PhantomBuster Full Review - Comparisons, Features, Pricing

Phantombuster ranks extremely well for "Professional Social Network Scraper API" on Google, and it is a fair assumption that they are a competent solution for scraping Professional Social Network profiles. That is true because there are some things that Phantombuster can do that Proxycurl API cannot do. For example, PhantomBuster is remarkably remarkable at:

• Bypassing privacy filters to scrape private profiles.
• Fetching contact data listed on Professional Social Network profiles.

PhantomBuster is not without its caveats, though. The most significant disadvantages of PhantomBuster are that:

• You need to bring your own Professional Social Network account.
• You cannot scale Professional Social Network scraping; You are limited to what your Professional Social Network account can scrape.
• Your data cannot be used commercially in a compliant manner.

Differences aside, Proxycurl API and PhantomBuster are both capable of scraping Professional Social Network profiles. The nuances lie in the way the different services scrape Professional Social Network. Let's break down the similarities and differences between Proxycurl API and PhantomBuster in scraping Professional Social Network profiles.

Public VS Private Profiles

The fundamental difference between Proxycurl API and PhantomBuster is that Proxycurl scrapes public Professional Social Network profiles while PhantomBuster scrapes private Professional Social Network profiles. This difference would account for many of the differences we will discuss further.

Let's go deeper and look at how each service works.

Proxycurl API is a 100% managed infrastructure to scrape public Professional Social Network profiles. Proxycurl has stuck to scraping public Professional Social Network profiles despite having less data than private profile data. The best thing about Proxycurl is that it is easy to scrape a Professional Social Network profile. Pass a Professional Social Network profile URL to Proxycurl's Person Profile Endpoint, and you will get structured data of the profile back in less than 3 seconds.

However, unlike PhantomBuster, Proxycurl has stuck to its guns in serving the software developer niche. In addition, Proxycurl is an API product which means it cannot be easily utilized by non-technical users.

On the other side of the spectrum, Phantombuster is a scraper tool that sits on top of your Professional Social Network account to scrape Professional Social Network profiles. In other words, to use PhantomScraper, they will need you to provide Professional Social Network credentials (in the form of a cookie), so they can automate scraping on your account. (Proxycurl does not require a Professional Social Network account from you)

Phantombuster works for small-scale Professional Social Network scraping for personal use-cases. It works for an account executive, and you are looking to automate your Professional Social Network workflow by scraping your connections for a cold email campaign. Still, your account might get blocked because there is a maximum limit to the number of profiles that can be viewed daily.

PhantomBuster might not be the best solution for you for anything more than just hobby-level scraping.

And there lie the biggest problems with PhantomBuster:

• You will be scraping private Professional Social Network profiles with your Professional Social Network account, risking account bans and lawsuits. PhantomBuster is also not solving.
• PhantomBuster is not solving the scaling problem with Professional Social Network scraping. You cannot scrape 1000 Professional Social Network profiles with PhantomBuster. 100 profiles will get your account blocked.

Data Freshness and Completeness

Proxycurl API works with public Professional Social Network profiles, while PhantomBuster works with private Professional Social Network profiles.

Profiles returned by both PhantomBuster and Proxycurl are fresh, with a slight difference.

PhantomBuster scrapes Professional Social Network from your account in real-time, so the profiles returned are fresh.

Proxycurl scrapes public Professional Social Network profiles in real-time, but Proxycurl caches popular profiles for up to 29 days. So to be precise, Proxycurl API returns fresh profiles no older than 29 days old. (80+% of the API requests are scraped in real-time).

Public Professional Social Network profiles have a few missing data points relative to private Professional Social Network profiles. These data points include skills, likes and comments made on Professional Social Network's status updates. You can check out this post for a clear breakdown of the core differences between public Professional Social Network profiles VS private Professional Social Network profiles.

Contact data is not available on public Professional Social Network profiles. Proxycurl compensates for the loss of contact data by matching it with external data sources. With Proxycurl's Contact API, you can enrich Professional Social Network profiles with

• Work email address
• Personal email addresses
• Personal mobile numbers

Proxycurl's Contact API comes with a 33+% match rate for contact data US profiles.

Private Professional Social Network profiles win out on the exhaustiveness of data points. But they lose to public Professional Social Network profiles in terms of reach. As is with any Professional Social Network account, profiles beyond the second level of connection are not accessible and cannot be scraped by PhantomBuster.

Public Professional Social Network profiles do not have a connection-of-connection limitation. What it does have instead is a privacy setting limitation. That means users can disable their public Professional Social Network profile or hide parts of their profile from being shown in their public profile. Around 5% of profiles on Professional Social Network have tweaked their privacy settings to hide parts or all of their profile from their public profile.

Personal email addresses are available on a private Professional Social Network profile if the profile is a first-level connection with the Professional Social Network account used to scrape with PhantomBuster. Phone numbers and work email addresses are not available.

So yes, with PhantomBuster, you get more data points scraped per profile; but not all profiles are accessible. Phantombuster returns email addresses if the target profile is a first-level connection only.

With Proxycurl, most profiles are accessible, but each profile comes back with fewer data points. Proxycurl returns personal emails, work emails and phone numbers enriched from external sources with a 33+% match rate.

GDPR and CCPA Compliance

Public Professional Social Network profiles are publicly available data. These profiles are filtered through a user's privacy settings, and the data shown is then crawled and indexed by major search engines. These search engines serve public Professional Social Network data globally with no limitations because these profiles are freely available. We describe a method by which you can view any public Professional Social Network profile consistently without a Professional Social Network account. Data opted to be made available publicly by users, for most use-cases, is GDPR and CCPA compliant.

Private profile data is shown to an individual on Professional Social Network sans any privacy filter. It comes with permission if and only if the data target is a first-level connection of the user that is scraping the data. It is safe to say that private Professional Social Network data, when scraped, is not GDPR or CCPA compliant.

Legality

Proxycurl scrapes public Professional Social Network profiles only. And this methodology has been rigorously tested in the HiQ VS Professional Social Network lawsuit. Therefore, it is safe to say that as of 13th April 2022, Professional Social Network will lose if they are suing you for scraping public Professional Social Network profiles based on legal precedence.

On the flipside, Mantheos just had their founders and the company sued by Professional Social Network for fraud amongst other charges, in US's federal courts. They are sued because they employed multiple fake Professional Social Network accounts and fraudulently signed the fake accounts for sales navigator trials which Professional Social Network was unable to make any charges on. As of now, it is not clear what the outcome of the lawsuit would be, but I would not bet against Professional Social Network in this case.

API Capability

As advertised on Phantombuster website, it takes 7-8 hours to scrape 1000 Professional Social Network profiles.

Proxycurl API has a rate limit of 300 requests/minute. And that means you need no more than 3.5 minutes to fetch profile data of 1000 Professional Social Network profiles via Proxycurl API.

Ease Of Use

Proxycurl API is an API and is a tool intended for use by software engineers. An individual is expected to possess basic programming knowledge to utilize Proxycurl API.

PhantomBuster advertises a spreadsheet methodology to power their scrapers. As a result, PhantomBuster has a lower barrier of entry to utilize their Professional Social Network Scraping tool.

Pricing

PhantomBuster's basic plan costs ~$0.03 to scrape a profile.

It costs one credit on Proxycurl API to fetch one Professional Social Network profile data. 1 Proxycurl credit costs $0.01 as of 13th April 2022.

Getting Started with Professional Social Network Scraping

Both Proxycurl and PhantomBuster offer a free trial for you to start scraping Professional Social Network. You can sign up for Proxycurl's free trial by registering an account here.

I have tried to be exhaustive and unbiased in evaluating PhantomBuster VS Proxycurl for Professional Social Network scraping. Send me an email at [email protected] if you have more questions about Professional Social Network Profile scraping, and I will do my best to help!