PhantomBuster alternatives, sorted by why you are leaving
PhantomBuster sells execution hours, not rows. People look for PhantomBuster alternatives when they need a price per record, or a run that does not stall when the hours do. 4 replacements below, each one matched to a specific reason.
If the Phantoms were pulling LinkedIn profiles, companies or jobs, Bright Data sells the same data as records at $1.50 per 1,000 without your account doing the work. If they were running LinkedIn outreach, HeyReach and Dripify are built for it, with published rate limits and the API on the plan. If they were scraping other public sources, Apify's Store has an Actor priced per result for most of them. Among these PhantomBuster competitors, none is cheaper by default; each is cheaper for one specific job.
Prices and limits for every option below are read off the vendor's own page. These are the PhantomBuster competitors that each answer a named problem.
The 3 reasons people actually leave
If none of these is your situation, the honest answer is that you should probably stay, and the PhantomBuster API review covers what you already have. The 28 providers in the Sourcing APIs listing are where these replacements come from.
1 · An execution hour has no price per row
Start is $56 a month on annual billing for 20 hours, Grow is $128 for 80, Scale is $352 for 300, which is $2.80, $1.60 and $1.17 an hour. How many profiles an hour yields depends on the Phantom and the site, so a team cannot forecast cost per record until it has run the job, and the answer moves when the platform does.
2 · Running out pauses the pipeline
PhantomBuster says automations pause until execution time resets or you upgrade, and no overage is charged. That protects a budget and breaks a deadline: a workflow triggered from a CRM or a form simply stops returning data, and the usage endpoint is the only early warning.
3 · The work runs through your own accounts
Phantoms extract and enrich through your own accounts on each platform, LinkedIn among them. Throughput is then whatever those accounts can safely do. Slots, the number of Phantoms that may run at once, cap parallel runs at 5, 15 or 50 by plan, and no request rate limit is published to plan around.
4 PhantomBuster alternatives, and what each one fixes
Ordered by how closely each one answers the reasons above, not by price.
| Provider | Entry price | Unit cost | Free tier | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PhantomBuster | $56/mo annual | $2.80 per execution hour | 14-day trial, no card: 2 hours of execution time and exports limited to 10 rows. | Baseline |
| Bright Data | $1.50/1K requests | $0.0015 per request | 5,000 credits a month across the SERP, Unlocker and Scraper APIs, no card. A hard stop, not a bill. | Best for search results and pre-built scrapers at volume |
| HeyReach | $79/sender/mo | Not sold by the unit | No free tier. Free trial, and senders are added one at a time. | API, webhooks and MCP on the $79 entry plan |
| Dripify | $59/user/mo annual | Not sold by the unit | No free tier. 7-day trial on Advanced features, no card. | An OpenAPI spec and documented errors for LinkedIn automation |
| Apify | $19/mo | $0.20 per compute unit | Free plan, $5 of platform usage a month, no card. Blocked rather than billed when it runs out. | Best for a scraper somebody already built |
Read from each vendor's own pricing page between 23 and 24 October 2026.
The case for each one
Each one below is matched to a reason rather than scored, and each one names what you give up by taking it. A replacement with no downside is a replacement nobody has actually run.
Bright Data
LinkedIn profiles, companies and jobs as records from a pre-built scraper, $1.50 per 1,000 on success, with no account of yours involved.
Bright Data is the answer when the Phantoms were extracting data rather than acting. Its Web Scraper API includes a LinkedIn scraper for profiles, companies, jobs and posts, and it sells LinkedIn datasets outright, so the rows arrive without your own account doing the browsing.
The price is per record and published: $1.50 per 1,000 records on success, 5,000 free credits a month shared with the SERP and Unlocker APIs, and $499 a month for about 384,000 records on the Scraper plan. That is a number you can forecast before running anything, which an execution hour is not.
Concurrency is advertised as unlimited, and the free tier stops hard when spent rather than billing. Authentication is a Bearer API key; the MCP server is hosted inside the same free pool.
What you give up
Action. Bright Data reads; it does not send connection requests, messages or follow-ups, and it has no notion of your account's network. Anything that depended on being logged in as you is gone.
When it is the wrong answer
Outreach automation. If the Phantoms were sending, this replaces the data half and none of the workflow.
HeyReach
LinkedIn outreach with the API, webhooks and an MCP server on the entry plan, at $79 a sender and 300 requests a minute.
If PhantomBuster was running LinkedIn outreach rather than extraction, HeyReach is built for that job and only that job. It prices per LinkedIn sender at $79 a month, and the API, webhooks, an MCP server and client workspaces are on that entry plan rather than on an agency tier.
The rate limit is published, which PhantomBuster's is not: 300 requests a minute, shared across every request, with API keys that never expire. Above about 13 senders the $999 Agency plan for 25 senders is cheaper per sender.
The meter is the sender, so cost scales with the LinkedIn accounts you run rather than with hours a job happened to take. That is the predictability an execution-time plan cannot give.
What you give up
Every platform but LinkedIn, and extraction as a product. HeyReach is a sending tool; it is not where you pull 10,000 company pages or scrape a directory. It still runs through your own LinkedIn account, so reason 3 does not change.
When it is the wrong answer
Teams whose Phantoms were mostly data extraction or covered several platforms. This replaces one use case well.
Dripify
LinkedIn outreach priced per account, with the API, webhooks and MCP on every plan, and published limits of 60 a minute and 5,000 a day.
Dripify is the other LinkedIn outreach tool here, and it prices by LinkedIn account because LinkedIn itself is the constraint: every plan allows up to 75 connection requests and 100-plus messages a day.
The API, webhooks and an MCP server come with every plan, with a downloadable OpenAPI spec. Limits are published at 60 requests a minute and 5,000 a day per key, and a 429 carries Retry-After, which is more than PhantomBuster documents.
Plans start at $59 a user a month on annual billing, $79 paying monthly, with a 7-day trial on Advanced features and no card. One seat connects one LinkedIn account, so a team of five needs five.
What you give up
Everything outside LinkedIn. Dripify automates LinkedIn only, so any Phantom running against another platform needs a second tool. It still runs through your own LinkedIn account, so reason 3 does not change.
When it is the wrong answer
A team that wants one tool across platforms, or extraction without sending. Like HeyReach, this replaces the outreach half of PhantomBuster only.
Apify
If the Phantoms scraped public sources, a marketplace of Actors priced per result, from $1.50 per 1,000 Google Maps places.
For the share of PhantomBuster usage that scrapes public sources rather than acting through an account, Apify Store usually has a maintained Actor. Google Maps listings, directories, marketplaces and whole-site crawls are all started, polled and read through one REST API and one token.
Most Store Actors price per result, set by their developer; Google Maps Scraper is listed from $1.50 per 1,000 places. The plan is prepaid usage in dollars, $5 free and then $19, $199 or $999 a month, with compute at $0.20 a unit on Starter for the Actors that bill compute.
Concurrent runs are 5 on Free, 32 on Starter and 128 on Scale, and the API allows 60 requests a second per resource. The hosted MCP server takes OAuth or a token.
What you give up
Acting as you. Apify Actors scrape; they do not send messages or connection requests through your accounts, and unused prepaid usage expires every month.
When it is the wrong answer
LinkedIn outreach, and any workflow whose value was being logged in as a member of the team.
What you would actually pay, on each one
Every provider on this page publishes a rate card, so the real numbers can sit next to each other rather than behind a summary. The plan you want is the one whose included volume covers a normal month for you, not the cheapest one on the page.
PhantomBuster
PhantomBuster publishes 4 tiers, one of them a free trial, and the paid ladder runs from $56 to $352.
Trial
- 5 slots, 2 hours of execution time
- 50 email credits, 1,000 AI credits
- 100 URL finder credits
- Exports limited to 10 rows
Start
- 5 slots, 20 hours a month
- 500 email credits, 10,000 AI credits a month
- 1,000 URL finder credits a month
- Unlimited users and exports
Grow
- 15 slots, 80 hours a month
- 2,500 email credits, 30,000 AI credits a month
- 10,000 URL finder credits a month
- Unlimited users and exports
Scale
- 50 slots, 300 hours a month
- 10,000 email credits, 90,000 AI credits a month
- 20,000 URL finder credits a month
- Unlimited users and exports
Bright Data
Bright Data publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and pay as you go with no minimum above the free allowance.
Free tier
- No credit card
- Shared across SERP, Unlocker and Scraper APIs
- Renews on the 1st, never rolls over
- Stops hard when spent, no surprise bill
Pay as you go
- Charged on success only
- Monthly spend limits you set
- Unlimited concurrency
- A prepaid wallet, so only deposited funds are spent
Scale
- $1.30 per 1,000 above the allowance
- 383,000 on the Unlocker plan, 384,000 records on Scraper
- About $1.31 per 1,000 when the allowance is used
- Cancel anytime
Enterprise
- Volume discounts
- Account manager and premium SLA
- SSO
- Priority support
HeyReach
HeyReach publishes 4 tiers, none of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $79 to $2,999, with a quoted tier above it.
Growth
- $71 a sender billed quarterly, 20% off yearly
- Unlimited campaigns and all LinkedIn actions
- 100 enrichment credits per sender
- MCP server included
Agency
- 1,000 enrichment credits
- Whitelabel included
- A 50-sender option is offered with no price shown
- Unified inbox across every sender
Unlimited
- Fair use caps it at 300 senders
- Custom branding for multiple clients, $500 per add-on
Done for you
- ICP research, campaign setup and reporting
- Priced on the engagement rather than on seats
Dripify
Dripify publishes 3 tiers, none of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $59 to $79, with a quoted tier above it.
Pro
- Up to 75 connection requests and 100-plus messages a day
- Open API and MCP server
- Webhooks, HubSpot, dedicated inbox, CSV export
Advanced
- Everything in Pro plus evergreen campaigns
- Adaptive activity control and team management
- Advanced LinkedIn protection
Enterprise
- Premium onboarding and dedicated support
- A customer success manager
- Priced on seat count
Apify
Apify publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $19 to $999.
Free
- No credit card
- Compute at $0.20 a CU, 16 GB of RAM
- 5 concurrent runs
- Blocked, not billed, when the $5 runs out
Starter
- $19 of prepaid usage a month
- Compute at $0.20 a CU, 64 GB of RAM
- 32 concurrent runs
- Bronze discount on Store Actors
Scale
- $199 of prepaid usage a month
- Compute at $0.16 a CU, 256 GB of RAM
- 128 concurrent runs
- Silver discount on Store Actors
Business
- $999 of prepaid usage a month
- Compute at $0.13 a CU, 512 GB of RAM
- 256 concurrent runs
- Gold discount and an account manager
Read the included volume before the headline price. A plan that costs twice as much and carries five times the credits is the cheaper plan, and on this page that is the usual case rather than the exception.
What each one costs at your volume
PhantomBuster first, then every replacement. The model picks the cheapest published plan that covers your volume on each one, which is the comparison a row of entry prices cannot make.
PhantomBuster
Its plans are not metered in records, so the figure below is the entry plan rather than a forecast.
Bright Data
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
HeyReach
Priced per seat, so the bill moves with headcount rather than with volume.
Dripify
Priced per seat, so the bill moves with headcount rather than with volume.
Apify
Its plans are not metered in records, so the figure below is the entry plan rather than a forecast.
Plans are read from each vendor's own pricing page and the model picks the cheapest one that covers you, so these are list prices on the billing term each vendor publishes, annual where that is how it prices, before any discount you negotiate. PhantomBuster and Apify publish plans that are not metered in records, so the figure shown is the entry plan rather than your bill.
What a year costs at three volumes
The same plan-fit arithmetic as the model above, run out to a year, because an annual number is what a budget actually asks for.
HeyReach and Dripify are priced per seat, so those columns do not move with volume. The figure shown is 3 seats for a year. PhantomBuster and Apify publish only an entry price, so those columns are the floor for a year, not a forecast.
| A year at | PhantomBuster | Bright Data | HeyReach | Dripify | Apify |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | $672 | $0 Free tier | $2,844 Growth | $2,124 Pro | $228 |
| 10,000 a month | $672 | $180 Pay as you go | $2,844 Growth | $2,124 Pro | $228 |
| 50,000 a month | $672 | $900 Pay as you go | $2,844 Growth | $2,124 Pro | $228 |
These are list prices on the published plan that covers each volume, on the billing term each vendor publishes, so they are the number before you negotiate.
Which replacement is yours
Answer what matters most and the lean appears below. Every option is read from the records on this page, and staying on PhantomBuster is one of the possible answers.
Each answer leans one way. The recommendation appears here once you have picked at least two.
A tool like this can only weigh what is on the page. It does not know your workload, and the one test that does is the bake-off on this page: your own rows, queries or records, run on the cheapest entry each side offers.
Where an answer leans on a certification or an integration, it means that vendor publishes it on the pages this directory read, which is not the same as the other one lacking it. The sources are listed at the foot of the page.
Where the data comes from, and what you may do with it
The question that arrives late and expensively is who is allowed to hold the data. A migration is the moment to check it, because you are signing a new contract anyway.
| Provider | Fields returned | Coverage | Compliance | Redistribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PhantomBuster | LinkedIn profile, Work email, Firmographics | Global | GDPR | Not stated |
| Bright Data | Firmographics, Job postings, LinkedIn profile, Search results, Web pages | Global | ISO 27001 SOC 2 Type II GDPR CCPA | Not stated |
| HeyReach | LinkedIn profile, Work email | Global | GDPR DPA | Not stated |
| Dripify | Work email, LinkedIn profile | Global | GDPR DPA | Not stated |
| Apify | Firmographics, Web pages | Global | SOC 2 GDPR | Not stated |
None of these states a redistribution position on its pricing or docs pages. Internally that never matters. Put the rows in something your customers can see and it becomes the question your legal team asks first.
Two practical notes that apply to every provider on this page. A compliance badge describes the vendor rather than your use of it, so a GDPR DPA does not give you a lawful basis for the outreach you send. And every one of these vendors runs its own opt-out, which means a person who asks you to delete their record has to be removed from your copy as well as from theirs.
Moving off PhantomBuster
Written against Bright Data, the first pick above, because the steps are the same whichever one you take and the specifics are what make them useful. Swap the name and the order still holds.
Measure the thing you are about to lose
Replay 100 of the queries, URLs or lookups you really send through PhantomBuster and record the usable results, the failures and what each one cost. Without that baseline every provider looks cheaper per call than the one you are paying for today.
Check which fields change
Bright Data does not return work email, which PhantomBuster does. If anything downstream reads that field, the switch changes your pipeline as well as your vendor.
Rewrite the auth and the limits, in that order
PhantomBuster authenticates with an API key in the X-Phantombuster-Key header; OAuth for the MCP server. Bright Data uses a bearer API key, plus a zone for the SERP, Unlocker or Browser API.
The limits are the part that bites later. PhantomBuster's limits: no request rate published. Slots cap parallel runs at 5, 15 or 50.
Bright Data's limits: SERP API 1,000 a minute on an unfunded account, raised by adding funds. Concurrency unlimited. A loop tuned to the first will either crawl or get throttled on the second.
Run both for one billing cycle
Keep the old key live and route a slice of real traffic to the new one. A month is the shortest honest test, because credit expiry, rollover and the overage rate only show up at renewal and those are where the surprises live.
Cancel on the renewal date
Credits on most of these plans do not survive a downgrade. Check what happens to the balance you have already paid for, and time the switch so you are not buying the same records twice.
The step people skip is the first one, and it is the only one that cannot be done after the fact. Once the old key is off you have nothing to compare the new one against, so a provider that is quietly worse on your workload looks like a provider that is fine.
What practitioners say about Dripify
Transcribed as written and linked to the thread. A Reddit claim is a signal rather than a fact, so nothing here is the only source for any figure on this page.
The tool is not what gets the account restricted
Solid breakdown. The only thing I'd add is that tool choice matters less than behavior - most restrictions happen because people crank volume too fast or send obviously templated messages. Honestly, hyper-personalization + low daily limits beats any "smart automation" feature long term. LinkedIn punishes spam patterns way more aggressively now.
r/socialmedia · February 2026 · 2 points
The same correction this directory records for cold email, pointed at LinkedIn. The sending tool does not decide deliverability and the automation tool does not decide whether an account survives; the volume curve and the message do. That is worth knowing before a comparison page persuades you the feature list is the risk.
It also explains why Dripify's daily action ceilings are fixed rather than left open: up to 75 connection requests and 100-plus messages a day on every plan. A ceiling you cannot raise is a product deciding the thing most likely to get you restricted, which is a feature rather than a limitation.
14 threads read on 13 October 2026, searched by vendor name. Scores and dates are the comment's own. Nothing here is the only source for a price or a limit on this site: every figure in the tables above comes from a vendor's own page.
Should you actually switch?
The short answer is at the top of this page. Before you act on it, run the test below, because it is the cheapest way to find out whether that answer holds for you.
The replacements here do not all do the same job, so decide which half of the product you are actually replacing before you compare prices. Run your real workload through the candidate alongside what you have, for a fortnight, and list what the new one cannot do. Switching costs are almost always in that list.
Head to head, and in a stack
Apify vs PhantomBuster
CompareBoth bill for running code rather than for rows. PhantomBuster sells execution hours through your own accounts; Apify sells prepaid usage and lets each Actor price its results.
Compare them →All alternatives
57Every provider in the directory that teams regularly try to replace, with the reasons and the replacements for each.
Browse the hub →Before you switch, try the waterfall in Clay.
Clay runs a waterfall across 150+ data providers from one table, without a separate contract with each. A lookup that finds nothing costs no data credit, and the free plan includes 500 actions a month.
Frontal is a Clay Elite Studio Partner.
Switching from PhantomBuster, answered
What is the best PhantomBuster alternative?
It depends on why you are leaving, which is how this page is organized rather than ranked. The first pick here is Bright Data, which this directory lists as the best for search results and pre-built scrapers at volume, at $1.50/1K requests. The case for it, and what you give up, is in the section above.
Is there a free alternative to PhantomBuster?
Yes, 2 of the replacements here do. Bright Data: 5,000 credits a month across the SERP, Unlocker and Scraper APIs, no card. A hard stop, not a bill. Apify: Free plan, $5 of platform usage a month, no card. Blocked rather than billed when it runs out.
How were these alternatives chosen?
By the reason teams leave, not by a score. The page opens with the reasons teams leave and matches a replacement to each one.