Buyer’s guide · 2026-10-19
Best LinkedIn scraper APIs for your workflow
The best fit depends on whether you need profile JSON, broader extraction or an outreach workflow. Compare the pricing unit, required fields and integration work before choosing.
Published by pineapi, one of the products compared. This is a shortlist based on public product documentation, not an independent benchmark or an exhaustive market ranking.
Compare the product and the billing unit
| Tool | Workflow | Published price | Commitment | Check before choosing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pineapi | Profile search by filters and URL lookup | $0.012 per delivered profile; $0.12 search minimum; no lookup floor | Prepaid from $5; no subscription | Asynchronous runs; no email enrichment, sandbox or MCP server |
| Bright Data | LinkedIn scrapers covering profiles, companies, jobs and posts | $1.50 per 1,000 records on the advertised pay-as-you-go plan | Also advertises a 5,000-record monthly free tier | Compare the selected scraper and its record schema with your required fields |
| PhantomBuster | Automation workflows, including LinkedIn outreach and enrichment | Start: $56/month equivalent, $672 billed annually | Subscription bundles execution time, slots and credits | Not a fixed delivered-profile rate; estimate execution and enrichment usage |
USD prices checked on the sources below. A provider’s record is not assumed equivalent to a pineapi profile. Free-tier eligibility, taxes, discounts and throughput are not modeled.
Choose by workflow before comparing the unit price
For an application that needs professional-profile JSON, compare search filters, URL lookup and the fields your application consumes. For outreach sequences, compare automation and enrichment instead. The table is a shortlist of different product models, not a performance ranking. pineapi publishes this guide and is one of the products compared; we have not run an independent benchmark of these services.
When pineapi fits
pineapi fits a prepaid integration that searches for people or looks up LinkedIn profile URLs, then reads structured records. It exposes requested_url for matching lookup results, unresolved URLs with reasons, derived tenure and promotion fields, and per-profile truncation flags. Use the generated API reference to check the exact schema. It does not provide contact-email discovery, company-profile endpoints, a no-code scraping dashboard or a native MCP server.
When to compare another tool
Bright Data advertises a lower headline per-record price and a broader LinkedIn scraper catalog. PhantomBuster packages automation workflows with subscription resources. Those may be a better fit for a different workload. A cheaper record is useful only if it includes the fields and retrieval method you need; a larger subscription can make sense when you use its automation features.
Calculate the cost of your actual workload
For pineapi, 1,000 delivered profiles cost $12 before any search minimums that increase the total. A completed search that returns zero profiles costs $0.12. URL lookup has no minimum, so unresolved URLs cost nothing. Duplicate profiles across separate runs are billed again. Repeated status polling and downloading existing results do not create new profile charges. For subscription tools, include the billing commitment and resource limits rather than dividing the subscription by an assumed throughput.
Check the integration before switching
Inspect a sample response, nullable fields, result retention and pagination. Make sure retries preserve the creation request and its Idempotency-Key. Test how your application handles partial runs and missing URLs. Compare credential requirements and your own data-use obligations separately: a product that does not ask for your LinkedIn cookie is not promising that every use of the resulting data is permitted.
Replacing a Proxycurl integration?
Start with the Proxycurl migration guide to identify which profile workflows pineapi covers and which require another service.