Top 10 LinkedIn Scrapers Benchmarked

We benchmarked every major LinkedIn scraper with 1,200 requests on 200 pages (e.g. posts, profiles) to identify the top solutions. Follow the links to learn more about these products:

Vendor

Focus

1

Bright Data

Dedicated large-scale and low-cost API solution

2

Apify

Market-leading range of web scraping APIs thanks to its community-driven approach

3

Nimble

Fastest unblocker responses according to our benchmark

4

NetNut

High success rate based on our benchmark

5

Dripify

Basic scraping features for lead generation

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When evaluating LinkedIn scraping tools, we prioritized proxy support and selected dedicated LinkedIn scraping solutions and multi-functional sales automation platforms that include data scraping features.

The best LinkedIn scraping tools

Ranking is in ascending order based on the lowest starting price, with the exception of the products of the article’s sponsors which are linked to their websites.

Pricing for the top LinkedIn scraping tools

* The LinkedIn Web Scraper API’s pricing is determined by the number of records you collect. The specific rate per record varies, depending on your chosen subscription plan.

This scraper is equipped with residential proxies and JavaScript rendering. The tool supports real-time scraping for up to 20 URLs per request, automated validation, and data discovery.

LinkedIn scraping benchmark

• The pricing chart displays data for providers with a success rate of 50% or higher.
• Users pay only for successful results.
• Prices are monthly and exclude those with annual discounts.

1. Proxy-based LinkedIn scrapers

Web scraping APIs that use their own proxy infrastructure, including IP addresses and servers. They use proxy servers to access LinkedIn to extract data, distributing requests across several IP addresses or LinkedIn profiles.

This is the right approach for high volume, reliable LinkedIn scraping because:

• Fast: Since the scraper relies on multiple profiles while scraping the data, it can scrape faster
• Reliable: If a profile or IP gets banned by the target website, the provider switches to another one to continue its operations.
• Safe: The person ordering the scraping doesn’t need to their individual account and therefore there is no risk of your profile being banned.

Bright Data

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Bright Data offers a dedicated web scraper for LinkedIn that extracts and parses LinkedIn public data. Their LinkedIn API Suite include Profiles API, Post API, and Companies information API. The web data provider also offers LinkedIn datasets tailored to specific LinkedIn use cases.

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Features:

• Discovery: You can get data from LinkedIn using a specific keyword such as first and last name, date filters, or job location.
• Real-Time Scraping: Enabling users to get the most current information available on LinkedIn.
• Built-in Proxy Support: The LinkedIn APIs come with built-in proxy server support.

Pricing:

• Starting price: $499/mo
• Trial: 7-day free trial

Apify

Apify provides a range of pre-built Actors tailored for web scraping on LinkedIn. Popular LinkedIn scraping tools on the platform include Job Scraper, Sales Navigator Scraper, Company Scraper, Profile Scraper, Post Scraper, Ads Scraper.

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Features:

• Customizable Actors (Pre-built Web Scrapers): A marketplace of LinkedIn scrapers built by community developers, each adaptable to specific scraping needs.
• Automation: Link multiple Actors or integrate with external tools via APIs. Each Actor supports MCP server connections, enables users to manage and communicate with multiple scraping Actors.

Pricing:

• Starting price (mo): $25, there are four pricing options available: rental, pay per result, pay per event, and pay per usage.
• Trial: Available, duration depends on the scraper.

NetNut

NetNut B2B Data Scraper API that allows users to extract real-time data from LinkedIn. It is compatible with proxies and and supports features such as automated proxy rotation to optimize data collection.

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Features:

• Live and on-demand data scraping: Supports real-time and scheduled data extraction features.
• Automatic IP rotation: Rotates proxies per each session by default.

Pricing:

• Starting price (mo): $1200

Nimble

Nimble offers a general-purpose web API that offers tools like page interactions and parsing templates. Nimble API offers three modes of data delivery:

1. Real-time: Data is gathered and instantly sent back to the user.
2. Cloud: The gathered data is transferred to a cloud storage option of the user’s choice.
3. Push/Pull: The data collected is held on Nimble’s servers, and users can access it through a given URL for downloading.

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Features:

• Batch processing: Allows users to submit a large number of URLs in a single request, handling up to 1,000 URLs.
• Built-in proxies: Offers rotating residential IPs.
• Custom parsing templates: Comes with integrated support for tables, JSON output, and custom objects. It is important to keep track of any alterations in the structure of the source webpage, as these changes can impact the effectiveness of parsing templates. Nimble does not handle the updating of these custom parsing templates.

Pricing:

• Starting price: $150
• Trial: Available

Dripify

Dripify is a LinkedIn automation tool that helps sales professionals automate various tasks on LinkedIn. They provide a LinkedIn scraper that enables users to access lead data available on LinkedIn and export the collected data to a CSV file.

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Features:

• Local IP-address: Provides unique IP address from users local region, enabling users to access websites as if they were located in different geographical regions.
• Human behavior simulation: Imitates the actions of a real user when interacting with LinkedIn. It adds random time delays between requests and simulates user clicks on links or buttons to help you appear more like a genuine user.  

Pricing:

• Starting price: $59/user/mo
• Trial: Available

Linked Helper

Linked Helper is a desktop-based LinkedIn automation platform that also includes LinkedIn scraping functionality. The tool doesn’t require proxies by default, but it allows users to manually set up proxies per LinkedIn account.

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Features:

• Automated Profile Connecting: Automatically visit LinkedIn profiles and send send personalized messages.
• Data Scraping: Offers data extractor to gather data from LinkedIn profiles and from Sales Navigator. You can get the collected data in CSV format.
• Built-in CRM: All contacts are stored in an integrated CRM within Linked Helper​. If you do use an external CRM, you can send data to these CRMs.

Pricing:

• Starting price (mo): $15 (standard), limiting certain outreach actions such as messaging up to 20 event attendees per day
• Trial: 14-day free trial

2. Cookie-based LinkedIn scrapers

Cookie-based tools use your browser cookie to extract data.² They are used for low-volume, non-critical data collection especially if users are already a customer of these automation tools and will not incur additional costs to use them.

These automation tools need to “act” as you to perform tasks on social networks on your behalf:

• When you are logged into LinkedIn, the website sets a session cookie in your browser (which is unique to your session).

• You need to pass this cookie to the LinkedIn scraper.

• Then, the scraper leverages your session cookie from the social network to collect data, make connection requests and collect data. You can automate personalized tasks on LinkedIn, like sending connection requests and liking posts.

This approach is:

• Slow: Since it emulates human behavior, the scraping activities are slower compared to tools that use their own infrastructure. They are not suitable for large-scale data extraction tasks.

• Risky: If LinkedIn detects suspicious activity, you could face temporary restrictions or a permanent ban from LinkedIn.

Phantombuster

PhantomBuster offers a LinkedIn profile scraper and a company scraper to scrape public data from the platform.

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Features:

• Updated LinkedIn data: You can set up the LinkedIn scraping tool to launch repeatedly to extract data daily.
• Firefox and Chrome extension: The LinkedIn data extractor is available as extension.
• Cloud-based: Runs on the remote servers, allowing users extract data LinkedIn without using local resources.

Pricing:

• Starting price: $59/mo
• Trial: Available for 14 days

3. Browser-extension LinkedIn scrapers

Browser-extension tools work directly within the browser. They can be activated while you’re browsing LinkedIn. These tools are ideal for smaller scraping tasks. The risk of using browser extension scrapers is dependence on browser. If the browser updates or changes, the extension tools can break.

Snov.io

Snov.io is a Chrome extension sales engagement platform that provides solutions across the outreach cycle. Snov.io’s LinkedIn Email Finder mechanically extracts email addresses from a LinkedIn profile or search results page. It is vital to note that Snov.io is not a specific LinkedIn scraper tool, and its capabilities are limited to scraping email addresses alone. You may collect emails in bulk from LinkedIn People Search pages and LinkedIn Sales Navigator search results.

LinkedIn automation providers like as PhantomBuster, Linked Helper, and Dripify provide pre-built scripts. If your organization requires LinkedIn automation but lacks an email solution, Snov.io may be sufficient. The free plan (50 credits) is generous.

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Features:

• Email Finder: Discovers email addresses based on name, company, and domain inputs. Snov.io also offers Chrome extensions (“click-and-collect”) for generating leads. You can extracts emails from LinkedIn and Google search engines.
• Email Verifier: Offersa 7-tier email verification tool​, verifying addresses with 98% accuracy. Keep in mind that verification consumes credits – 1 credit per verification.

Pricing:

• Starting price (mo): $39 (1,000 credits)
• Trial: 50 credits monthly

findthatlead

FindThatLead is a cloud-based B2B lead generation and email verification platform. The platform offers a Chrome extension that allows users to extract emails from LinkedIn profiles and websites. It is not a free solution and requires credits from your own FindThatLead account.

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Features:

• Email Finder & Verifier: You can receive emails from LinkedIn and other websites that include additional information such as your name, email address, and work title.
• Email Sender & Drip Campaigns: Email Sender is a free tool that allows you to personalize messages for each recipient.

Pricing:

• Starting price (mo): $49 (2000 email credits)
• Trial: 50 email credits, including the Chrome extension.

LinkedIn scraper APIs benchmark results

See the LinkedIn page types supported by leading web scrapers with more than 90% success rate:

* Requires cookies. Other providers did not have this requirement. We excluded this scraper from testing since we completed all our web scraping tests without cookies

In our benchmark, we used the following dedicated APIs designed specifically for extracting data from LinkedIn. To learn more, see our benchmark methodology for scraping APIs.

* : is listed for reference, but it was not used in our LinkedIn scraping benchmark.

What is a LinkedIn scraper?

A LinkedIn scraping tool is software or script that can directly access LinkedIn using a web browser. LinkedIn scrapers are designed to crawl public LinkedIn profiles and extract data from the platform, including names, job titles, company names, industries, and skills.

Which LinkedIn data can you scrape?

Social media web scraping can pose privacy concerns, you should

• avoid collecting private or sensitive data, such as professional email addresses and phone numbers.

• adhere to web scraping ethics and examine the target site’s terms of service.

That being said, the following are some examples of data that are technically possible to be scraped from LinkedIn:

• LinkedIn profile data: Using a specific account name or URL, you can extract public data from LinkedIn profile URLs, such as names, headlines, profile pictures, and location (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The output of a scraped LinkedIn profile account by a URL

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Source: Bright Data

• LinkedIn job listings: LinkedIn job listings include information such as job description, required qualifications, responsibilities and title (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Sample output of a scraped LinkedIn job listings using a LinkedIn scraping tool

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Source: Bright Data

• LinkedIn posts: LinkedIn scrapers allow users to extract text and image data from posts, including the owner’s URL, publication date, and comments (Figure 3). Scraped post data can be used for lead generation, brand sentiment, and market research.

Figure 3: The output of a scraped LinkedIn post by a LinkedIn scraping tool

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Source: Bright Data

• LinkedIn search results: LinkedIn search results include information about companies or profiles (Figure 4). You can scrape LinkedIn search results using keywords or URLs, and the platform will return results based on the keywords or filters you apply.

• LinkedIn group: Extract public LinkedIn group data such as the number of members, the content of a discussion or question posted in the group, and group members’ names and profile URLs.

Is it legal to scrape LinkedIn data?

Legality of scraping LinkedIn data may vary depending on the specific circumstances and your jurisdiction. To clarify any uncertainties, consult with legal counsel to understand the laws and regulations relevant to your jurisdiction. Scraping personally identifiable information or exposing the scraped data to the public are likely to be illegal in most jurisdictions.

Here are some best practices for scraping data from LinkedIn in compliance with LinkedIn’s terms of service:

• Consult your legal advisor.
• Review LinkedIn terms of service.
• Adhere to the rules outlined in the robots.txt (Figure 5).

Figure 5: LinkedIn’s robots.txt file

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Source: LinkedIn³

• Stick to data that is publicly available. Avoid scraping personal, sensitive, or private LinkedIn data.

• Use extracted data responsibly and ethically.

• Use LinkedIn APIs to access data legally.

3 business use cases of LinkedIn data

1. Take data-driven investment decisions:

Targeting public posts of key finance executives and investment banks will help build a “radar” for the trending industries and stocks in the financial investment world. Similarly, top technology executives and venture capital firms’ posts will help you identify emerging startups and new products in the market.

• Top benefit: LinkedIn will give you access to the business-focused audiences to start building your “target influencers”. Currently, there are groups on “venture capital” and groups on “financial investment” that you can join as a member and find out the profiles of people who may not be as prominent as top executives in the field but are quite active to generate content on LinkedIn.
• Top challenge: The startup ecosystem is very dynamic and financial markets are very volatile. Despite being a good source, you may need to track the pulse of political and financial news by scraping the web searches and other social media resources.

2- Optimize your recruitment processes:

It is challenging to put the right keywords and requirements for a job description and also reaching out to best talent. Scraping LinkedIn profiles can help recruitment in two ways:

1. Optimize your job posting: Job postings cost companies money and time and it is important to optimize the content to find the right talent as fast as possible. If you limit your job posting to a certain list of keywords, degrees, certificates, prior titles, you may miss out some candidates who have a new version of the same experience. It is good practice to have a pool of candidates that you perceive to be a good candidate for job search and analyze top schools, backgrounds and experiences they come from. Another gem in the LinkedIn profile data is the short bio that people put “what they are looking for” which will shape the keywords and call to action you use for your job description.
2. Reach out to right candidates: Recruitment is a two-way process. Sometimes, especially for urgent roles or need for a specific experience, recruiters will need to reach out to candidates directly. However, it is a very manual task to search for all candidates on LinkedIn, take notes and prepare a rank of preference to reach out. Scraping a pool of candidates will help recruiters to process people’s profiles quickly and prepare a short list to reach out to.

• Top benefit: As the most popular professional social network, LinkedIn will be the most up-to-date and organic information source you can find in terms of education and job experience trends of your potential candidates.
• Top challenge: A complete LinkedIn profile will also have many redundant data points such as early job experiences, skills, endorsements which will add on your data processing time. It is essential to tailor your data scraping query or inform your scraper service to narrow down the data points scraped.

3. Reach out to right people for lead generation

LinkedIn comes into play to find you the right contacts for your email lead generation efforts. You can define the type of profiles you want to access, run automated scraping queries and download an up to date list of LinkedIn profiles with all public information you needed.

Top challenge: Information you can scrape from LinkedIn is limited to publicly available data. If a B2B contact is open for being contacted, they will provide their work email publicly. If not, you will not receive it in the scraped data. In such cases, your only option for contacting that person would be connecting them organically on LinkedIn or using LinkedIn’s paid marketing tools such as LinkedIn Lead Generator.

Top benefit: The profiles you scrape can be filtered as detailed as you want, such as company names, shared connections or keywords in the bio e.g. “responsible for, looking for solutions…”

Reference Links

1

'Instagram'.Bright Data.

2

“Connect your Phantom via session cookies“. PhantomBuster. Retrieved October 26, 2023.

3

LinkedIn. Retrieved January 1, 2024

CTO

Sedat Dogan

CTO

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Sedat is a technology and information security leader with experience in software development, web data collection and cybersecurity. Sedat:
- Has ⁠20 years of experience as a white-hat hacker and development guru, with extensive expertise in programming languages and server architectures.
- Is an advisor to C-level executives and board members of corporations with high-traffic and mission-critical technology operations like payment infrastructure.
- ⁠Has extensive business acumen alongside his technical expertise.

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Researched by

Gulbahar Karatas

Industry Analyst

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Gülbahar is an AIMultiple industry analyst focused on web data collection, applications of web data and application security.

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