You are probably reading this article because you are seeking a solution to fetch fresh Professional Social Network profile data at scale. In this article, I'll introduce and provide a cursory review of the top 5 Professional Social Network scraping API services to help your comparison. For each Professional Social Network Scraper Tool, I will also link you to a detailed review of the service.
Challenges of scraping Professional Social Network at scale
Scraping Professional Social Network at scale is hard. And for most people, you do not want to do it yourself.
For one, you might want to outsource the risks of scraping Professional Social Network profiles. What risks? Well, we do know that with the [hiQ Labs VS Professional Social Network case](https://nubela.co/blog/is-Professional Social Network-scraping-legal/), scraping publicly accessible Professional Social Network profiles is considered legal. But from the [Mantheos Pte Ltd VS Professional Social Network Corp](https://nubela.co/blog/what-you-should-know-now-that-mantheos-a-Professional Social Network-scraping-service-is-sued-by-Professional Social Network/) case, we learned that scraping private Professional Social Network profiles would put you in an unsafe situation.
Another reason you might be seeking a Professional Social Network scraping service is that scraping Professional Social Network is hard, and you want the data soon. In fact, for most people, you do not want to be building a Professional Social Network scraper unless your time is cheap. There are two primary ways you could go the DIY route. First, there is an illegal way of scraping Professional Social Network profiles with a Professional Social Network account. Ignoring that it is not legal, you must bypass Recaptchas, implement a daily rate limit, parse raw API data, etc. Then there are publicly accessible Professional Social Network profiles which are shown to search engines for indexing. First, you must figure out a method to fetch a publicly accessible Professional Social Network profile consistently without being stopped by a Professional Social Network authwall. Then you perform tests to verify that the method scales beyond ten profiles within a reasonable time. After that, you have to parse the data yourself.
So it's not easy. And here's the best part: Professional Social Network is a moving target. That means whatever scraper you have built today might not work tomorrow. Do you want to maintain a Professional Social Network scraper in perpetuity? Probably not.
Here are the top 5 Professional Social Network Scraper API services that I will be reviewing today. Hopefully, one of them might be useful to you:
- BrightData
- Proxycurl
- CoreSignal
- People Data Labs
- PhantomBuster
Reviews Of The Top 5 Professional Social Network Scraper API Tools
I will be judging these Professional Social Network Scrapers by the following attributes:
- Freshness of data is self-explanatory.
- Richness of data refers to the vastness of data points that will be returned to you.
- Scalability refers to how many profiles you can scrape, and how fast your queries run.
- Pricing refers to the cost per profile.
- Developer friendliness refers to the ease with which a software engineer can use the service.
- Stability refers to how stable the service has been over the years.
- Compliance refers to the legal work done to ensure that the data you fetch from the service is legally compliant.
These are the findings:
| BrightData | Proxycurl | CoreSignal | People Data Labs | PhantomBuster | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Freshness of data | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| Richness of data | ⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| Scalability | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐ |
| Pricing | ⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐ |
| Developer Friendliness | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐ |
| Stability | ⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐ |
| Compliance | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐ | ⭐ |
| Average rating | 3.42/5 |
4.14/5 |
2.71/5 |
3/5 |
2.42/5 |
Now, let's go into the individual reviews.
1. BrightData (3.42/5) ⭐⭐⭐
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 precisely what they did with their Data Collector product which features a Professional Social Network Scraper. Bright Data's Professional Social Network Scraper is priced at $0.05 / Professional Social Network profile. Bright Data requires a subscription plan.
Pros
- Bright Data has a community-maintained scraper. That means you do not have to worry about parsing HTML data. And you can get structured data from Professional Social Network profiles directly.
- The prices are reasonable.
- The company has been around for years and is legally compliant.
Cons
- Bright Data has a community-maintained scraper. Because the parsing code relies on the goodwill of community contributions, if Professional Social Network changes anything on their site, customers will need to await the community to keep the scraper up to date.
- Has an 80% success rate per API call.
For a deeper dive into BrightData, see [our in-depth review on Bright Data's Professional Social Network Profile Scraper](https://nubela.co/blog/proxycurl-api-vs-brightdatas-Professional Social Network-profile-scraper/).
2. Proxycurl (4.14/5) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Proxycurl provides an enrichment API for people and companies. Their API is well-maintained and has comprehensive API documentation.
Pros
- Manages multiple methods to scrape Professional Social Network profiles.
- Has been around since 2014.
- Enriches Professional Social Network profiles with data from external sources.
- Fair cost of $0.009 / profile (depending on which subscription plan you are on).
Cons
- Rate limit of 300 requests/minute.
- Caches profiles for up to 29 days.
Proxycurl focuses on powering products centred around fresh data on people and businesses. Given that it works with large Enterprise customers, It understands the need to stay compliant and stable. Most of the work under the hood is in keeping the service stable as it seeks to be a plumbing infrastructure for companies to fetch fresh data without building a dedicated scraping team.
Proxycurl's API is fast and reliable, and it's well-documented. You will come to Proxycurl for its Professional Social Network scraping service but end up staying for every other API endpoint, such as its Work Email Lookup Endpoint which will fetch verified work email profiles from any Professional Social Network profiles.
3. CoreSignal (3/5) ⭐⭐⭐
CoreSignal's core product is its bulk datasets.
CoreSignal's real-time API does not scrape Professional Social Network profiles in real-time. What it offers is an API service that reads their database and returns cached profiles.
Pros
- Has a dataset that is bigger and richer (For example, CoreSignal has 91M Company Profiles VS Professional Social Network's 17M Company Profiles)
Cons
- Does not scrape Professional Social Network profiles live. Real-time API reads their database.
- Stale data (3-4 months old)
For a deeper dive, see [our in-depth review on CoreSignal Professional Social Network data scraper](https://nubela.co/blog/proxycurl-api-vs-brightdatas-Professional Social Network-profile-scraper/).
4. People Data Labs (2.5/5) ⭐⭐
Let's get it out of the way. People Data Labs (PDL) does not scrape Professional Social Network profiles. They also do not offer a service that scrapes Professional Social Network profiles. People Data Labs is not a Professional Social Network 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.
Pros
- Enrich profiles with extra data points such as personal emails and phone numbers
- Has search functionality via API
Cons
- Serves stale profile data
For a deeper dive, see our in-depth review on People Data Labs.
5. PhantomBuster (2.42/5) ⭐⭐
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 PhantomBuster, you will need to provide Professional Social Network credentials (in the form of a cookie), so they can automate scraping on your account.
PhantomBuster works for small-scale Professional Social Network scraping for personal use cases. It works if you are 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.
Pros
- Scrapes private Professional Social Network profile (if you don't care about the legal liabilities)
- Has UI to read-from/write-to spreadsheets
- 100% API success rate
Cons
- Bring your own Professional Social Network account
- At serious legal risk. See Mantheos's lawsuit
- 7 hours for 1000 profiles
For a deeper dive, see our in-depth review on PhantomBuster Professional Social Network profile scraper.
Best Professional Social Network scraping tools? Your pick
You can probably figure out my opinion based on these ratings. What's your own verdict after reading through the reviews? These Professional Social Network data scrapers might seem like the same on the surface, but digging deeper, you'll see the vast differences in how they work. This is where you need to decide what works best for your unique company's use cases, and take a pick from this list.