. Auto-Merge continuously evaluates these records and unifies them into a single platform user when a confident match is detected.
This improves:
- Accuracy across dashboards and reports
- Clarity in team- and user-level insights
- Data integrity for billing and licensing
Auto-Merge logic
LinearB automatically merges user records when at least one of the following conditions is met:
- Matching email address – The same email appears across Git or project management tools.
- Matching provider ID – Identical external IDs from supported providers (for example, GitHub, GitLab, Jira, or Azure DevOps).
Auto-Merge is designed for high accuracy and runs continuously in the background. When a confident match exists, the identities are unified automatically.
How Auto-Merge relates to manual merging
Auto-Merge handles the majority of identity unification automatically. In cases where users cannot be confidently matched (for example, different email addresses across systems), admins can manually merge users.
Manual merging is performed from Settings → Users & Teams → Users using the Merge Account action.
During a manual merge, admins select a Primary Account, which becomes the authoritative identity across LinearB.
Primary account behavior
- The primary account defines the user’s name, email, avatar, and permissions.
- Permissions are inherited only from the primary account.
- Team memberships from all merged accounts are combined.
- Historical activity from secondary accounts is preserved.
Why this matters
By maintaining a unified user identity model, Auto-Merge:
- Prevents inflated user counts
- Improves billing and license accuracy
- Ensures developer activity is attributed correctly
- Provides clearer, more reliable engineering metrics
The result is a cleaner data model and more trustworthy insights across LinearB.
How did we do?
Managing Users in the Users & Teams – Users Tab
