Bright Data Full Review - Comparisons, Features, Pricing

Most major industry players who employes LinkedIn at scale understand the implications of the HiQ VS LinkedIn lawsuit that scraping public LinkedIn profiles is legal. The US Appeals court further reaffirmed this fact on 22nd May 2022.

So if you're a venture-funded company or a publicly listed company, you should be sticking to scraping and utilizing public LinkedIn data unless you want to be sued. And there are just a few vendors that scrape public LinkedIn profiles.

There is Proxycurl, and there is Bright Data. These are the only two vendors I am aware of that provide the capability to scrape a public LinkedIn profile in real-time. Given that both Proxycurl and Bright Data work exclusively with public LinkedIn profiles, both vendors:

• Are GDPR and CCPA compliant
• Do not require you to bring your LinkedIn accounts
• Will return you data that is legally tested

While both Proxycurl and Bright Data return the same category of data, there are fundamental differences between the two services.

Core Product Differences

Bright Data is a residential proxy provider.
Proxycurl is an enrichment API that fetches fresh data about people and companies from public data sources such as LinkedIn. LinkedIn Profile scraping is just one of the capabilities that Proxycurl offers.
And there lies the fundament differences between Bright Data and Proxycurl -- Bright Data sells proxies while Proxycurl sells an Enrichment API.

Pricing

Bright Data's core business is in renting residential IP addresses. Bright Data figured they could charge more if they built a web crawler service on top of their network of residential IP addresses. And that is exactly what they did with their Data Collector product which features a LinkedIn Scraper. Bright Data's LinkedIn Scraper is priced at $0.05 / LinkedIn profile. Bright Data requires a subscription plan.

Proxycurl pulls a fresh public LinkedIn Profile for $0.01 / profile. Proxycurl has a pay-as-you-go business model.

Data Completeness

The most significant difference between Bright Data and Proxycurl is the exhaustiveness of the data returned.

Both Proxycurl and Bright Data have the same base public LinkedIn profile data because both vendors scrape the same source.

However, Proxycurl has more data. Proxycurl enriches profiles beyond public LinkedIn profile data. By matching data from multiple data sources, Proxycurl offers the following extra data for profiles on people:

• Inferred salary
• Social media account IDs (Github/Facebook/Twitter)
• Gender
• Birth Date
• Skills
• Contact info (Personal emails and mobile numbers)

Ease Of Use

In general, both products are near equivalent because they target the same type of users that are software engineers.
Proxycurl has a well-written API documentation. So, developers who are comfortable with code would prefer Proxycurl.
Bright Data's Data Collector has a user interface to toy around with the tooling, so that is a win for developers who prefer having a web interface to play with the tool before writing code.

API Availability

The other significant difference between Proxycurl and Bright Data is the API performance. Specifically on the success rate of the API. Proxycurl has an API success of 99+%. Bright Data has a success rate of 80%.
However, Bright Data has no rate limit. In contrast, Proxycurl has a rate limit of 300 requests/minute.

Summary: Proxycurl API VS Bright Data's LinkedIn Profile Scraper

Use Proxycurl if your primary use-case is in LinkedIn profile enrichment, mainly because it is cheaper, with no need for a subscription commitment, and it returns many more helpful data points beyond LinkedIn profile data.
Use Bright Data if you are already in their ecosystem and crawling LinkedIn is just one segment of your overall crawling requirements.