| Proxycurl | People Data Labs |
|---|---|
| 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. People Data Labs (PDL) does not scrape LinkedIn profiles. They also do not offer a service that scrapes LinkedIn profiles. People Data Labs 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
People Data Labs serves stale data. You are querying a database of pre-crawled cached data when you call People Data Labs API.
Proxycurl API serves data no older than 29 days. See Proxycurl's freshness guarantee here.
| Proxycurl | People Data Labs |
|---|---|
| Serves fresh data no older than 29 days | Serves stale profile data |
Contact Data
People Data Labs 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 | People Data Labs |
|---|---|
| Enrich profiles with personal emails, phone numbers and work emails. | Enrich profiles with personal emails and phone numbers only. |
Search
The one thing that People Data Labs have that Proxycurl does not have or does better is in search. People Data Labs 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 | People Data Labs |
|---|---|
| Does not have search | Has search functionality via API |
Update in 2023: we have Search now!
Pricing
People Data Labs prices around $0.20 per profile retrieval or enrichment. Proxycurl prices it at $0.01 per profile. People Data Labs is ~20x more expensive. This is possibly so because data from People Data Labs can be retrieved from search or enrichment, whereas profiles retrieved from Proxycurl are constrained to just enrichment queries.
| Proxycurl | People Data Labs |
|---|---|
| $0.01 / profile | $0.20 per profile |
Proxycurl VS People Data Labs (PDL)
The biggest strength of People Data Labs 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 People Data Labs.
In other words, use People Data Labs for profile searches and Proxycurl for profile enrichment and refreshes.
