10 Best LinkedIn Scraper APIs in 2026, Compared

The best LinkedIn scraper APIs in 2026 are Bridgly, Bright Data, Apify, People Data Labs, Coresignal, Apollo, ZoomInfo, ScrapIn, Unipile and PhantomBuster. Bridgly is our pick for developers and AI agents that need live LinkedIn data in a single request: profiles, companies, jobs, posts, comments and reactions, at about one second per call and from $1 per 1,000 profiles. Bright Data suits bulk batches, People Data Labs and Coresignal suit large stored databases, and Unipile or PhantomBuster suit workflows that run through your own LinkedIn account.

A disclosure first: Every entry uses the vendor's own pricing and product pages, checked on November 5, 2026. Where a vendor does not publish a price, we say so instead of guessing.

Quick comparison

#	API	Best for	Data source	Needs your LinkedIn login	Entry price
1	Bridgly	Live lookups for apps and AI agents	Live, fetched on each request	No	100 free credits, then $5
2	Bright Data	Bulk batches of profiles, companies, jobs	Live scrapers and datasets	No	5,000 free records a month
3	Apify	Choosing from many community scrapers	Depends on the Actor	Depends on the Actor	$5 free usage a month
4	People Data Labs	Person enrichment with contact data	Stored database	No	100 free records a month, then $98
5	Coresignal	Employee and company records at volume	Stored database	No	7-day free trial, then $49
6	Apollo	Sales teams already using Apollo	Stored database	No	API on custom plans
7	ZoomInfo	Enterprise go-to-market data	Stored database	No	Custom contracts
8	ScrapIn	Real-time profile and company lookups	Live	No	$30 for a 7-day trial
9	Unipile	Messaging plus data through user accounts	Live, through a linked account	Yes	€49 a month for 10 accounts
10	PhantomBuster	No-code prospecting automations	Live, through your session	Yes	$69 a month

The prices above use different units. Bridgly charges credits per request or per result, Bright Data charges per delivered record, database providers charge per matched record, and Unipile and PhantomBuster charge for accounts or run time. The cost section converts them to one workload.

What changed in 2026

For years, Proxycurl was the default answer to "which LinkedIn API should I use". It shut down on July 4, 2025, after LinkedIn sued it over fake accounts used to collect profiles. Many roundups still recommend it, so check the date on any list you read.

The tools that remain fall into three groups, and the group decides most of your trade-offs:

• Live APIs fetch public LinkedIn pages when you call them. Data is current, and nothing touches your own account. Bridgly, Bright Data, ScrapIn and most Apify Actors work this way.
• Databases sell access to records they collected earlier. Responses are fast and come with extra fields such as emails, but a record can be weeks or months old. People Data Labs, Coresignal, Apollo and ZoomInfo work this way.
• Account-based tools act through a logged-in LinkedIn account. They can send messages and see what that account sees, and they put that account at risk of restriction. Unipile and PhantomBuster work this way.

How we ranked these APIs

We scored each API on what a developer runs into in the first month of building:

• Coverage: which LinkedIn objects it returns, beyond the basic profile and company.
• Freshness: whether data is fetched live or read from a stored copy.
• Speed: published response times for a single lookup.
• Account risk: whether you must connect a LinkedIn login or cookie.
• Real cost: the price of a fixed workload, not the headline plan price.
• Developer tools: SDKs, MCP servers for AI agents, and how errors and pagination behave.

We did not run a controlled benchmark across all ten vendors. Speed figures are the ones each vendor publishes.

1. Bridgly

Best for: developers and AI agents that need live LinkedIn data in the same request, without a LinkedIn account.

Bridgly is a real-time social data API. Its LinkedIn API has 20 endpoints that return structured JSON straight in the response, with no job to poll and no file to download. You do not connect a LinkedIn account or pass cookies.

LinkedIn endpoints

Area	Endpoints
Lookups	Profile, company, job posting
Posts	Posts by a profile, posts by a company, single post
Activity	Comments on a post, who reacted to a post, comments a member wrote, posts a member reacted to
Search	All of LinkedIn, companies, jobs, posts, groups, events, courses, schools, products, services

A profile response includes the headline, location, about section, full work history, education, skills, certifications, languages and projects. A company response includes industry, employee count, headquarters and other locations, specialties, funding details and similar companies.

What Bridgly has that most others on this list don't

• Member activity without your account. Bridgly returns the comments a person wrote and the posts they reacted to, plus the full list of people who reacted to any post. The database providers on this list sell person and company records, not engagement on individual posts, and Bright Data's ready-made LinkedIn catalog does not list these endpoints. ScrapIn offers similar activity endpoints, but its paid credits start at $500. Unipile and PhantomBuster can read activity only through a connected LinkedIn account. On Apify you can find community Actors for some of it, each with its own maintainer and price.
• Ten search types. Besides companies, jobs and posts, you can search LinkedIn groups, events, courses, schools, products and services, or run one global search across all of them. No other API on this list publishes searches for all of these.
• One API for seven platforms. The same key and credit balance cover X, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, GitHub and YouTube. A sales tool can follow a prospect from their LinkedIn posts to their X replies without a second vendor.
• Built for agents. Bridgly hosts a remote MCP server. Add one URL to Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Codex or VS Code, and the assistant can look up profiles and read posts on its own.

Speed

Bridgly keeps live browser sessions ready on every platform, so a request does not wait for a cold start. Calls return in about one second at the median, with a p99 under 1.6 seconds. Self-serve plans carry a p99 guarantee of under five seconds, and Enterprise plans under three. Every response includes timeMs and creditsCost, so you can see the timing and price of each call.

That is the lowest published latency for live LinkedIn lookups on this list. ScrapIn publishes "under 2 seconds", and Bright Data's synchronous mode waits up to a minute before switching you to a snapshot you collect later. Databases such as Coresignal answer faster because they read stored records, not live pages.

Developer tools

You can call Bridgly over the REST API, the typed TypeScript SDK, the CLI or the MCP server. The SDK autocompletes every input and response field, and handles pagination, concurrency and rate-limit retries. Errors come back as typed results instead of thrown exceptions.

This script finds everyone who reacted to a post and enriches each person's profile:

// reactors.mts — run with: BRIDGLY_API_KEY=bgly_... npx tsx reactors.mts
import { Bridgly } from '@bridgly/sdk';

const client = new Bridgly({ apiKey: process.env.BRIDGLY_API_KEY ?? '' });

const reactions = await client.linkedin.getPostReactions({
  activityUrn: 'urn:li:activity:7300000000000000000',
  count: 50,
});
if (reactions.type === 'error') {
  throw new Error(`${reactions.status} ${reactions.message}`);
}

const handles = reactions.data
  .map((reaction) => reaction.reactorPublicId)
  .filter((handle) => handle != null);

const profiles = await Promise.all(
  handles.map((memberIdentity) =>
    client.linkedin.getProfileFromUrl({ memberIdentity }),
  ),
);

for (const profile of profiles) {
  if (profile.type === 'success') {
    console.log(profile.data.headline, `${profile.timeMs} ms`);
  }
}

The 50 reactions cost 50 credits and each profile costs 1 more, so the whole run costs about 100 credits, the amount every new account gets free.

Pricing

A profile, company, job or single-post lookup costs 1 credit. Search and list endpoints cost 1 credit per result returned. Failed requests cost nothing. You buy credits in one-time top-ups, with no subscription, and purchased credits never expire.

Plan	One-time purchase	Price per 1,000 credits	Rate limit per platform
Pay as you go	From $5	$2.00	2 requests a second
Growth	From $50	$1.67	5 requests a second
Scale	From $300	$1.00	25 requests a second
Enterprise	Custom	Custom	Custom

New accounts with a work email get 100 free credits, with no card required. See pricing for the full plan comparison.

Where Bridgly is not the right fit

Bridgly returns public LinkedIn data. It does not search for people by name or title, find emails or phone numbers, export Sales Navigator lists, or send messages and connection requests. If you need verified contact data, pair it with a database provider. If you need millions of records delivered as files, Bright Data's datasets are built for that.

2. Bright Data

Best for: large batches of LinkedIn profiles, companies, jobs and posts.

Bright Data is one of the best-known web scraping companies, and its LinkedIn Scraper API covers people profiles, companies, jobs, posts and LinkedIn ads. You can send up to 5,000 URLs in one call and receive JSON, NDJSON or CSV over the API, a webhook, or cloud storage. It offers Python and Node.js SDKs, a CLI and an MCP server.

Pricing: 5,000 free records a month with no card. Pay as you go costs $1.50 per 1,000 successful records, and the Scale plan is $499 a month for 384,000 records, then $1.30 per 1,000. You pay only for successful records.

Trade-offs: Bright Data is built around batch collection. Synchronous requests time out after one minute and fall back to a snapshot you fetch later, which is awkward when a user or agent is waiting on the answer. Its ready-made LinkedIn catalog does not list endpoints for a member's comments or reactions. Read our Bright Data vs Bridgly comparison for more detail.

3. Apify

Best for: teams that want to pick from many community-built scrapers and run them on a schedule.

Apify is a cloud platform for scrapers called Actors. Its store has many LinkedIn Actors from independent developers, covering profiles, companies, jobs, posts and more. The platform handles proxies, scheduling, storage and webhooks. A popular choice, HarvestAPI's LinkedIn Profile Scraper, does not need your LinkedIn cookies.

Pricing: the free plan includes $5 of usage a month, and Starter is $29 a month plus usage. HarvestAPI's profile Actor lists $4 per 1,000 profiles, or $10 per 1,000 with email search.

Trade-offs: each Actor has its own author, inputs, output format and price, so quality varies. An Actor can break or be abandoned when LinkedIn changes its pages. Check when it was last updated before you build on it. Each run also has start-up time, so Apify fits batch jobs better than single interactive lookups. See Apify vs Bridgly.

4. People Data Labs

Best for: enriching people with work history and contact data from a large database.

People Data Labs sells person and company data through enrichment, search and bulk APIs. You send a LinkedIn URL, email or name and get back a stored profile with job history, education and, on paid plans, emails and phone numbers. It is a database, so you are not scraping LinkedIn yourself.

Pricing: the free plan includes up to 100 records a month with contact fields hidden. Pro starts at $98 a month for 350 records, and a successful match uses one credit. Enterprise pricing is custom. Paid accounts get 1,000 requests a minute by default.

Trade-offs: records are refreshed on PDL's schedule, so a recent job change may not appear yet. At roughly $0.28 per record on the entry plan, it costs far more per profile than a live API. It does not return posts, comments or reactions.

5. Coresignal

Best for: employee, company and job-posting records at large volume.

Coresignal maintains its own database built from more than 15 public web sources, with over 900 million employee profiles and 480 million job postings. It offers search and enrichment APIs, an agent-oriented search API, and full datasets. It collects only publicly available business data.

Pricing: a 7-day free trial, then plans from $49 a month for 2,500 credits up to $5,000 a month for 10 million. A full employee or company record costs 20 credits, and a core record costs 10. On the $49 plan, a full employee record costs about $0.39. Rate limits run from 5 to 100+ requests a second by plan.

Trade-offs: the credit maths takes work, and the per-record price falls steeply only with larger commitments. Data is stored, not live, so freshness depends on the refresh cycle.

6. Apollo

Best for: sales teams that already use Apollo and want its data in their own systems.

Apollo is a sales platform with a large contact database, sequencing and CRM tools. Its API covers people and company search and enrichment, including emails and phone numbers, and records include LinkedIn URLs.

Pricing: Apollo sells plans per seat. Its pricing page says API access for advanced or custom integrations is on Custom plans, and that standard plans are for internal use only. Using Apollo data to power an external product or resell it needs a separate agreement.

Trade-offs: Apollo is a sales tool first and an API second. The terms rule it out for most products that show LinkedIn data to their own users. It does not return posts or engagement.

7. ZoomInfo

Best for: enterprise sales and marketing teams with an annual budget.

ZoomInfo is one of the best-known B2B data vendors, with company, contact, intent and technographic data. Its API supports search and enrichment, and searching is free while each newly enriched record uses a credit.

Pricing: ZoomInfo now has a free self-serve tier, but API packages are custom annual contracts. ZoomInfo does not publish API prices, and third-party reports put API access in the tens of thousands of dollars a year.

Trade-offs: the cost and contract length put it out of reach for most startups and side projects. It is a contact and company database, not a source of LinkedIn posts or activity.

8. ScrapIn

Best for: real-time LinkedIn profile and company lookups for B2B products.

ScrapIn focuses on live LinkedIn profile and company data, plus a person's posts, comments and reactions and the comments, reactions and reposts on a post. It does not need a LinkedIn account, and it publishes a response time under two seconds and 98.8% uptime.

Pricing: a 7-day trial costs $30. Pay-as-you-go credits start at $500 and stay valid for 12 months. Enterprise plans are annual, with guaranteed rate limits and Slack support. ScrapIn does not publish how many credits each tier includes.

Trade-offs: there is no free trial, the minimum after the trial is $500, and without published credit counts you cannot compare the price until you buy. Its full API reference is only visible after you sign up.

9. Unipile

Best for: products that send LinkedIn messages and read inboxes for their users.

Unipile is a unified API for LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, email and calendars. Your users link their own LinkedIn accounts, and your app can then read profiles, send messages and InMail, and manage conversations through those accounts.

Pricing: €49 ($55) a month for up to 10 linked accounts, then €5 per account, falling to €3 per account at high volume. API calls are unlimited. There is a 7-day free trial with no card.

Trade-offs: Unipile says it works with LinkedIn through reverse engineering, acting on behalf of each linked user. Every request goes through a real account, so LinkedIn's own limits apply and the account can be restricted. You pay per account, not per record, so it is a poor fit for collecting data at scale.

10. PhantomBuster

Best for: sales and growth teams that want no-code LinkedIn automations.

PhantomBuster offers ready-made automations that collect profiles, search results and post engagers, and chain them into outreach steps on a schedule. It has an API and an MCP server, but most users run it from its visual interface.

Pricing: Start costs $69 a month for 20 hours of run time, Grow $159 for 80 hours, and Scale $439 for 300 hours. Annual billing saves 20%. There is a 14-day trial.

Trade-offs: LinkedIn automations run through your session cookie, so the risk to your account is yours. Pricing in run hours makes cost per record hard to predict, and unused time does not roll over.

What 1,000 LinkedIn profiles cost on each API

This table prices one workload: 1,000 profile lookups from LinkedIn URLs you already have.

API	Cost for 1,000 profiles	How it is billed
Bridgly	$1.00 to $2.00	1 credit per profile, credits never expire
Bright Data	$1.30 to $1.50	Per successful record
Apify (HarvestAPI)	$4, or $10 with email search	Per profile, plus your Apify plan
People Data Labs	About $200 to $280	Per matched record, includes contact data
Coresignal	About $133 to $392 for full records	20 credits per full record
Apollo	Not published	Custom plan required for API access
ZoomInfo	Not published	Annual contract
ScrapIn	Not published	Prepaid credits from $500
Unipile	Not priced per profile	Per linked account, unlimited calls
PhantomBuster	Not priced per profile	Per hour of run time

The database providers cost more because each record can include verified emails and phones, which live APIs do not provide. If you only need the public profile, a live API is about 100 times cheaper.

Feature comparison

Feature	Bridgly	Bright Data	Apify	PDL	Coresignal	Apollo	ZoomInfo	ScrapIn	Unipile	PhantomBuster
Profiles and companies	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Posts	Yes	Yes	Yes	Not listed	Yes	Not listed	Not listed	Yes	Yes	Yes
Who reacted to a post	Yes	Not listed	Some Actors	Not listed	Not listed	Not listed	Not listed	Yes	Via account	Via account
A member's comments and reactions	Yes	Not listed	Some Actors	Not listed	Not listed	Not listed	Not listed	Yes	Via account	Via account
Search beyond people and companies	10 types	Jobs	Some Actors	Not listed	Jobs	Not listed	Not listed	Not listed	Posts, jobs	Some automations
Emails and phone numbers	No	Not listed	Some Actors	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Not listed	Not listed	Yes
Live data	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
No LinkedIn login needed	Yes	Yes	Most Actors	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
Unused credits	Never expire	Pay per record	Expire monthly	Not listed	Up to 3-month rollover	Expire monthly	Annual contract	Valid 12 months	Per account	Expire monthly

"Not listed" means the vendor's public LinkedIn product pages and docs do not list the feature as of November 5, 2026. "Via account" means it works only through a connected LinkedIn account.

How to choose a LinkedIn scraper API

Start from what the data is for:

• A feature where a user or AI agent waits for the answer, such as enriching a lead in a CRM, researching a prospect, or reading what someone posts: use a live API with fast single lookups. Bridgly fits here, and ScrapIn is the other option.
• Engagement data, such as finding everyone who reacted to a competitor's post or reading what a prospect comments on: use Bridgly or ScrapIn, or an account-based tool if you accept the account risk.
• Millions of records in a batch: Bright Data's scrapers and datasets, or Coresignal's datasets.
• Verified emails and phone numbers: People Data Labs, Apollo or ZoomInfo. You can pair them with a live API for current job titles and activity.
• Messaging and outreach through LinkedIn: Unipile for developers, PhantomBuster for no-code teams.

Before you commit, run your own list through each candidate. Check how many records come back, which fields are empty, how long each call takes, and whether failed lookups are charged.

Is it legal to scrape LinkedIn with an API?

In hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, US courts held that collecting publicly visible pages likely does not break the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. That ruling does not cover fake accounts, logged-in scraping or breach of contract, which is what ended Proxycurl. LinkedIn's User Agreement also prohibits automated collection.

In practice, three questions matter: whether the data is public, whether your own account is involved, and how you store and use personal data under laws such as GDPR and CCPA. This is not legal advice, so talk to a lawyer before you build hiring, credit or other sensitive uses on LinkedIn data.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best LinkedIn scraper API in 2026?

For live data in apps and AI agents, Bridgly is our pick. It covers profiles, companies, jobs, posts, reactions, member activity and ten search types, with about one-second responses and prices from $1 per 1,000 profiles. For bulk batches, Bright Data is the strongest option. For contact data, People Data Labs is the most developer-friendly database.

What replaced Proxycurl?

Proxycurl shut down in July 2025. Developers who used it for live profile and company lookups usually move to a live API such as Bridgly, Bright Data or ScrapIn. Those who used it for enrichment move to a database such as People Data Labs or Coresignal.

Is there an official LinkedIn API for profile data?

LinkedIn's official APIs need approval for most permissions and partner programs, and they do not allow open access to arbitrary public profiles. They suit apps that act on a signed-in member's own account, such as sharing posts or signing in with LinkedIn.

Do I need a LinkedIn account to use a scraper API?

Not for live APIs and databases such as Bridgly, Bright Data, People Data Labs or Coresignal. Unipile and PhantomBuster work through a connected LinkedIn account or session cookie, which puts that account at risk.

Which LinkedIn API is the fastest?

Among live APIs, Bridgly publishes a one-second median and a p99 under 1.6 seconds, and ScrapIn publishes under two seconds. Databases such as Coresignal answer faster, but they return stored records, not the profile as it is today.

How much does a LinkedIn scraper API cost?

For public profiles, live APIs cost about $1 to $4 per 1,000 lookups. Databases that include emails and phone numbers cost about $130 to $400 per 1,000 records. Account-based tools charge per account or per hour of run time instead.