PhantomBuster’s cheapest paid plan costs $56 a month billed annually and includes 20 hours of execution time. Its own documentation puts LinkedIn Auto Connect at roughly 30 seconds to a minute per profile, so those 20 hours are the budget for everything you run in a month, outreach and data collection together.
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 what you actually want is one LinkedIn sequence running safely on one or more accounts, and you would rather the tool held the sending limits than you.
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 1 September 2026.
PhantomBuster is a data platform that also sends
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, and its own filters list Sales Navigator, Google, Instagram, HubSpot, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Yellow Pages, GitHub, Reddit and Slack. Every plan, including the trial, includes an MCP server so automations can be run from an AI assistant.
It also sends. LinkedIn Auto Connect sends invitations with a personalized note, LinkedIn Message Sender messages your connections, and PhantomBuster publishes ready-made outreach workflows that pair a connection request with up to three follow-up messages. Anyone telling you PhantomBuster is only a scraper has not looked at the Phantom list recently.
What it does not sell is a lead database. PhantomBuster’s own pricing FAQ says it does not provide pre-built databases and that you build lists from data you can already see through your own accounts.
Pricing
Four plans, one of them free. The annual figures below are what PhantomBuster shows as the per-month price when you pick annual billing, and it charges the year 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 |
Every plan carries unlimited users, worth saying plainly because much of this category charges per seat. Email credits scale with the plan: 500 a month on Start, 2,500 on Grow, 10,000 on Scale.
The trial runs 14 days with no card required, and exports are capped at 10 rows while it lasts. That cap matters more than it sounds: you can confirm a Phantom does what you expected, but you cannot collect a usable list until you pay.
When the trial ends the workspace drops to a Free plan rather than closing. Free gives you 1 slot and 30 minutes of execution time a month, which is enough to keep a login alive and not much else.
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.
Work the Start plan through. Twenty hours is 1,200 minutes. At PhantomBuster’s own estimate of 30 seconds to a minute per profile for Auto Connect, that is somewhere between 1,200 and 2,400 profiles a month if invitations are the only thing you run. Add a search export, a profile scraper and an email enrichment pass and the same 1,200 minutes covers all of it.
Slots constrain the shape rather than the volume. Start includes five, and PhantomBuster’s published outreach workflows take two each, so one Start plan runs two outreach sequences at once with a slot spare for a scraper.
The rate limits PhantomBuster publishes, and the ones it leaves to you
PhantomBuster documents recommended LinkedIn limits by action and by account type, updated on 20 August 2026. This is more detail than most of the category publishes, and it deserves credit as a fact rather than a compliment.
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.
The important sentence is the caveat underneath. PhantomBuster states that these limits apply to one automation, and that if you run several you should take each tool’s maximum and divide it by the number of automations you are running. It adds that if you turn on email discovery you should halve the figures again, because the automation opens two pages per profile. It also notes that manual and automated actions both count toward the same total, so your own browsing counts.
That arithmetic is correct and honestly published. It is also yours to do, every time you add a Phantom, on every account. Get it wrong and the tool will not stop you, because nothing you bought is a per-account ceiling. You bought hours and slots.
There is a second gap worth knowing about before you write your first message. PhantomBuster’s Auto Connect documentation explains that placeholder tags expand into real text and add to your character count, and that if the message plus the expanded placeholders goes over the limit, the invitation is not sent. The counter is in the corner of the message box for you to watch. A long headline in a placeholder can therefore cost you an invitation, and you find out afterwards.
What we would tell you not to do. Do not buy PhantomBuster on the headline execution hours and plan to fill them with connection requests. Twenty hours would cover well over a thousand invitations a month, while PhantomBuster’s own guidance recommends 10 to 20 a working day and its rate table caps invitations at 100 a week even for a strong account. Buy the hours for the work that consumes hours, which is extraction and enrichment, and judge the outreach on the rate limits instead.
How limits work in Doreach
Doreach bills a connected LinkedIn account rather than an hour of compute, so the ceiling arrives with the account.
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.
On message length we warn at 180 characters rather than at LinkedIn’s cap of 200, and the warning says why: shorten it to leave room for personalization. The merge tag is expanded before you send rather than after, so a long headline shows up as a warning in the editor instead of as an invitation that quietly did not go. 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. Audiences come from your own LinkedIn access through six sources, listed on audience sources. If you want Instagram followers pulled or 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 is a data extraction platform with real outreach attached, priced like infrastructure rather than like a sequencer. If your work spans several platforms and involves collecting and enriching as much as sending, the model fits.
If your work is LinkedIn outreach across one or more accounts, the fit is looser. You are paying for hours and slots to get a capability that the tool then asks you to govern with a spreadsheet of rate limits. That is a reasonable trade for someone who likes building their own process, and a poor one for someone who wanted the guardrails included.
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, shared inbox and lead CRM as an agency running twenty. Current numbers are on pricing, and the comparison page shows how the rest of the category charges.
Work out which budget actually constrains you before you choose. If your bottleneck is how much data you can collect, count hours. If it is how many invitations you can safely send in a week, count invitations, and pick the tool that counts them for you. To see the second shape, connect one account on the 7-day trial and read its weekly limits before you launch anything.
