PhantomBuster Alternatives: 5 Better Ways to Get Web Data in 2026

The best PhantomBuster alternatives charge you for the data you get, not for hours of run time. Scrape.ly is our top pick: a Store of 568 ready-made scrapers, priced per result (LinkedIn jobs at $1.50 per 1,000), that run without your LinkedIn login and plug into an API and AI agents.

PhantomBuster is built for sales automation, and its plans reflect that: execution hours, automation slots and credit pools, from $69 a month. If what you mostly need is data (job listings, company pages, posts, Google Maps places, profiles), you can pay a lot less. This list compares five alternatives on how they bill, what they cost and what they're best at, with prices checked on 22 October 2026 and a real run from the same day.

Why teams look for PhantomBuster alternatives

The reasons come straight out of PhantomBuster's own help center:

• You pay for time, not results. Plans are sized in execution hours: 20 on Start ($69 a month), 80 on Grow ($159) and 300 on Scale ($439). PhantomBuster's plan guide says its LinkedIn Profile Scraper takes about a minute per profile, so Start's 20 hours cover about 1,200 profiles.
• Three meters, any of which can run out. Besides hours, you're limited by slots (5, 15 or 50; a Workflow takes up to 3) and by separate email, AI, URL Finder and CAPTCHA credits. Email credits are spent per attempt, "even if no match is found."
• The free tiers are for testing only. The Free plan has 30 minutes a month and the 14-day trial 2 hours, and both cap exports and API output at 10 rows.
• Nothing rolls over. Hours and credits reset each billing cycle.
• LinkedIn automations run on your account. PhantomBuster's safety guide explains that a session cookie "lets PhantomBuster act on your behalf while you're logged in" and that "no automation tool can eliminate risk entirely."

Our PhantomBuster pricing breakdown works through what those meters cost per result.

What to look for in a PhantomBuster alternative

If your goal is data rather than outreach, judge alternatives on five things:

1. Price per result. A listed price per job, company or place lets you budget a project in one line.
2. No hour or slot quota. Slow pages and big lists shouldn't eat into a monthly allowance.
3. Public data without your login. Tools that read public pages don't put your own LinkedIn account in the loop.
4. A free tier you can actually use. Full exports on free credit, not 10 rows.
5. An API and an agent path. Results should flow into your code, your sheets and your AI agents.

PhantomBuster alternatives compared

Competitor prices are from each vendor's pricing page on 22 October 2026; PhantomBuster's are from its help center, because its pricing page only loads with JavaScript.

1. Scrape.ly: pay per result, no hour budget

Scrape.ly is a web data platform: a Store of 568 ready-made scrapers called Actors, a cloud runtime that runs them, managed proxies, an API with Python and Node clients, and a hosted MCP server for AI agents. You pick an Actor, fill in its form (or send JSON), and get a dataset you can export as JSON, CSV or Excel.

The same jobs, priced per result. These Store Actors cover what most PhantomBuster users extract:

On top of result fees, a run pays a little platform usage for compute, storage and proxy traffic. There's no hour budget and no slot count: a run that takes longer costs a little more compute, and that's all.

No LinkedIn login. The job, company search and post Actors read public LinkedIn pages. The company search Actor's listing says "No login required", and the post Actor's says "No account and no cookies." Your own account stays out of it.

A real run. On 22 October 2026 we ran the LinkedIn Jobs Scraper's Data engineer jobs in Berlin this week preset. It saved 10 jobs with their company pages in 46 seconds and was charged $0.0181: $0.015 in job fees, $0.0015 of compute, $0.0015 of residential proxy traffic and $0.00005 of storage writes. The LinkedIn jobs tutorial shows the output.

Pricing. The Free plan includes $5 of credit every month with no card, enough for 3,333 LinkedIn jobs in result fees, and its limits are on concurrency and memory, not on exported rows. Paid plans (Starter $19, Scale $199, Business $999 a month) turn their whole price into usable credit and raise concurrency, memory and data retention. Set a maximum charge on any run and it stops when it reaches that amount. Residential proxy traffic costs $4 per GB on Free, down to $2 per GB on Business.

Built for agents and developers. The hosted MCP server at https://api.scrape.ly/mcp works with Claude, Cursor, VS Code, ChatGPT and other MCP clients, so an agent can find an Actor, run it and read the results. Scoped API keys with daily charge limits keep agents in budget. Schedules, webhooks and integrations with Slack, Google Sheets and S3 turn a one-off pull into a feed. And the SDKs keep the Apify SDK API, so most Apify Actors run unchanged.

See the full Scrape.ly vs PhantomBuster comparison.

2. Apify

Apify is a cloud platform and marketplace for Actors, the same model Scrape.ly uses. Its Free plan includes $5 of usage a month, and paid plans start at $19 a month (Starter), then $199 (Scale) and $999 (Business), each with that amount of prepaid usage. Residential proxy traffic costs $8 per GB on Free and Starter, $7.50 on Scale and $7 on Business, according to Apify's pricing page.

Best for: teams that already run their scrapers on Apify. If you're weighing the two, Scrape.ly's residential proxy costs half as much per GB on the entry plans ($4 vs $8), and most Apify Actors and apify-client code run on Scrape.ly with an import and base URL change. See Scrape.ly vs Apify.

3. Bright Data Web Scraper API

Bright Data is a proxy network that also sells scraping APIs. Its Web Scraper API charges per delivered record: $1.50 per 1,000 records pay as you go, or $499 a month for 384,000 records on the Scale plan, then $1.30 per 1,000. A free tier includes 5,000 records a month.

Best for: enterprises that want a single records contract and can commit $499 a month. Smaller jobs pay $1.50 per 1,000 records, which is the same as Scrape.ly's LinkedIn jobs price and more than its post or profile Actors ($1.00 per 1,000).

4. Octoparse

Octoparse is a point-and-click scraping app for the desktop, with cloud runs on paid plans. Its Free plan includes 10 tasks on one device with local extraction and up to 50,000 exported rows a month. Paid plans start at $69 a month for Standard and $249 for Professional, both billed annually, per Octoparse's pricing page.

Best for: non-developers who want to build their own scrapers visually and are happy to commit to a year.

5. Web Scraper

Web Scraper (webscraper.io) builds scrapers as "sitemaps" in a browser extension and runs them in Web Scraper Cloud. Cloud plans are billed annually: Project at $50 a month for 5,000 URL credits and 2 concurrent scrapers, Professional at $100 for 20,000 URL credits, and Scale from $200 a month priced per concurrent scraper. Each comes with a 7-day free trial, per its pricing page.

Best for: people who want to click together a scraper for one site in the browser. You maintain the sitemap when the site changes.

How to switch from PhantomBuster to Scrape.ly

1. List your Phantoms and what each returns. Write down the data, not the automation: "jobs for data engineer in Berlin, weekly", "company pages for these 200 URLs".
2. Find the matching Actor. Search the Store by site. Each Actor page shows its input, output fields and price per result.
3. Run a preset once. Presets are ready-made inputs. Run one on the free credit and compare the fields with your PhantomBuster export.
4. Save it as a task and schedule it. A task stores your input; a schedule runs it daily or weekly.
5. Send the data where it's used. Export to CSV or Excel, push to Google Sheets or S3, or call your own endpoint with a webhook when the run finishes.

From code, the Python client starts a run and waits for it however long it takes (pip install scrapely-client-python, token from Settings → API & Integrations):

import os
from scrapely_client import ScrapelyClient

client = ScrapelyClient(os.environ["SCRAPELY_TOKEN"], api_url="https://api.scrape.ly")

run = client.actor("openrole/linkedin-jobs-scraper").call(
    run_input={"keywords": "data engineer", "location": "Berlin", "distance": 0, "datePosted": "pastWeek", "limitPerSource": 10}
)
print(run.status)  # SUCCEEDED, FAILED, ABORTED or TIMED-OUT
for job in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(job.get("title"), job.get("companyName"))

Or let an AI agent do it. Add the MCP server in Claude Code with claude mcp add --transport http scrapely https://api.scrape.ly/mcp, sign in with /mcp, and ask: "Use scrapely to run openrole/linkedin-jobs-scraper for data engineer jobs in Berlin posted in the past week, 10 jobs, and give me a CSV of title, company and posting date." The MCP docs cover Cursor, VS Code and other clients.

A note on LinkedIn data: LinkedIn's User Agreement (section 8.2) says members may not use software or crawlers "to scrape or copy the Services, including profiles and other data". Scrape.ly Actors collect only publicly available data that any visitor can see. Personal data you store still falls under privacy laws such as the GDPR and CCPA, so collect only what you need. This is general information, not legal advice. Our guide to scraping LinkedIn covers what's public and what isn't.

FAQ

What is the best PhantomBuster alternative?

For data extraction, Scrape.ly. It charges per result instead of per execution hour, its LinkedIn job, company search and post Actors don't need your LinkedIn login, and the same account runs 568 Actors for other sites, from a form, the API or an AI agent.

Is there a free PhantomBuster alternative?

Scrape.ly's Free plan gives you $5 of credit every month with no credit card. At $1.50 per 1,000 LinkedIn jobs, that covers 3,333 jobs in result fees, with full exports.

Can I get LinkedIn data without connecting my account?

Yes, for public data. Scrape.ly's LinkedIn Jobs Scraper, LinkedIn Company Search and LinkedIn Post Scraper read public pages and don't use your login or cookies.

Is Apify a good PhantomBuster alternative?

Apify uses the same Actor model as Scrape.ly and is a solid option. Scrape.ly runs most Apify Actors unchanged and charges $4 per GB for residential proxy traffic on its Free plan, against Apify's $8.

How much cheaper is pay per result than PhantomBuster?

PhantomBuster's Start plan costs $69 a month. The same $69 in Scrape.ly result fees buys 46,000 LinkedIn jobs or 19,166 Google Maps places, plus platform usage.