PhantomBuster’s cheapest paid plan costs $56 a month billed annually and includes 20 execution hours each month. Data collection, enrichment and outreach all use that shared allowance.
Execution time is the thing to understand before you look at anything else. PhantomBuster does not charge you per LinkedIn account, per user, or per message sent. It charges for how long its automations spend working and how many of them can run at once.
The short version
Choose PhantomBuster if you want data from several platforms rather than LinkedIn alone, you are comfortable assembling a process out of parts, and you want to pull lists, enrich them and hand them to a CRM.
Consider something else if you want one LinkedIn sequence across several accounts and want the tool to apply weekly sending limits for each account.
We build Doreach, which competes with PhantomBuster for some of the same buyers. Every price, limit and feature below was checked against PhantomBuster’s own pricing page and support centre on 2 September 2026.
PhantomBuster handles data and outreach
PhantomBuster sells automations it calls Phantoms. Each Phantom does one job: export a LinkedIn search, scrape a company page, find email addresses, send a connection request. Workflows chain several Phantoms into a sequence, so one setup can find people who engaged with a post, collect their profiles and push them to a CRM.
The catalogue reaches well past LinkedIn. PhantomBuster states it collects real-time data from over fifteen platforms. Its filters include Sales Navigator, Google, Instagram, HubSpot, Facebook, YouTube, GitHub and Reddit. Every plan can connect its automations to AI assistants through an MCP server.
PhantomBuster also sends LinkedIn invitations and messages. LinkedIn Auto Connect sends invitations with a personalized note. LinkedIn Message Sender contacts your connections. Ready-made outreach workflows pair a connection request with up to three follow-up messages.
PhantomBuster does not sell a lead database. Its pricing FAQ says you build lists from data you can already see through your own accounts.
Pricing
PhantomBuster’s pricing page shows a trial and three paid plans. The annual figures below are monthly equivalents. PhantomBuster charges the full yearly amount in one payment.
| Plan | Billed annually | Per year | Billed monthly | Slots | Execution time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trial | Free for 14 days | 5 | 2 hours total | ||
| Start | $56/mo | $672 | $69/mo | 5 | 20 hours/month |
| Grow | $128/mo | $1,536 | $159/mo | 15 | 80 hours/month |
| Scale | $352/mo | $4,224 | $439/mo | 50 | 300 hours/month |
PhantomBuster’s pricing page advertises unlimited users. Its help centre documents a limit of 100 workspace members. If your team is larger, confirm the current limit with PhantomBuster before buying. Email credits rise with the plan: 500 a month on Start, 2,500 on Grow and 10,000 on Scale.
The trial runs for 14 days and does not require a card. Exports are limited to 10 rows, so you can test an automation but cannot collect a working list.
After the trial, the workspace moves to a Free plan. Free gives you 1 slot and 30 minutes of execution time each month, which is enough for small tests.
Execution time runs out, and your automations stop
Slots are how many automations can run at once. Execution time is how many hours a month they may spend working. The two are separate budgets and you can exhaust either.
PhantomBuster is direct about what happens when the hours are gone: your automations pause until the execution time resets or you upgrade, and no overage charges are applied automatically. Nobody bills you by surprise, and nobody restarts your campaign either.
PhantomBuster estimates about 30 minutes per 1,000 leads for LinkedIn Profile Scraper. It estimates about 12 seconds per page of results for a LinkedIn search export, so 40 pages take about 8 minutes. Both tasks use the same 1,200-minute monthly allowance on Start.
Slots limit how many automations you can run at once. Start includes five slots. PhantomBuster’s published outreach workflows use two slots each, so Start can run two such workflows at once and leave one slot free.
The rate limits PhantomBuster publishes, and the ones it leaves to you
PhantomBuster documents recommended LinkedIn limits by action and account type. It updated the table on 20 August 2026.
Their table splits accounts three ways: a new or infrequently used account under 2,000 connections, a frequently used free account over 5,000 connections, and a frequently used Premium account or one on Sales Navigator Advanced.
| Action | New or infrequent account | Frequent free account | Frequent Premium account |
|---|---|---|---|
| Connection invitations | 50 to 80 per week | 80 to 100 per week | Up to 100 per week |
| Messages | Up to 80 per week | Up to 80 per week | Up to 150 per week |
| Search results exported | 1,000 per day, one launch | 1,000 per day, one launch | 2,500 per day, one launch |
| Follows | 80 per day | 80 per day | 150 per day |
| Comments | 80 per day | 80 per day | 80 per day |
For getting started with invitations, PhantomBuster’s Auto Connect guide recommends around 10 to 20 a working day, spaced across launches.
PhantomBuster says each limit applies to one automation. If you run several automations, divide the maximum by the number you run. If you turn on email discovery, halve the figures again because the automation opens two pages per profile. Manual and automated actions count toward the same total.
PhantomBuster publishes the calculation, but you must repeat it whenever you add another automation or LinkedIn account. PhantomBuster does not enforce one combined sending limit for each account.
Message length needs the same attention. PhantomBuster’s Auto Connect documentation says placeholder tags add to the character count after they expand. If the final message is too long, PhantomBuster does not send the invitation. You must watch the counter in the message box because a long headline can push the message over the limit.
What we would tell you not to do. Do not treat 20 execution hours as 20 hours of safe LinkedIn outreach. PhantomBuster’s rate table recommends 50 to 100 connection requests a week, depending on the account. Choose a plan based on all the extraction, enrichment and outreach you will run. Then use the published rate limits to set your sending volume.
How limits work in Doreach
Doreach charges for each connected LinkedIn account. Each account has its own weekly sending limits.
Connect an account, open Limits, and you get four weekly numbers before you have launched anything: 80 connection requests, 100 messages, 150 profile views and 25 InMails. Each is editable per account, and limits and pacing holds the current defaults. Attach several accounts to one campaign and the prospects are divided between them, each account staying inside its own weekly allowance, so there is no division for you to do when you add the fourth account.
Doreach stops you from saving a connection note longer than 180 characters. That leaves room below LinkedIn’s current 200-character limit. The editor also checks merge-tag syntax and fallbacks. Merge tags and spintax covers the seven tags we support and what each returns.
Actions on the same account are separated by a randomised gap of five to thirty minutes, and campaigns run only inside that account’s working hours. The gap is not adjustable, and we think there is no good reason to send faster. Safety and pacing covers what the scheduler does when an account starts collecting warnings.
Doreach is narrower than PhantomBuster on purpose. There is no scraping, no email finder, no data credits and no AI-written messages. Audiences come from your own LinkedIn and Instagram access, your chats and your CSVs, listed on audience sources. If you want a list enriched with verified emails, we do not do that and PhantomBuster does.
Where it falls short
Nothing enforces your sending ceiling. The rate limits are published guidance you apply. Divide them across automations yourself, halve them for email discovery yourself, and remember your own manual activity counts too.
Assembly is your job. Phantoms are parts. The ready-made workflows help, but running outreach across several accounts means several setups and a plan for keeping them apart.
The trial will not give you a list. Ten rows of export is enough to prove a Phantom runs and not enough to test it against real work.
Session connection needs maintenance. PhantomBuster connects your account through a browser extension or a manually retrieved session cookie, and its documentation warns that an out-of-date browser makes that cookie expire faster.
Costs are not only the hours. Email credits, AI credits and URL finder credits are separate monthly allowances, so heavy enrichment moves you up a plan for the credits rather than for the time.
Verdict
PhantomBuster works well when you collect and enrich data across several platforms. Its execution hours and automation slots suit that kind of work.
If you mainly run LinkedIn outreach, execution hours and slots are less useful than per-account sending limits. PhantomBuster asks you to divide its published limits across your automations. That trade may suit someone who likes building a custom process. It is a poor fit for a team that wants the tool to apply the limits.
Doreach costs $36 per connected LinkedIn account per month on annual billing, or $45 monthly. Team members are free and unlimited, and there is one plan with nothing gated behind a higher one, so a solo founder on one account gets the same audience sources, sequence builder, unified inbox and built-in CRM as an agency running twenty. Current numbers are on pricing, and the comparison page shows how the rest of the category charges.
Decide which limit will affect your work first. If you collect data across several platforms, compare execution hours. If you run LinkedIn outreach, compare weekly sending limits and how each tool applies them. To see how Doreach manages those limits, connect one account on the 7-day trial and review its weekly limits before you launch a campaign.
