PhantomBuster vs Apify: Cost, Limits and Ban Risk
PhantomBuster drives your own logged-in LinkedIn session. You hand it an li_at session cookie, or let its extension read one, and every action runs as you (PhantomBuster support, checked 2026-09-09). Apify runs server-side scrapers against public pages, and its most-used LinkedIn Actor states "No cookies or account required" (apify.com, checked 2026-09-09).
For web scraping, Apify is the cheaper and broader pick: $19/month entry against $69, 70,000+ Actors against a social-only Phantom catalogue, and no exposure of your own LinkedIn account. For connection requests, messages and profile visits, Apify has no equivalent feature at any price. PhantomBuster is the tool for that job.
What we re-checked on 2026-09-09
Four numbers decide most of this comparison. All four were read from the vendors' own pages on 2026-09-09.
| Figure | Live value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Apify Starter price | $19/month, $17 billed annually, $19 of usage included | apify.com/pricing |
| Apify Store size | "70,000+ ready-to-run tools called Actors" | apify.com/store |
| PhantomBuster tiers | Start / Grow / Scale at $69 / $159 / $439 | phantombuster.com |
| PhantomBuster free plan | An ongoing Free plan: 30 min/month, 1 slot, 50 MB | phantombuster.com |
One figure we could not settle: PhantomBuster does not publish a fetchable count of Phantoms. Its catalogue and pricing pages render in JavaScript and returned no text to three fetches on 2026-09-09, so no Phantom count is given here.
Which one is better for web scraping?
Apify, on every axis except LinkedIn outreach. It runs without your credentials, covers sites outside social entirely, costs less at the entry tier, and exports without a row cap. PhantomBuster's advantage is narrow and real: it acts inside your LinkedIn seat, which is the only way to do outbound from it.
| Dimension | Apify | PhantomBuster | Better for scraping |
|---|---|---|---|
| Runs as | Server-side, no login | Your account, via li_at cookie | Apify |
| Catalogue | 70,000+ Actors, any site | Curated Phantoms, almost all social | Apify |
| Entry price | $19/mo (Starter) | $69/mo (Start) | Apify |
| Free tier | $0 + $5 credit/mo, no card | 30 min/mo, exports capped at 10 rows | Apify |
| Billing unit | Results or compute | Execution hours and slots | Apify |
| LinkedIn extraction | Store Actors for profiles, jobs, posts | Sales Navigator and profile Phantoms | Tie |
| Sales Navigator seat data | Not reachable without a login | Exports your own saved searches | PhantomBuster |
| LinkedIn outreach | None | Invitations, messages, visits, sequences | PhantomBuster |
| Beyond social | Maps, e-commerce, SERP, real estate, RAG | Not covered | Apify |
| Custom code | JavaScript and Python Actors | Configuration only | Apify |
What does each one actually cost?
| Tier | Apify | PhantomBuster |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0, $5 credit/month, ongoing | $0, 30 min/month, ongoing |
| Trial | Not applicable | 14 days, 2 run-hours, no card |
| Entry | $19/mo Starter ($17 annual) | $69/mo Start ($56 annual) |
| Middle | $199/mo Scale ($179 annual) | $159/mo Grow ($128 annual) |
| Top published | $999/mo Business ($899 annual) | $439/mo Scale ($352 annual) |
Apify plan prices and included usage from apify.com/pricing, checked 2026-09-09. PhantomBuster prices from the vendor's own pricing explainer, dated 2026-07-21.
Apify's entry plan is $19/month subject to change · verified 2026-09-09 and includes $19 of platform usage. The LinkedIn Profile Scraper charges $4 per 1,000 detailed profiles, or $10 per 1,000 with an email search (apify.com/harvestapi/linkedin-profile-scraper, checked 2026-09-09). That is roughly 4,750 profiles a month inside the included usage, and about 1,250 on the free plan's $5. Treat both as ceilings: under Apify's pay-per-event model the Actor developer chooses whether to pass platform compute on to you (Apify docs). The Apify pricing guide works through the two billing layers in full.
PhantomBuster cannot be converted to that unit. Its plans meter execution time and concurrent automations, not results: Start buys 20 run-hours and 5 slots, Grow 80 hours and 15 slots, Scale 300 hours and 50 slots. How many profiles an hour buys depends on the Phantom and on how far you throttle it to stay under LinkedIn's radar, and PhantomBuster publishes no rate. Anyone quoting you a cost-per-profile for PhantomBuster is guessing.
The free tiers are both too small to finish a job
Apify's free plan is $0 with $5 of platform credit a month and no credit card. The credit expires at the end of the billing cycle rather than rolling over (apify.com/pricing, checked 2026-09-09), and what $5 buys is a real, exportable dataset.
PhantomBuster's Free plan is 30 minutes of execution a month, 1 slot and 50 MB of storage, with exports and API output limited to 10 rows. The 14-day trial raises that to 2 run-hours, 5 slots and 1 GB of storage, needs no card, and keeps the same 10-row cap (phantombuster.com, 2026-07-21). That cap is the one that matters. You can watch a Phantom work, but you cannot pull a usable list out of either free option.
Concurrency: Apify's own sources disagree
Apify's two tier-1 pages give different Free-plan limits. apify.com/pricing lists 5 concurrent Actor runs on Free; docs.apify.com/platform/limits lists 25. Both were checked on 2026-09-09 and both are Apify's own. They agree on every paid tier: 32 on Starter, 128 on Scale, 256 on Business.
Plan a schedule against 5, and confirm the real number on your account's Limits page before you build around it.
Which one puts your LinkedIn account at risk?
PhantomBuster does. Apify's Store Actors do not touch your account at all.
Because a Phantom acts through your li_at cookie, LinkedIn sees the activity as yours. A restriction lands on your profile, not on a scraper you can restart.
PhantomBuster is candid about the ceiling this imposes, which is worth more than most third-party safety advice. Its own 2026 guidance recommends 10 to 15 connection requests a day for accounts under 90 days old (40 to 60 a week in the first month) and 15 to 25 a day for established accounts (60 to 100 a week), and it states that "LinkedIn doesn't publish an official LinkedIn connection request limit or public message limits" (phantombuster.com, dated 2026-07-08). At the top of that range, a $69/month plan is buying you about 100 invitations a week.
Apify's LinkedIn Actors read public pages without a login, so there is no seat to restrict. That removes the account risk, not the legal one. Scraping personal data still sits under GDPR, the CFAA and LinkedIn's terms, and those are separate questions from whether a tool touches your cookie. Is Apify legal and safe covers where the lines currently sit.
If a campaign depends on messaging from one specific seat, price in the cost of losing that seat.
What PhantomBuster does that Apify cannot
Apify has no outreach features. Not fewer: none. No connection requests, no message sequences, no profile visits, no auto-follow. If the job is "send 200 invitations and follow up twice," stop reading and go to PhantomBuster.
It also reaches data Apify cannot. Both LinkedIn and Sales Navigator connections run on your session cookie (PhantomBuster support, checked 2026-09-09), so a Phantom can export a Sales Navigator saved search you built inside your own seat. A cookie-less scraper has no seat and cannot see that search. It works from public profiles and public search instead.
For a sales team whose entire pipeline starts in Sales Navigator and ends in a message, $69 a month for one opinionated tool beats assembling the same thing from Actors, exports and a separate sending tool.
What Apify does that PhantomBuster cannot
Everything that is not a social network. The Apify Store lists 70,000+ ready-to-run Actors (apify.com/store, checked 2026-09-09): Google Maps, Amazon, Shopify, Zillow, Google SERP, news, plus a generic Website Content Crawler for sites nobody has written an Actor for. PhantomBuster is deliberately not that, and does not claim to be.
Apify also lets you write the scraper. Actors are JavaScript or Python containers you version, schedule and call from the REST API, so LinkedIn data becomes one input to a pipeline instead of a CSV somebody downloads on Fridays. Best LinkedIn scrapers compares the specific Actors on price and returned fields, and how to scrape LinkedIn profiles walks through a first run.
If LinkedIn is the only source you will ever need, none of that breadth is worth anything to you.
Can you run both?
Yes, and for teams doing both jobs it is the usual setup. Extract and enrich at volume on Apify, where the unit cost is published and no account is exposed, then hand a short filtered list to PhantomBuster for the sequence. The account risk sits entirely on the PhantomBuster half, so keep the volume low there and put the scale on the extraction side.
Which should you pick?
- LinkedIn data as one input among several, or any target outside social: Apify.
- Outbound sequences sent from a named LinkedIn seat: PhantomBuster. Apify does not compete here.
- Both jobs: run both, with the volume on Apify and the seat activity capped at PhantomBuster's own recommended range.
- Undecided: start on Apify's free plan. $5 of credit extracts roughly 1,250 profiles you can export; PhantomBuster's free plan caps every export at 10 rows.
Create a free Apify account and run a LinkedIn Actor against 100 public profiles before you pay anything. No credit card, and nothing touches your LinkedIn login. Browse the LinkedIn Actors in the Store to see what each one returns.
FAQ
Yes, for anything that is extraction rather than outreach. Apify runs server-side against public pages, lists 70,000+ Actors covering sites outside social, supports custom JavaScript and Python Actors, and starts at $19/month against PhantomBuster's $69 (both checked 2026-09-09). PhantomBuster stays ahead only where a task must run inside your own logged-in LinkedIn session.
Apify Starter is $19/month, or $17 billed annually, and includes $19 of platform usage (apify.com/pricing, 2026-09-09). PhantomBuster Start is $69/month, or $56 billed annually, and includes 20 execution hours and 5 slots (phantombuster.com, 2026-07-21). PhantomBuster renamed its tiers to Start, Grow and Scale; older comparison pages still call them Starter, Pro and Team.
Yes, though it is very small. As of July 2026 PhantomBuster's ongoing Free plan gives 30 minutes of execution a month, 1 slot and 50 MB of storage, with exports and API output capped at 10 rows. A separate 14-day trial raises that to 2 run-hours and 5 slots with no credit card, and keeps the same 10-row export cap. Apify's free plan is $0 with $5 of monthly platform credit and no row cap.
No. Apify has no connection requests, no messaging, no profile visits and no sequence builder, and no Store Actor substitutes for them. It replaces PhantomBuster only on the extraction side: profiles, companies, jobs and posts, at a published per-result price.
PhantomBuster, because it acts through your own session cookie, so LinkedIn attributes the activity to you. PhantomBuster's own 2026 guidance suggests 10 to 15 connection requests a day for accounts under 90 days old and 15 to 25 for established accounts. Apify's LinkedIn Actors use no login, so there is no account to restrict, but the legal questions around scraping personal data apply either way.
Apify, priced per result rather than per execution hour. The LinkedIn Profile Scraper charges $4 per 1,000 detailed profiles, or $10 per 1,000 with an email search (apify.com, 2026-09-09), so the $19 of usage included in Starter covers roughly 4,750 profiles. PhantomBuster meters run-hours and slots instead, and publishes no throughput figure, so no honest per-profile price can be calculated for it.
Yes, and it is a common split. Extract and enrich at volume on Apify, then pass a short filtered list to PhantomBuster for the outreach sequence. Keep the sending volume inside PhantomBuster's recommended daily range, since that half of the workflow is the one carrying your LinkedIn account.
PhantomBuster does not publish a machine-readable count. Its catalogue and pricing pages render in JavaScript and returned no text to three fetches on 2026-09-09, so the 130+ figure repeated across comparison pages could not be verified here. The catalogue is LinkedIn-first, with Instagram, X, Sales Navigator and a set of enrichment steps.