Best Sales Navigator Scraping Tools (2026): Comparison & Reviews

Understanding The Different Types Of Scraping Solutions

There are various ways to scrape Sales Navigator data. Certain tools focus on the scraping of public profiles while others scrape logged-in data ; some tools are cookie-based while others are cookie-less ; finally, there are tools that offer live scraping and some others that give access to cached data.

The following chart shows you how to navigate between these different types of scraping solutions:

Public profiles are profiles that are accessible while not being logged-in. Linkedin makes certain profiles publicly visible, primarily for search engine indexing. Certain data providers, such as Mixrank, Piloterr or Scrapingdog, scrape public profiles only. 

Since 2021-2023, Linkedin has progressively limited the amount of information available on these public profiles. Today, some sections are never exposed publicly, while others may be partially visible or inconsistently displayed. 

Example: 

On this screenshot, you can see that the “Experience & Education” section is redacted on the public profile.

Therefore the scraping of public profiles has become less and less interesting.

Then, when looking at logged-in scraping, one must differentiate between cookie-based and cookie-less scraping. 

Cookie-based Sales Navigator Scrapers

Cookie-based scraping tools require the user to have a Linkedin account with a paid subscription to Sales Navigator. Usually, the tool is a Chrome extension that retrieves the user’s Linkedin session cookie. Then, this cookie is imported into a scraping engine in the cloud, to replay the user’s session and browse profiles “on its behalf”. 

Depending on the technical skills and carefulness of the developing team who has built the scraper, the risk of being detected by Linkedin varies. If your scraping tool is done right, then it should mimic a real user, with a consistent web fingerprint, a clean IP address and human-like behavioural patterns. If your scraping tool has been implemented poorly, it will be perceived as robotic by Linkedin, and your Linkedin account will receive the following warning: 

If you keep using the same poorly-developed scraping tool despite Linkedin’s warnings, your account will be banned, ultimately.  

Besides the quality of the implementation of your scraping tool, you must also stay below a certain usage threshold: your Sales Navigator account should not extract more than 15,000 profiles per day. As a precautionary measure, the Koolkit extension (our partner at Icypeas) limits data collection to 10,000 profiles per day, deliberately staying well below the accepted tolerance threshold.

The Safest Choice: Icypeas

Thanks to both the quality of its implementation and the conservative quotas we enforce, Icypeas is considered the safest cookie-based Sales Navigator scraper.

It is used by top-tier agency owners such as: 

➡️ Jed Mahrle, CEO at Practical Prospecting:

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➡️ Maja Voje, Founder at GTMstrategist:

If you want to give it a try, see this quick demo tour:

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Should You Use Your Own Sales Navigator Account Or A Dedicated One?

That's a very frequent question.

Using your own Sales Nav account - Pros & Cons:

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‍Using a dedicated Sales Nav account - Pros & Cons:

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Now, if you decide to use a dedicated account instead of your own personal Linkedin account, you have two options: either rent/buy accounts, or create one. 

Renting a dedicated account costs 140€/profile/month for a EU profile, and $200/profile/month for a US profile. While there are several rental services out there (Akountify, ProfilePartner, Linkedrent, LinkUnity), we recommend MirrorProfiles as they offer the best quality profiles alongside with the most serious support: 

From there, you'll have to pay an additional $99 for subscribing to Sales Navigator.

You can also buy a Linkedin account on marketplaces such as Accsmarket or Noves-shop. 

Finally, you can create your own dedicated account. It requires some expertise and patience. To subscribe to Sales Navigator, you'll need to grow to +50 connections, complete +80% of your profile sections, and to spend +15 hours on Linkedin (engaging with content, having conversations, browsing). Fresh new accounts cannot subscribe to Sales Navigator.

Pricing, Speed, and Email Enrichment Comparison

Here’s our review of the 6 main cookie-based Sales Navigator scraping tools:

While Vayne does not find emails, it deserves a special mention. Sales Navigator limits searches to 2,500 results per query, so larger searches must be split into smaller batches using additional filters. Vayne simplifies this process by automatically splitting large searches (up to 15,000 results) into 2,500-result batches. Caveat: when doing this automatic splitting, Vayne may occasionally lose a small portion of leads (~5%).

Another characteristic of cookie-based scraping tools is that they are manually operated and cannot be used programmatically. If you want to integrate them into an automated workflow (orchestrated with Make, n8n, Clay or a Python script), you’ll need to use a cookie-less solution.

Cookie-less Sales Navigator Scrapers

Cookie-less solutions come in 2 types: “live scraping” & “databases” (also named “async scraping” or “cached data”).

Live Scrapers

Live scrapers provide ultra-fresh data but they struggle to scale. If you want to retrieve hundreds of thousands of profiles, they will have difficulty supporting your needs. In addition, they are often subject to service interruptions (ranging from a few hours to several days). They answer API calls in 3.5 seconds on average, whereas cached data solutions answer API calls in less than 1.5 seconds, scale with ease, and suffer almost zero downtime.

Another major difference: live scrapers allows you to provide them with Linkedin profile URLs, and they will return the full profile details. They don’t allow you to search for profiles, using search criteria such as location, job title, industry, company headcount, and so on. On the contrary, databases are primarily designed to search for people. 

Certain databases have data obsolescence issues: UpLead, Seamless.ai, Wiza, Cognism, Apollo have multiple users that reported outdated profiles. By contrast, Icypeas offers a highly refreshed lead database. 

First, let’s review 5 major live scrapers for Linkedin data: Scrapin.io, Surfe, Bright Data, Captain Data, Crustdata. There are also multiple providers on the 2 API marketplaces - Apify and RapidAPI.

All these live scrapers are great for small volumes but none is capable of fetching more than 1M profiles per day.

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People Databases

Now, let’s review the cached data solutions.  

Databases differ according to:

➡️ Size (how many profiles?)

➡️ Diversity of their data source (is data coming from Linkedin only or from multiple sources such as Crunchbase, Google Maps, CommonCrawls, OpenCorporates?)

➡️ Data freshness (how frequently profiles are updated?) 

➡️ Data quality (which data fields are normalized? Has the data been altered by unsafe operations? Are the data models consistent over time?)

➡️ Price

Of course, many of the solutions below are much more than mere people databases. They might offer contact data (emails, phone numbers), technographic data, CRM integrations, outbound platform features, AI capabilities, etc. But today, we are evaluating the core aspects of their lead databases: the number and quality of the people profiles. We have split the players in 3 categories: the Find People APIs, the phone-focussed databases and the low-cost databases. 

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Find People APIs

The Find People APIs are built for developers (and vibe-coders) first. Profiles are fetched without contact data.

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Phone-focussed databases

The phone-focussed databases are for salespeople primarily. These databases have a polished graphic interface, making them easy to use for non-technical users. They provide emails and phone numbers. You cannot fetch profiles without contact data. That’s why fetching profiles is much more expensive than it is with Find People APIs.  

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Low-cost databases

The low-cost databases mimick the value proposition of phone-focussed databases but phone numbers are usually either missing or wrong. Often, these databases are built on Apollo scrapers, and their data is largely outdated.  

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Is it legal to scrape Linkedin Sales Navigator? 

No law, whether in the United States or in any European country, prohibits automated data collection as such. However, LinkedIn’s Terms of Service prohibit any form of automated data collection. Scraping Sales Navigator is therefore not illegal, but it does breach the contract (ToS) that every LinkedIn user enters into with LinkedIn when signing up for the platform. As a result, by scraping LinkedIn, you are not exposing yourself to legal proceedings, but you do risk having your LinkedIn account closed.

Additionally, some voices (Guy Marcus, Aaron Levie, Alexis Ohanian, Steven Morell) have spoken out to protest what they view as LinkedIn exercising a form of monopoly. It is undeniable that LinkedIn enjoys an ultra-dominant position in the professional social networking market. Most criticisms focus on the closure of the ecosystem and the self-preferencing given to Microsoft products, which prevents the emergence of new players.

According to this anti-monopoly view, LinkedIn’s restrictive Terms of Service likely violate the EU Digital Markets Act (Articles 6.9 and 6.10), which mandates data portability and prohibits "Gatekeepers" from blocking third-party interoperability. Similarly, Linkedin's ToS may violate the US Sherman Antitrust Act.

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