Picking a LinkedIn data API is less about features and more about how the data gets collected: through LinkedIn's own permissions, through your logged-in account, through a scraper that reads public pages, or from a database someone else built. That one choice decides your cost, your account risk, and how fresh the data is.

This roundup covers LinkedIn's official programs and five third-party options, including ours. Where we quote a competitor's price, we checked it on that company's own website this month and marked it "as of September 2026". Where we couldn't confirm a number, we describe the pricing model instead of guessing.

If you just want working code, skip to our LinkedIn scraping API guide.

The short version

Option	How data is collected	Pricing model	Best for
LinkedIn official APIs	Member consent (OAuth)	Free, but most access needs partner approval	Sign-in, posting, approved partner integrations
Bright Data	Public-page scraping, managed	Per 1,000 records	High-volume profile and company pulls
Apify	Public-page scrapers from a marketplace	Set by each scraper's developer	Trying many scrapers, custom workflows
PhantomBuster	Your own LinkedIn session	Subscription	Sales automation around your own account
Coresignal	Pre-collected B2B database	Monthly credit plans	Bulk firmographic and employee data
InsightSocial	Public-page scraping, one API for 9 platforms	Credits per endpoint, free tier	Small to mid jobs, multi-platform products

Does LinkedIn have an official data API?

Yes, but it's not a general data API. According to LinkedIn's developer documentation, only a few "open permissions" are self-serve: Sign In with LinkedIn using OpenID Connect (the logged-in member's name, headline, photo and email) and Share on LinkedIn (posting and commenting on that member's behalf). Everything else requires explicit approval:

Marketing (Advertising API and audiences) needs you to apply and be approved.
Sales access, including Sales Navigator profile matching, needs you to be an approved Sales Navigator Application Platform (SNAP) partner.
Talent integrations such as Recruiter System Connect and Apply Connect go through a separate partner application.
Compliance permissions are closed to new applicants.

Pick it when your product needs "Sign in with LinkedIn", posts on a member's behalf, or you're a genuine ATS, CRM or ad-tech partner willing to go through review. Skip it when you need to look up arbitrary profiles, companies or posts. There's no self-serve endpoint for that.

Bright Data

Bright Data runs a managed Web Scraper API with dedicated LinkedIn scrapers. Its LinkedIn page lists five data types: people profiles, companies, jobs, posts and people search. You send URLs or search inputs and get structured records back. Because they manage the proxies and unblocking, you don't touch a LinkedIn account.

Pricing (as of September 2026, from brightdata.com): pay-as-you-go at $1.50 per 1,000 records, a free tier of 5,000 records per month, and a Scale plan at $499/month that includes 384,000 records, with extra records at $1.30 per 1,000.

Strengths: The lowest per-record price in this list at volume, broad LinkedIn coverage, and an enterprise-grade operation. Trade-offs: It's a large platform with many products, and the scraper model is built around batch jobs of records, not one quick call per lookup. If you need hundreds of thousands of LinkedIn profiles a month, start here.

Apify

Apify is a platform for running scrapers ("Actors"), and its store has many LinkedIn Actors from independent developers. You pick one, run it through the Apify API, and read the results from a dataset.

Pricing has two layers. Apify's own plans (as of September 2026, from apify.com) are Free ($0, with $5 of monthly platform usage), Starter ($19/month), Scale ($199/month) and Business ($999/month). On top of that, each Actor's price is set by its developer, using pay-per-event, pay-per-usage or a monthly rental, as Apify's documentation explains. So the real cost of a LinkedIn profile depends on which Actor you choose.

Strengths: Lots of choice, a strong developer platform with scheduling, storage and integrations, and easy to prototype on the free tier. Trade-offs: Quality and upkeep vary by Actor, and when LinkedIn changes its pages, you depend on that one developer to fix theirs. Each Actor also has its own input and output format, so switching means rewriting your parser.

PhantomBuster

PhantomBuster is an automation tool more than a data API. Its LinkedIn automations ("Phantoms") run through your own account. PhantomBuster's support docs describe connecting LinkedIn with your li_at session cookie and browser user agent, which it then uses to run your Phantoms. It has an API for launching Phantoms and fetching results, and it's popular for prospecting workflows like search exports, profile visits and connection requests.

We couldn't load current plan prices from PhantomBuster's own pricing page, so we won't quote them. It's a subscription priced by plan tier. Check phantombuster.com/pricing for current numbers. We've written more about the trade-offs in PhantomBuster alternatives.

Strengths: Great at actions, not just data, with a mature library of LinkedIn workflows. Trade-offs: Because it acts as you, your LinkedIn account carries the risk. LinkedIn's User Agreement prohibits bots and unauthorized automated access, and accounts that automate heavily can get restricted. Your volume is also limited by what one account can do safely.

Coresignal

Coresignal sells B2B data rather than live scraping on demand. Its site describes employee, company and job records, with employee data going back to 2016 (more than 900 million employee records and 70 million company profiles by its own count). You get it through Company, Employee and Jobs APIs or as bulk datasets, and it says multi-source company data is updated daily.

Pricing (as of September 2026, from coresignal.com): a 7-day free trial with 2,000 credits, then monthly plans from $49/month for 2,500 credits up to $5,000/month. Its pricing page says employee or company records cost 10 to 20 credits each and job postings cost 1 credit.

Strengths: Huge historical coverage, fast bulk queries, and no scraping to run yourself. Great for firmographics, talent analytics and market maps. Trade-offs: It's a database, so a record reflects the last time it was collected, not the page right now. Its APIs center on companies, employees and jobs, so check whether it has the post-level data you need, such as comments or reactions, before you commit.

InsightSocial

That's us. The InsightSocial API reads public LinkedIn pages on request and returns JSON in the same schema we use for eight other platforms (Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, Facebook, Threads, Reddit, Pinterest). The LinkedIn endpoints (68 of them) cover profiles and every profile section, company pages, company posts and headcount insights, posts, comments, reactions, reposts, people search with filters, post search, jobs, groups and the Ad Library.

Pricing is per endpoint, in credits, and published in full at endpoint pricing: a member profile is 100 credits, a company page 100, a people-search page 200 to 1,000 (metered). The free plan has 500 credits a month, and your first 10 calls priced at 200 credits or less are free. Pro is $9.99/month for 10,000 credits, which works out to roughly $0.10 per LinkedIn profile. See pricing.

A few billing rules that matter in practice (details in Credits):

Failed calls and empty results cost 0.
Re-running the exact call you already paid for is free inside its window (24 hours for profiles).
A shared-cache hit costs 5 credits.
GET /v1/endpoints lists every price and needs no key.

Strengths: One key and one schema across nine platforms, a real free tier, pay-per-call pricing that suits small and bursty jobs, and no LinkedIn account involved. There's also a Chrome extension on the same credit balance for teammates who don't code. Trade-offs, honestly: Per LinkedIn profile we're more expensive than Bright Data's bulk rate, so if you're pulling hundreds of thousands of profiles a month, a per-record provider will cost less. We're also rate-limited to 60 requests a minute and 10 concurrent requests per key, which suits product features and research jobs better than massive batch crawls.

What happened to Proxycurl?

It's worth knowing before you commit to any vendor. Proxycurl was a popular LinkedIn profile API. After LinkedIn sued in January 2025, the company shut it down on July 4, 2025, and its founder wrote that there was no winning a fight against a company with Microsoft's resources. The team helped customers move, but every one of them still had to replace a dependency.

The lesson isn't that every vendor will vanish. It's that you should keep your code loosely coupled. Put the provider behind one small client in your codebase, store the raw responses you depend on, and make sure you can swap vendors in a day, not a quarter.

Which LinkedIn data API should you choose?

You need "Sign in with LinkedIn" or to post for users: the official API.
You're a real CRM, ATS or ad-tech partner: apply to the relevant LinkedIn partner program.
Millions of profile or company records: Bright Data for live pulls, Coresignal for a pre-built database.
You want to try many scrapers or build custom workflows: Apify.
You want to automate your own LinkedIn outreach: PhantomBuster, knowing the account risk.
LinkedIn plus other platforms, or small, frequent lookups inside a product: InsightSocial. Start with the quickstart, or hand the AI agents page to your coding agent.

Whatever you pick, stick to public data, collect only what the job needs, and treat privacy law as applying even when a profile is public.

FAQ

What is the cheapest LinkedIn data API?

At high volume, per-record providers are cheapest. Bright Data listed $1.50 per 1,000 records as of September 2026. For small jobs, free tiers matter more: Bright Data offers 5,000 records a month, Apify $5 of monthly usage, and InsightSocial 500 credits a month plus 10 free calls.

Can I use LinkedIn's official API to look up any profile?

No. Self-serve permissions only return data about the member who signed in to your app. Broader profile access runs through partner programs like SNAP, which LinkedIn approves case by case.

Which options avoid using my LinkedIn account?

Bright Data, Coresignal and InsightSocial don't ask for your LinkedIn login. On Apify it depends on the Actor, so read its input settings: some ask for a cookie. PhantomBuster's LinkedIn automations run through your session cookie by design.

Is it legal to use a LinkedIn scraping API?

It depends on where you are, what you collect and how you use it. Scraping public data isn't automatically illegal, but LinkedIn's User Agreement prohibits it and privacy laws like GDPR still apply. The Proxycurl case shows LinkedIn will sue. Get legal advice if LinkedIn data is core to your product.

Can I get LinkedIn people search results through an API?

Yes. Bright Data lists a people-search scraper, and InsightSocial's /v1/linkedin/search/people takes keywords plus title, company, school, industry and location filters, returning 10 people per page.

How do I test an API before paying?

Use the free tiers and run the same five or ten real inputs through each. Compare field coverage, how nulls are handled and how errors are billed. On InsightSocial, GET /v1/endpoints shows every price for free, and your first 10 qualifying calls cost nothing.