| Proxycurl | PeopleDataLabs |
|---|---|
| Serves fresh data no older than 29 days | Serves stale profile data |
| Enrich profiles with personal emails, phone numbers and work emails. | Enrich profiles with personal emails and phone numbers only. |
| Does not have search | Has search functionality via API |
| $0.01 / profile | $0.20 per profile |
Let's get it out of the way. PeopleDataLabs (PDL) does not scrape LinkedIn profiles. They also do not offer a service that scrapes LinkedIn profiles. PeopleDataLabs is not a LinkedIn scraping service. Their core business lies in buying and combining a myriad of datasets from data vendors, packaging them up in an API and upselling the data.
Conversely, Proxycurl API scrapes data live from data sources such as LinkedIn. Proxycurl's core business is selling the capability to fetch fresh enriched data from legal and ethical sources.
That brings me to the next point.
Data Freshness
PeopleDataLabs serves stale data. You are querying a database of pre-crawled cached data when you call PeopleDataLabs API.
Proxycurl API serves data no older than 29 days. See Proxycurl's freshness guarantee here.
| Proxycurl | PeopleDataLabs |
|---|---|
| Serves fresh data no older than 29 days | Serves stale profile data |
Contact Data
PeopleDataLabs strong suit is not in serving fresh data, but in enriching people profiles with contact data. That includes personal emails and phone numbers.
Proxycurl takes it one step further by offering the same plus verified work emails that do not bounce.
| Proxycurl | PeopleDataLabs |
|---|---|
| Enrich profiles with personal emails, phone numbers and work emails. | Enrich profiles with personal emails and phone numbers only. |
Search
The one thing that PeopleDataLabs have that Proxycurl does not have or does better is in search. PeopleDataLabs allow you to query their database through their API.
Proxycurl does not have equivalent or similar solutions. Instead, Proxycurl requires you to implement your search solution by purchasing their profile datasets - LinkDB Snapshot.
| Proxycurl | PeopleDataLabs |
|---|---|
| Does not have search | Has search functionality via API |
Pricing
PeopleDataLabs prices around $0.20 per profile retrieval or enrichment. Proxycurl prices it at $0.01 per profile. PeopleDataLabs is ~20x more expensive. This is possibly so because data from PeopleDataLabs can be retrieved from search or enrichment, whereas profiles retrieved from Proxycurl are constrained to just enrichment queries.
| Proxycurl | PeopleDataLabs |
|---|---|
| $0.01 / profile | $0.20 per profile |
Proxycurl VS PeopleDataLabs (PDL)
The biggest strength of PeopleDataLabs is its search function. You can identify and filter for profiles that match a constraint.
However, if all you require is fresh data and enrichment of profiles, use Proxycurl. Proxycurl is priced way lower than PeopleDataLabs.
In other words, use PeopleDataLabs for profile searches and Proxycurl for profile enrichment and refreshes.
