Introduction

You need LinkedIn data in a spreadsheet — post authors with their titles and companies, engagement numbers on competitor content, or the people posting about your industry. The official LinkedIn API is locked behind partner approval, and most scraping tools charge per row before you've even validated the idea.

The good news: if the data is visible in your browser, you can extract it for free. This guide walks through every free method, then shows step-by-step how to export LinkedIn posts, profiles, and company data to Excel using a free Chrome extension — no API key, no coding, no credit card.

What Counts as "LinkedIn Data"?

Before picking a method, be specific about what you're extracting:

Data type	Examples	Typical use
Posts	Content, author name, author title, company, reactions, comments, shares, date	Content research, social selling, trend analysis
Profiles	Name, headline, location, experience	Recruiting, prospect research
Company pages	Posts, engagement, activity	Competitor monitoring
Engagement	Who reacts and comments, how often	Lead generation, audience research

The most underrated of these is post data. Every LinkedIn post carries the author's name, professional title, and company — which means a feed or company page is effectively a self-updating list of people in your market, complete with job titles, sorted by how actively they engage.

Engagement data goes one level deeper: the LinkedIn Post Likers Scraper exports everyone who reacted to a specific post — name, headline, connection degree, and reaction type — turning a single high-engagement post into a warm prospect list.

Your Free Options, Compared

Option 1: Manual copy-paste

Free, but the math is brutal. Copying 100 posts with author details into a spreadsheet takes hours, formats inconsistently, and you'll do it all again next month. Fine for 5 rows, unworkable for 500.

Option 2: The official LinkedIn API

LinkedIn's API is free in theory but gated behind the Partner Program. Individual developers and small teams are rarely approved, and even approved apps get narrow scopes. For ad-hoc research, this path is a dead end.

Option 3: Paid cloud scrapers

Tools like PhantomBuster or Apify run in the cloud and often ask you to hand over your LinkedIn session cookie — meaning a third-party server logs in as you. Pricing is per-result or per-minute, which adds up fast. We've compared them in detail in our PhantomBuster alternatives and Apify alternatives guides.

Option 4: A free browser extension (this guide)

A Chrome extension reads the data LinkedIn already renders in your browser, in your session. Nothing to code, no cookie to share, and the free tier is genuinely free — InsightSocial lets you scrape and read unlimited posts, and includes 500 export rows per month.

Step-by-Step: Extract LinkedIn Data to Excel for Free

Step 1: Install the extension

Add InsightSocial from the Chrome Web Store. It takes one click and works on Chrome, Edge, Brave, and other Chromium browsers.

Step 2: Open LinkedIn where your data lives

The extension detects three LinkedIn page types automatically:

Your feed (linkedin.com/feed) — posts from your network and followed hashtags
Company pages (linkedin.com/company/...) — everything a company publishes
Profiles (linkedin.com/in/...) — an individual's posts and activity

No URLs to paste and no configuration — open the page and the extension recognizes it.

Step 3: Start the scrape

Click the InsightSocial icon to open the side panel, choose how many posts you want, and hit Start. The extension scrolls the page like a reader would and captures each post as it loads.

Step 4: Export to Excel, CSV, or JSON

When the session finishes, export in one click. Every post row includes:

Field	What you get
Post Content	Full text of the post
Author Name	Who posted it
Author Title	Their professional headline
Company	Where they work
Reactions	Total reaction count
Comments	Comment count
Shares	Share/repost count
Post Date	When it was published
Post URL	Direct link to the post
Media URLs	Attached images or video
Post Type	Text, image, video, article, or repost

That Author Name + Author Title + Company combination is the one people usually pay for. From a single scrape of an industry hashtag feed you get a list of active professionals in that space with their roles and employers — ready for CRM import.

Results also sync to your web dashboard, so you can filter, search, and re-export later from any device.

Three Free Workflows to Steal

1. Build a prospect list from a company's engaged audience

Scrape a competitor's company page posts, export to Excel, and sort by engagement. The authors commenting and posting in that space, with titles and companies attached, are your warm prospect list. Full playbook: LinkedIn Sales Prospecting Guide.

2. Reverse-engineer content that works in your niche

Scrape 200 posts from your feed or a company page, sort by reactions, and read the top 20. Patterns in hooks, length, format, and posting time appear immediately — data beats guessing.

3. Track competitor publishing cadence

Scrape each competitor's company page monthly. Post frequency, formats, engagement trends — all in a spreadsheet you control, at no cost.

Is Extracting LinkedIn Data Legal?

The short version:

Public data, viewed in your own browser, for legitimate research is the defensible end of the spectrum. Courts (notably hiQ v. LinkedIn) have repeatedly declined to treat viewing public web data as unauthorized access.
LinkedIn's Terms of Service prohibit automated data collection, so use judgment: scrape at reading speed, in your own session, for research — not mass harvesting.
Personal data rules still apply. If you're subject to GDPR or similar, exporting people's data for outreach carries obligations regardless of how you collected it.

InsightSocial only captures what your logged-in session can already see, never accesses private data, and performs no actions on your behalf — no auto-connecting, liking, or messaging. Keep volumes reasonable and use the data respectfully.

Free vs Paid: What Do You Actually Get for $0?

Scraping and reading your results are unlimited on the free plan — only exporting is metered, at 1 credit per exported row, with 500 free credits a month. For most research workflows (a few competitor checks, a weekly feed scrape) that's enough to never pay. If you outgrow it, Pro is $95.88/year ($7.99/month) with 10,000 export credits a month — still less than a single hour of most cloud scrapers.

What's Next?

LinkedIn Scrapers overview — all LinkedIn tools in one place
LinkedIn Posts Scraper — the tool used in this guide
LinkedIn Company Scraper — company page extraction
How to Scrape LinkedIn Profiles — profile-focused walkthrough

Conclusion

You don't need API approval or a paid scraping subscription to get LinkedIn data into a spreadsheet. A free Chrome extension, your own browser session, and ten minutes will export posts with author names, titles, companies, and full engagement metrics.

Install the free extension, open your LinkedIn feed, and run your first extraction today.