PhantomBuster alternative: LinkedIn profiles without your LinkedIn account

PhantomBuster sells hours, not profiles. Its Profile Scraper's page says it processes 1,000 leads in 30 minutes without email discovery. At that pace, with every hour of a plan spent on profiles, each plan as its pricing page gives it in October 2026 takes:

When the hours run out, its automations pause until they reset or you move up a plan. Its trial is 14 days with 2 hours of execution time, its exports limited to 10 rows. Sign up at datacircle.dev with your work email: a $5 credit, that's 4,000 LinkedIn profiles at $1.25 per 1,000.

Spent on profiles alone, Grow and Scale come to less per 1,000 than Up2Data: past 127,200 profiles a month, Grow's $159 costs less than $1.25 per 1,000, and Scale is $0.73 at 600,000 a month. That's if your LinkedIn accounts can take them.

PhantomBuster runs its automations through your own accounts, its FAQ says. At its recommended 1,500 profiles a day, one LinkedIn account takes 45,000 in a 30-day month. A month of profiles, on the smallest plan whose hours take them:

Datacircle's call needs no LinkedIn account at all. A month you call less, it costs less; a month without calls costs nothing, and the balance waits: funds never expire.

PhantomBuster's Profile Scraper only scrapes the two most recent positions; for the full job history and skills, its page points to its LinkedIn Profile Visitor. Up2Data's answer through Datacircle has positions, the full experience history with each role's dates, and education, skills (the first 20, or every one with with_full_skills_and_endorsements) and languages, at the same $1.25 per 1,000.

You send the provider's own request to api.datacircle.dev, with your Datacircle key. That's the only change. For Up2Data:

curl -X POST "https://api.datacircle.dev/v1/profiles/enrich" \
  -H "Authorization: Token $DATACIRCLE_API_KEY" \
  -H "X-Data-Provider: up2data" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamhgates"}'

Or HarvestAPI's, at $3.70 per 1,000:

curl "https://api.datacircle.dev/linkedin/profile?url=https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamhgates" \
  -H "Authorization: Token $DATACIRCLE_API_KEY" \
  -H "X-Data-Provider: harvestapi"

Every answer carries datacircle_meta: which provider answered, what the call cost, your balance after it. Both providers' requests and answers, field by field: LinkedIn Profile API in the docs. A whole CSV of LinkedIn URLs: get LinkedIn profile data with Python.

Without code: Use it from Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor: add api.datacircle.dev/mcp as an MCP server. Then ask your assistant for the profile behind a URL: the LinkedIn MCP server.

• It finds the profiles: LinkedIn and Sales Navigator search exports, a company's employees, a group's members. Datacircle starts from a URL you already have.
• Emails, with its email credits (500 a month on Start) or a Dropcontact, Hunter or Snov.io key.
• LinkedIn outreach campaigns and AI-written messages, from your own LinkedIn accounts.
• No code: its automations sync to HubSpot and Google Sheets, and it runs on 15+ platforms, X and Instagram among them.

If you prospect and message on LinkedIn without code, that's what PhantomBuster is built for. If you already have the LinkedIn URLs and want each profile as it is today, from your code or your AI assistant, without your LinkedIn account and without a plan, that's Datacircle.

Live. Each request goes to the provider and gets the profile as it is today. A call that fails is not charged, and every answer says what it cost.

Free: 10M+ U.S. B2B leads, as a flat file. Download it at datacircle.dev. Of its 9,521,154 people, 2,790,286 have an email. Add $50 to your account: you get $50 of API PLUS the flat file. Or invite 3 people who sign up. What's in it: the B2B data co-op. Every LinkedIn profile API's price: LinkedIn profile API pricing compared.