It’s hard to imagine successful prospecting without LinkedIn. No matter your niche, you can find plenty of opportunities for fruitful connections—but only if you know where (and how) to look. Sure, you can browse profiles manually and use the traditional spreadsheet approach to data sourcing, but doing so is incredibly time-consuming and wasteful.
A much better alternative is to use a LinkedIn scraper—a tool that automates prospecting by pulling all the data you need with little to no effort on your part. In this guide, we’ll show you how this happens and why a LinkedIn scraping tool should be an essential part of your tech stack.
We’ll then discuss some of the most effective tools you should consider and outline their key features, costs, and pricing to help you find the best solution. ⚖️
How To Scrape LinkedIn the Easy Way With a Dedicated Tool
The general mechanism behind LinkedIn scrapers is simple—they find and organize data according to predetermined parameters, letting you access lots of data points instantly. You can then export the data and add it to your CRM and other sales engagement tools.
Still, the specifics of this process can vary greatly between platforms. Some can only be used alongside LinkedIn or Sales Navigator, while others let you browse contacts and data directly from the scraper. Similarly, certain tools automate data exports, as opposed to having you do it manually.
In any case, using a scraping tool can save you countless hours and many headaches caused by manual research. All you need to do is sign up and ask for the data you need, and your chosen platform will take care of all the heavy lifting.
You can find lots of LinkedIn scraping tools on the market, so the research process might be a bit overwhelming. To give you a shortcut, we’ve selected seven options based on the following criteria:
- Our hands-on assessments of different platforms
- Input from our extensive network of industry experts and influencers
- Reviews by existing customers drawn from trusted sources (G2, Trustpilot, etc.)
These steps were necessary as not all scrapers are the same—seemingly minor feature nuances can make a world of difference to your efficiency and user experience.
Best LinkedIn Scraper—Our Top 7 Picks
After we gathered the necessary info, we shortlisted the following platforms:
- Lemlist
- PhantomBuster
- Proxycurl
- Waalaxy
- Linked Helper
- Helium Scraper
1. Lemlist
Lemlist is another comprehensive solution that goes beyond LinkedIn prospecting to help you automate many tasks throughout the sales cycle. These include email warmup, multichannel prospecting, and email finding.
It features an extensive database of over 450 million contacts drawn from various sources, including LinkedIn.
Besides letting you search for leads within the platform and enrich their data, Lemlist offers a dedicated LinkedIn Chrome extension. The way it works is simple:
- Install the extension and open LinkedIn
- Find a specific profile or do a LinkedIn search using various filters
- Click on the extension to mirror the search results and import them into Lemlist in one click
You can scrape people and company data points, from contact information to company industry and size. Much like Clay, Lemlist will then help you craft personalized emails at scale, letting you add custom text variables, images, GIFs, and many other elements.
Lemlist integrates with numerous tools, so you shouldn’t have trouble adding it to your workflow. Unfortunately, you can’t do so without paying since the platform doesn’t offer a free plan. Instead, you can choose between the following paid plans:
- Email Starter—$39/month
- Email Pro—$69/month
- Multichannel Expert—$99/month
- Outreach Scale—$159/month
Besides a lack of a free plan, one of the main concerns with Lemlist is that scraping can sometimes be too buggy, as reported by some users. You might encounter issues like duplicate imports, which can be a hassle to clean up.
2. PhantomBuster
PhantomBuster is all about automation. It offers over 100 automated workflows known as Phantoms and Flows. These let you fulfill three categories of tasks—sourcing qualified leads, enriching lead data, and building outreach campaigns.
Dozens of Phantoms are dedicated specifically to LinkedIn and/or Sales Navigator scraping and outreach efforts, such as:
- Creating a LinkedIn outreach strategy 📈
- Crafting connection requests and intro messages 👋
- Auto-connecting with LinkedIn users 🔗
As for the scraping features, many are simple enough and don’t involve much effort. You can install the PhantomBuster Chrome extension and export leads from your LinkedIn search effortlessly in a few clicks. Unfortunately, other Phantoms and Flows can be a bit difficult to set up, especially if you’re a new user.
For example, the Search to Lead Connection Flow is quite useful as it automates data extraction and connections—but it involves several steps to set up. The same goes for many workflows, so it’s no surprise that some PhantomBuster users complained about the platform’s beginner-friendliness.
PhantomBuster doesn’t offer a free plan, but you can use the free trial to get a taste of its features. When it expires, you can opt for one of the following tiers:
- Starter—$69/month
- Pro—$159/month
- Teams—$439/month
Each plan gets you a fixed number of execution hours per month, as well as a specific number of credits you can use for AI email generation.
3. Proxycurl
Proxycurl takes a unique approach to LinkedIn scraping, which is the main reason it deserves a spot on our list. It’s a data enrichment solution aimed mainly at developers and otherwise tech-savvy users as it offers a profile-scraping API, letting you find all sorts of information on your prospects.
By using the API, you can build apps that perform many scraping tasks, such as:
- Getting contact information
- Pulling specific data like venture funding information
- Looking up employee listings, roles, and more
If you’re not a developer and find APIs too complex, Proxycurl offers another solution—LinkDB. It’s a huge database of over 485 million public profiles you can browse to get the necessary data.
The database is updated every month, so there’s little to no risk of the information getting stale. The only downside is that it’s not particularly easy to navigate, which is why Proxycurl recommends using the API anyway. You can employ it after purchasing the database to extract the data you need.
Sadly, LinkDB isn’t for you unless you’re willing to splurge—the entire database costs a whopping $69,500 if you’re paying upfront. You can choose between monthly and quarterly installments to make the investment more digestible, but it’s still outrageously expensive for most small and mid-sized businesses.
If you opt for the API instead (or in conjunction with LinkDB), you can choose between two pricing models:
- Subscription-based—From $49/month
- Pay-as-you-go—From $10 for 100 credits
4. Waalaxy
Waalaxy is a LinkedIn and email prospecting tool that doesn’t try to do too much at once—it focuses on a handful of specific features, most notably:
- Lead generation
- Cold emailing
- LinkedIn prospecting and workflow automation
You have two options for building LinkedIn lead lists with Waalaxy. The first one is to use the plugin and perform a search within LinkedIn, similarly to how you’d do it with Lemlist’s add-on. You can then import the search results into Waalaxy in one click.
Alternatively, you can use the platform’s AI prospecting. Either upload your existing list or answer a few questions Waalaxy will ask about your target audience, and you’ll get up to 1,000 leads in no more than two minutes.
When you have your list of leads, you can set up automated campaigns to streamline your outreach efforts. For example, you can automatically connect with your prospect and then send them a LinkedIn message and a follow-up email when the connection is triggered.
You can test these features through Waalaxy’s free plan. Alternatively, you can sign up for one of the two paid plans:
- Advanced—€112 (~$122)/user per month
- Business—€160 (~$174)/user per month
Note that the Inbox Waalaxy add-on is charged separately at €20 (~$22) per month, so you’ll need to pay a bit more to use the aforementioned message automation features.
As for Waalaxy’s downsides, it’s not particularly robust when it comes to data enrichment. You get some basic LinkedIn and contact information, which may not be enough to create highly personalized messages.
5. Linked Helper
If you need a LinkedIn-oriented tool without additional outbound features, Linked Helper can be a solid choice. When you open it, you can access LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, and LinkedIn Recruiter much like you would from your browser, except you get lots of useful tools and features like:
- Automated post engagement (likes and comments)
- Integration with various CRM platforms, as well as Zapier and Webhooks
- Email finder
Linked Helper lets you extract valuable information from people and company profiles, which you can then add to the built-in CRM. Alternatively, you can export them in a CSV file or send data to a third-party service.
From the CRM, you can launch automated drip campaigns without too much legwork. Linked Helper lets you add custom variables, images, and similar elements to help your messages stand out and encourage a response.
Considering Linked Helper’s feature variety, the pricing is reasonable enough—the platform offers two tiers:
- Standard—$15/month
- Pro—$45/month
There’s no free plan, but you can use the 14-day free trial to see if the paid tiers are worth the investment.
If you haven’t used similar tools in the past, LinkedIn Helper might be a bit overwhelming. Users have complained about the platform’s complexity, saying that it comes with a considerable learning curve.
6. Helium Scraper
Helium Scraper is a web scraping tool that lets you pull information from any page on the web—including LinkedIn. Unlike other tools on our list, it’s not specifically oriented toward outbound marketing and sales, so it’s more of a general scraping tool.
The basic mechanism behind Helium Scraper is simple:
- Enter the URL of the page you wish to scrape
- Click the Extract button
Depending on the page’s specifics, you’ll have various extraction options. For example, you can choose to only extract a list, ignore images, or select the parts you want.
That said, we included Helium Scraper in our list because of the platform’s dedicated LinkedIn extraction templates. You need to download the template from the website, after which you can open it through Helium and choose either the top-level extraction (e.g., profile and company links) or details extraction. 🔍
As useful as it is, Helium Scraper doesn’t have the most modern or user-friendly interface, and you’ll see quite a few technical settings that might seem confusing. For example, to organize your data neatly in a table, you need to go to Data Flow > Queries > Profile Contact, which is far from the most intuitive way to go about it.
Due to its nature, the platform also doesn’t natively connect to sales engagement or execution platforms, so exporting data involves some manual work.
If you don’t mind this, you can choose from four license types (which require a one-off payment):
- Basic—$99
- Professional—$199
- Business—$399
- Enterprise—$699
The Verdict—Clay Is the Prime Choice 🏆
While no platform is universally superior to all others, Clay is the most well-rounded solution on our list—and we’re not only saying that because we’re biased. Some of the main reasons it trumps the competition are as follows:
- Over 50 data providers besides LinkedIn
- AI-powered research and email building
- Integration with over 100 tools
- A robust free plan
A particularly notable feature is Claygent—an AI scraper and assistant that lets you pull information from any corner of the web through a simple conversation. Ask Claygent any question about your leads, and you’ll have an answer in seconds. 🧠
Clay also integrates with some of the top picks you saw here—Lemlist and PhantomBuster—offering the best of these platforms and letting you use them together.
With all of the above in mind, it’s clear that Clay can uplevel your outreach campaigns in many ways. Don’t take our word for it—here’s what Clay’s users have to say about the platform:
Create a Free Clay Account
If you’re ready to get started, you can create a free Clay account in three steps:
- Go to the signup page
- Enter your name, email, and password
- Explore Clay’s scraping and enrichment features
To see everything Clay can do beyond LinkedIn scraping, you can visit the Learn hub and join the Slack community. For useful tips on maximizing the results of your outbound campaigns, you can also sign up for Clay’s newsletter. 🔔
It’s hard to imagine successful prospecting without LinkedIn. No matter your niche, you can find plenty of opportunities for fruitful connections—but only if you know where (and how) to look. Sure, you can browse profiles manually and use the traditional spreadsheet approach to data sourcing, but doing so is incredibly time-consuming and wasteful.
A much better alternative is to use a LinkedIn scraper—a tool that automates prospecting by pulling all the data you need with little to no effort on your part. In this guide, we’ll show you how this happens and why a LinkedIn scraping tool should be an essential part of your tech stack.
We’ll then discuss some of the most effective tools you should consider and outline their key features, costs, and pricing to help you find the best solution. ⚖️
How To Scrape LinkedIn the Easy Way With a Dedicated Tool
The general mechanism behind LinkedIn scrapers is simple—they find and organize data according to predetermined parameters, letting you access lots of data points instantly. You can then export the data and add it to your CRM and other sales engagement tools.
Still, the specifics of this process can vary greatly between platforms. Some can only be used alongside LinkedIn or Sales Navigator, while others let you browse contacts and data directly from the scraper. Similarly, certain tools automate data exports, as opposed to having you do it manually.
In any case, using a scraping tool can save you countless hours and many headaches caused by manual research. All you need to do is sign up and ask for the data you need, and your chosen platform will take care of all the heavy lifting.
You can find lots of LinkedIn scraping tools on the market, so the research process might be a bit overwhelming. To give you a shortcut, we’ve selected seven options based on the following criteria:
- Our hands-on assessments of different platforms
- Input from our extensive network of industry experts and influencers
- Reviews by existing customers drawn from trusted sources (G2, Trustpilot, etc.)
These steps were necessary as not all scrapers are the same—seemingly minor feature nuances can make a world of difference to your efficiency and user experience.
Best LinkedIn Scraper—Our Top 7 Picks
After we gathered the necessary info, we shortlisted the following platforms:
- Lemlist
- PhantomBuster
- Proxycurl
- Waalaxy
- Linked Helper
- Helium Scraper
1. Lemlist
Lemlist is another comprehensive solution that goes beyond LinkedIn prospecting to help you automate many tasks throughout the sales cycle. These include email warmup, multichannel prospecting, and email finding.
It features an extensive database of over 450 million contacts drawn from various sources, including LinkedIn.
Besides letting you search for leads within the platform and enrich their data, Lemlist offers a dedicated LinkedIn Chrome extension. The way it works is simple:
- Install the extension and open LinkedIn
- Find a specific profile or do a LinkedIn search using various filters
- Click on the extension to mirror the search results and import them into Lemlist in one click
You can scrape people and company data points, from contact information to company industry and size. Much like Clay, Lemlist will then help you craft personalized emails at scale, letting you add custom text variables, images, GIFs, and many other elements.
Lemlist integrates with numerous tools, so you shouldn’t have trouble adding it to your workflow. Unfortunately, you can’t do so without paying since the platform doesn’t offer a free plan. Instead, you can choose between the following paid plans:
- Email Starter—$39/month
- Email Pro—$69/month
- Multichannel Expert—$99/month
- Outreach Scale—$159/month
Besides a lack of a free plan, one of the main concerns with Lemlist is that scraping can sometimes be too buggy, as reported by some users. You might encounter issues like duplicate imports, which can be a hassle to clean up.
2. PhantomBuster
PhantomBuster is all about automation. It offers over 100 automated workflows known as Phantoms and Flows. These let you fulfill three categories of tasks—sourcing qualified leads, enriching lead data, and building outreach campaigns.
Dozens of Phantoms are dedicated specifically to LinkedIn and/or Sales Navigator scraping and outreach efforts, such as:
- Creating a LinkedIn outreach strategy 📈
- Crafting connection requests and intro messages 👋
- Auto-connecting with LinkedIn users 🔗
As for the scraping features, many are simple enough and don’t involve much effort. You can install the PhantomBuster Chrome extension and export leads from your LinkedIn search effortlessly in a few clicks. Unfortunately, other Phantoms and Flows can be a bit difficult to set up, especially if you’re a new user.
For example, the Search to Lead Connection Flow is quite useful as it automates data extraction and connections—but it involves several steps to set up. The same goes for many workflows, so it’s no surprise that some PhantomBuster users complained about the platform’s beginner-friendliness.
PhantomBuster doesn’t offer a free plan, but you can use the free trial to get a taste of its features. When it expires, you can opt for one of the following tiers:
- Starter—$69/month
- Pro—$159/month
- Teams—$439/month
Each plan gets you a fixed number of execution hours per month, as well as a specific number of credits you can use for AI email generation.
3. Proxycurl
Proxycurl takes a unique approach to LinkedIn scraping, which is the main reason it deserves a spot on our list. It’s a data enrichment solution aimed mainly at developers and otherwise tech-savvy users as it offers a profile-scraping API, letting you find all sorts of information on your prospects.
By using the API, you can build apps that perform many scraping tasks, such as:
- Getting contact information
- Pulling specific data like venture funding information
- Looking up employee listings, roles, and more
If you’re not a developer and find APIs too complex, Proxycurl offers another solution—LinkDB. It’s a huge database of over 485 million public profiles you can browse to get the necessary data.
The database is updated every month, so there’s little to no risk of the information getting stale. The only downside is that it’s not particularly easy to navigate, which is why Proxycurl recommends using the API anyway. You can employ it after purchasing the database to extract the data you need.
Sadly, LinkDB isn’t for you unless you’re willing to splurge—the entire database costs a whopping $69,500 if you’re paying upfront. You can choose between monthly and quarterly installments to make the investment more digestible, but it’s still outrageously expensive for most small and mid-sized businesses.
If you opt for the API instead (or in conjunction with LinkDB), you can choose between two pricing models:
- Subscription-based—From $49/month
- Pay-as-you-go—From $10 for 100 credits
4. Waalaxy
Waalaxy is a LinkedIn and email prospecting tool that doesn’t try to do too much at once—it focuses on a handful of specific features, most notably:
- Lead generation
- Cold emailing
- LinkedIn prospecting and workflow automation
You have two options for building LinkedIn lead lists with Waalaxy. The first one is to use the plugin and perform a search within LinkedIn, similarly to how you’d do it with Lemlist’s add-on. You can then import the search results into Waalaxy in one click.
Alternatively, you can use the platform’s AI prospecting. Either upload your existing list or answer a few questions Waalaxy will ask about your target audience, and you’ll get up to 1,000 leads in no more than two minutes.
When you have your list of leads, you can set up automated campaigns to streamline your outreach efforts. For example, you can automatically connect with your prospect and then send them a LinkedIn message and a follow-up email when the connection is triggered.
You can test these features through Waalaxy’s free plan. Alternatively, you can sign up for one of the two paid plans:
- Advanced—€112 (~$122)/user per month
- Business—€160 (~$174)/user per month
Note that the Inbox Waalaxy add-on is charged separately at €20 (~$22) per month, so you’ll need to pay a bit more to use the aforementioned message automation features.
As for Waalaxy’s downsides, it’s not particularly robust when it comes to data enrichment. You get some basic LinkedIn and contact information, which may not be enough to create highly personalized messages.
5. Linked Helper
If you need a LinkedIn-oriented tool without additional outbound features, Linked Helper can be a solid choice. When you open it, you can access LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, and LinkedIn Recruiter much like you would from your browser, except you get lots of useful tools and features like:
- Automated post engagement (likes and comments)
- Integration with various CRM platforms, as well as Zapier and Webhooks
- Email finder
Linked Helper lets you extract valuable information from people and company profiles, which you can then add to the built-in CRM. Alternatively, you can export them in a CSV file or send data to a third-party service.
From the CRM, you can launch automated drip campaigns without too much legwork. Linked Helper lets you add custom variables, images, and similar elements to help your messages stand out and encourage a response.
Considering Linked Helper’s feature variety, the pricing is reasonable enough—the platform offers two tiers:
- Standard—$15/month
- Pro—$45/month
There’s no free plan, but you can use the 14-day free trial to see if the paid tiers are worth the investment.
If you haven’t used similar tools in the past, LinkedIn Helper might be a bit overwhelming. Users have complained about the platform’s complexity, saying that it comes with a considerable learning curve.
6. Helium Scraper
Helium Scraper is a web scraping tool that lets you pull information from any page on the web—including LinkedIn. Unlike other tools on our list, it’s not specifically oriented toward outbound marketing and sales, so it’s more of a general scraping tool.
The basic mechanism behind Helium Scraper is simple:
- Enter the URL of the page you wish to scrape
- Click the Extract button
Depending on the page’s specifics, you’ll have various extraction options. For example, you can choose to only extract a list, ignore images, or select the parts you want.
That said, we included Helium Scraper in our list because of the platform’s dedicated LinkedIn extraction templates. You need to download the template from the website, after which you can open it through Helium and choose either the top-level extraction (e.g., profile and company links) or details extraction. 🔍
As useful as it is, Helium Scraper doesn’t have the most modern or user-friendly interface, and you’ll see quite a few technical settings that might seem confusing. For example, to organize your data neatly in a table, you need to go to Data Flow > Queries > Profile Contact, which is far from the most intuitive way to go about it.
Due to its nature, the platform also doesn’t natively connect to sales engagement or execution platforms, so exporting data involves some manual work.
If you don’t mind this, you can choose from four license types (which require a one-off payment):
- Basic—$99
- Professional—$199
- Business—$399
- Enterprise—$699
The Verdict—Clay Is the Prime Choice 🏆
While no platform is universally superior to all others, Clay is the most well-rounded solution on our list—and we’re not only saying that because we’re biased. Some of the main reasons it trumps the competition are as follows:
- Over 50 data providers besides LinkedIn
- AI-powered research and email building
- Integration with over 100 tools
- A robust free plan
A particularly notable feature is Claygent—an AI scraper and assistant that lets you pull information from any corner of the web through a simple conversation. Ask Claygent any question about your leads, and you’ll have an answer in seconds. 🧠
Clay also integrates with some of the top picks you saw here—Lemlist and PhantomBuster—offering the best of these platforms and letting you use them together.
With all of the above in mind, it’s clear that Clay can uplevel your outreach campaigns in many ways. Don’t take our word for it—here’s what Clay’s users have to say about the platform:
Create a Free Clay Account
If you’re ready to get started, you can create a free Clay account in three steps:
- Go to the signup page
- Enter your name, email, and password
- Explore Clay’s scraping and enrichment features
To see everything Clay can do beyond LinkedIn scraping, you can visit the Learn hub and join the Slack community. For useful tips on maximizing the results of your outbound campaigns, you can also sign up for Clay’s newsletter. 🔔
