Best LinkedIn Data APIs for Developers: Pricing Compared (2026)

The official LinkedIn API returns a member's name, email, and the ability to post on their behalf. That is the whole surface for most apps. Everything past it, profile enrichment, company intel, jobs, recruiting signals, is served by third-party data APIs, and their prices differ by more than 10x for the same profile lookup.

This is the honest pricing comparison. Seven providers, every number pulled from a live pricing page in July 2026, with SocialCrawl ranked first and argued on its real strengths and real limits. Where a provider hides its price behind a sales call, this post says so instead of inventing one.

The 7 best LinkedIn data APIs at a glance

1. SocialCrawl, best overall: LinkedIn in a unified schema shared across 44 platforms, no per-seat account risk
2. ScrapingDog, cheapest per profile at volume ($40/month for ~4,000 profiles)
3. Bright Data, best enterprise dataset tier (896M+ LinkedIn records)
4. Apify, best pay-per-result marketplace ($4 per 1,000 profiles)
5. Linkedapi, best for account-driven automation (Sales Navigator actions)
6. Coresignal, best aggregated B2B firmographic data
7. NinjaPear, the Proxycurl successor, useful mainly as a churn/legal case study

LinkedIn data API pricing compared

Every figure below was verified live in July 2026. Prices move, so re-check the linked pricing page before you commit budget.

Provider	Entry price	What you get	Free tier	Pricing verified
SocialCrawl	£15 (2,500 credits)	~500 LinkedIn calls (5 credits each)	100 credits, no expiry	July 2026
ScrapingDog	$40/mo (200,000 credits)	~4,000 profiles (50 credits each)	200 credits, no card	July 2026
Bright Data	$250 one-time	100,000 records (~$0.0025/record)	Samples only	July 2026
Apify	$4 / 1,000 profiles	Pay-per-result profile scraper	$5/mo usage credit	July 2026
Linkedapi	$49/seat/mo (annual)	Unlimited actions, one LinkedIn seat	7-day trial	July 2026
Coresignal	$49/mo	250 Collect + 500 Search credits	200+400 credits, 7d	July 2026
NinjaPear	$49/mo (2,500 credits)	~833 profiles (3 credits each)	3-day trial, 10 cr	July 2026

The tiny "LinkedIn data API" search term is a buyer term, not a traffic term. Every visitor is deciding what to build on, so the axis that matters is not the sticker price alone. It is price times account risk times how much normalizing code you write afterward.

1. SocialCrawl: LinkedIn in a unified schema across 44 platforms

Best for: developers who already pull more than one platform, or who want LinkedIn company and profile data without running a logged-in LinkedIn account that can get banned.

SocialCrawl covers LinkedIn across 44 platforms and 358 endpoints behind one API key. The point is not the count. It is that a LinkedIn company or profile call returns the same field names as an Instagram or TikTok call: followers is followers, bio is bio, display_name is display_name. If you already parse one SocialCrawl platform, LinkedIn needs no new parser.

LinkedIn sits in the Advanced credit tier at 5 credits per call, because the upstream is more expensive to serve than a standard social profile. Here is a real, unmodified response from GET /v1/linkedin/company, called with a live dev key in July 2026:

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "author": {
      "id": "1035",
      "username": "microsoft",
      "display_name": "Microsoft",
      "followers": 28663626,
      "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft",
      "location": "Redmond, Washington, US"
    },
    "computed": {
      "language": "en",
      "content_category": "other"
    }
  },
  "credits_used": 5
}

Beyond profile and company, the LinkedIn surface includes people search, company people, posts, and ad-library reads, all in the same envelope. The Visual Explorer lets you see that response shape before writing a line of code, there are free tools built on the same data, and there is an MCP server if an AI agent is the caller.

What we like: one schema across every platform; no LinkedIn account to maintain or get banned; 100 free credits that never expire; MCP and Explorer for agent and no-code use.

What to watch: LinkedIn calls cost 5 credits, not 1, so at pure LinkedIn volume a dedicated scraper like ScrapingDog is cheaper per profile; person-profile depth is narrower than a specialist recruiting-data vendor.

Pricing: Free (100 credits) then £15 for 2,500 credits, £49 for 20,000, £299 for 150,000. Credits never expire. See pricing.

2. ScrapingDog: cheapest LinkedIn profiles at volume

Best for: teams that need raw LinkedIn profile or company scraping and nothing else.

ScrapingDog's Lite plan is $40/month for 200,000 credits, and a LinkedIn profile costs 50 credits (100 if the profile is protected), so roughly 4,000 profiles a month. The $90/month plan lifts that to 1,000,000 credits. There is a free 200-credit trial with no card, enough for about four profiles. The catch: coverage is essentially profile and company. No jobs, no deep recruiting fields, and protected profiles quietly cost double (pricing verified July 2026).

Pricing: $40/mo (200K credits) or $90/mo (1M credits); free 200 credits.

3. Bright Data: the enterprise dataset tier

Best for: high-volume teams buying LinkedIn as a refreshed dataset, not a live per-URL call.

Bright Data sells LinkedIn as datasets: a $250 minimum order buys 100,000 records at about $0.0025 each, across 896M+ records in five datasets (people, company, jobs, posts). Subscription refresh discounts the per-record cost. A separate real-time Scraper API exists for live pulls. There is no free credit block, only sample rows, and the $250 floor plus ISO 27001 / SOC 2 onboarding makes this an enterprise buy, not a weekend prototype (pricing verified July 2026).

Pricing: from $250 one-time (100K records); subscription refresh discounts apply.

4. Apify: pay-per-result marketplace

Best for: developers who want per-result billing and are comfortable with third-party actor variance.

Apify's LinkedIn profile scraper (the curious_coder actor) is $4.00 per 1,000 profiles on a pay-per-result basis, with other LinkedIn actors ranging $3 to $10 per 1,000. The platform free plan gives $5 of monthly usage credit; paid platform access starts around $39/month on top. The trade-off is that each actor is maintained by a different developer, so quality and uptime vary and there is no single SLA across them (pricing verified July 2026).

Pricing: $4 / 1,000 profiles pay-per-result; platform from ~$39/mo.

5. Linkedapi: account-driven automation

Best for: growth and sales teams that specifically need actions taken from a real LinkedIn account (connection requests, Sales Navigator).

Linkedapi is a different category: it drives your own logged-in LinkedIn account through an API, Core at $49/seat/month billed annually (about $69 monthly), Plus at $74/seat adds Sales Navigator actions. One seat is one LinkedIn account, with unlimited actions and connectors for n8n, Make, and MCP. That account-driven model is the strength for automation and the risk for data work: you are operating a real account that LinkedIn can restrict, and it does not do cookieless bulk scraping (pricing verified July 2026).

Pricing: Core $49/seat/mo (annual), Plus $74/seat/mo; 7-day trial.

6. Coresignal: aggregated B2B data

Best for: firmographic and workforce datasets rather than live single-URL lookups.

Coresignal is a B2B data aggregator. Starter is $49/month for at least 250 Collect plus 500 Search credits (roughly $0.13 to $0.20 per record), Pro is $800/month, and Premium is $1,500/month, where per-record cost drops to $0.005 to $0.03. Full datasets start at $1,000. The free trial gives 200 Collect and 400 Search credits for 7 days, no card. It is the right shape for building a company or talent database, less so for reading one profile on demand (pricing verified July 2026).

Pricing: Starter $49/mo, Pro $800/mo, Premium $1,500/mo; datasets from $1,000.

7. NinjaPear: the Proxycurl successor and the cautionary tale

Best for: understanding why LinkedIn data now carries legal and continuity risk.

Proxycurl, for years the default LinkedIn API, shut down in July 2025 after LinkedIn sued its parent company Nubela (filed January 2025). The successor, NinjaPear, positions itself carefully: "We do not scrape LinkedIn," describing itself as public-web aggregation. Starter is $49/month for 2,500 credits ($0.0196 each), a person profile costs 3 credits, and there is a 3-day trial with 10 credits, though the plan carries a 12-month commitment with a cancellation fee. Include it in your evaluation less for the price and more as evidence that a LinkedIn data source can disappear on a lawsuit's timeline (pricing verified July 2026).

Pricing: Starter $49/mo (2,500 credits); 12-month commitment.

Feature matrix: LinkedIn data APIs compared

✓ genuine capability, ✗ absent, ~ partial or conditional.

Provider	Unified schema	No account risk	Jobs / people	Live per-URL	Free tier	Other platforms
SocialCrawl	✓	✓	✓ (search)	✓	✓ 100 cr	✓ 43 more
ScrapingDog	✗	✓	✗	✓	✓ 200 cr	~ (web scraper)
Bright Data	~	✓	✓	~ (dataset)	✗	✓
Apify	✗ (per-actor)	✓	~	✓	~ $5 cr	✓ (actors)
Linkedapi	✗	✗ (your seat)	~	✓	~ trial	✗ LinkedIn only
Coresignal	~	✓	✓	✗ (dataset)	~ trial	~
NinjaPear	✗	✓	~	✓	~ 10 cr	✗ LinkedIn only

Which LinkedIn data API should you choose?

• You already pull more than one social platform → SocialCrawl. One schema, one key, one bill across LinkedIn plus 43 others, and no account to babysit.
• You need pure LinkedIn profiles at the lowest cost → ScrapingDog. About 4,000 profiles for $40, as long as profile-and-company coverage is all you need.
• You are buying a company or talent database at scale → Bright Data or Coresignal. Dataset economics beat per-call pricing past tens of thousands of records.
• You need actions taken from a real account → Linkedapi. Accept the account-restriction risk that comes with account-driven automation.
• You want per-result billing and a specific niche scrape → Apify. Just verify the individual actor's reliability before you build on it.

For the deeper background on what the official API does and does not allow, and how the landscape shifted after Proxycurl, see our LinkedIn API reality check. If you are comparing across every network rather than just LinkedIn, the best social media scraping APIs roundup covers the full field.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best LinkedIn data API in 2026?

For most developers, SocialCrawl, because it returns LinkedIn profiles and company pages in the same unified schema as 43 other platforms, at 5 credits per call, with no logged-in LinkedIn account to get banned. If you need only raw LinkedIn profiles at the lowest per-unit cost, ScrapingDog is cheaper at about 4,000 profiles for $40/month. For dataset-scale buys, Bright Data leads.

How much does a LinkedIn API cost?

It ranges widely. SocialCrawl LinkedIn calls are 5 credits each, so about £0.03 per call on the £15 pack. ScrapingDog is roughly $0.01 per profile at 50 credits on the $40 plan. Apify is $4 per 1,000 profiles. Bright Data datasets are around $0.0025 per record with a $250 minimum. Coresignal and Linkedapi start at $49/month. All figures verified July 2026.

Is there an official LinkedIn data API?

Yes, but it is narrow. The official LinkedIn API grants access to a member's basic profile, email, and posting on their behalf, gated behind partner review. It does not provide bulk profile enrichment, competitor company data, or recruiting-scale access, which is why third-party data APIs exist.

Why did Proxycurl shut down?

Proxycurl closed in July 2025 after LinkedIn filed suit against its parent company, Nubela, in January 2025. Its successor, NinjaPear, describes itself as public-web aggregation rather than a LinkedIn scraper. The episode is why continuity and legal posture now belong in any LinkedIn data API evaluation, not just price.

Which LinkedIn API avoids getting my account banned?

APIs that read public data without operating your logged-in account, SocialCrawl, ScrapingDog, Bright Data, carry no per-seat account risk. Account-driven tools like Linkedapi run through a real LinkedIn seat and can trigger restrictions on that account, which is the trade-off for being able to send connection requests and take Sales Navigator actions.

Can I get LinkedIn jobs and people search through an API?

Yes. SocialCrawl exposes people search alongside company and profile reads. Bright Data and Coresignal both offer jobs and people datasets. ScrapingDog is limited to profile and company. Confirm the exact fields you need against each provider's docs before committing.

What is the cheapest way to test a LinkedIn data API?

SocialCrawl's 100 free credits never expire and cover about 20 LinkedIn calls at 5 credits each, enough to validate the response shape. ScrapingDog offers 200 free credits with no card (about four profiles), and Coresignal gives a 7-day trial with 200 Collect and 400 Search credits. Use a free tier to check coverage before you pay.