What is PhantomBuster? Phantoms, Workflows and your own LinkedIn session
What is PhantomBuster? A no-code automation platform in the cloud. Each Phantom does one job (export a LinkedIn search, scrape profiles, send invitations, find an email); a Workflow chains several Phantoms towards one goal. They run on PhantomBuster's servers, with the session of the accounts you connect, so your computer can be off. The vendor counts "100+ automations & workflows" across "15+ platforms".
What it is not
PhantomBuster does not sell data: it "does not sell, resell, or provide pre-built databases". Every lead comes from a source you point it to, through your own accounts. It does not send emails either: the leads it finds go to a sending tool or a CRM (see below).
Who uses one workspace
The pricing page promises unlimited users; the help centre caps a workspace at 100 members. All of them share the same hours, slots and credits, and up to 100 LinkedIn accounts can be connected to it. The interface exists in English only, in a web browser: there is no mobile app.
PhantomBuster in six lines
- Company
- The Phantom Company (SAS), Paris, founded in 2016
- Founders
- Guillaume Boiret and Martin Tapia
- Platforms
- LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, Google Maps, Instagram, Facebook, X, YouTube, GitHub, Reddit, Slack and Pages Jaunes
- Price
- €69 to €439 a month per workspace, excluding VAT
- Free trial
- 14 days, no card, then a Free plan of 30 minutes a month
- Email sending
- None: leads go to another tool
The PhantomBuster scrapers people search for: LinkedIn profiles, Sales Navigator, Instagram, Google Maps
Scraping is where PhantomBuster earns its name. Most extractors are a single Phantom that occupies 1 slot (Google Maps Search to Contact Data takes 2) and uses execution time while it runs; the plan changes the total of hours, not the speed.
LinkedIn profile scraper and search export
LinkedIn Search Export, LinkedIn Profile Scraper, LinkedIn Company Scraper, LinkedIn Job Scraper, LinkedIn Post Commenter and Liker Scraper and LinkedIn Connections Export. The help centre gives about 1 minute per profile for the Profile Scraper and about 12 minutes for 1,000 leads with the Search Export. It recommends no more than 1,000 search results a day per LinkedIn account.
Sales Navigator scraper
Sales Navigator Search Export and Sales Navigator Profile Scraper, up to 2,500 results a day per account. On these two and the two LinkedIn extractors above, one Phantom can share the work between up to 4 LinkedIn accounts. Leads land on a "LinkedIn Leads" page, capped at 100,000 per organisation.
Instagram profile scraper and commenters extractor
Instagram Profile Scraper, Instagram Post Scraper, Instagram Hashtag Search Export and Instagram Auto Liker. On LinkedIn, the Post Commenter and Liker Scraper collects the people who reacted to a post, yours or a competitor's, a common starting point for warm leads.
Google Maps scraper
Google Maps Search Export and Google Maps Search to Contact Data: 120-200 businesses per search, about 7-8 minutes per 100 results. PhantomBuster advises its built-in proxy for Google Maps and Facebook, and requires a France-based one for the Pages Jaunes. Facebook, X, YouTube, GitHub, Reddit, Slack and the French Pages Jaunes directory have their own Phantoms.
LinkedIn automation in PhantomBuster: the Outreach workflow, step by step
For prospecting, the ready-made LinkedIn Outreach Workflow sends a connection request, then up to 3 follow-up messages to the people who accept. It occupies 2 slots and works with one LinkedIn account: each account needs its own Outreach Workflow.
- Leads in: a LinkedIn Leads list, a profile URL, a Google Sheet, a CSV file (paid plans only), the results of another Phantom or a HubSpot list.
- LinkedIn account: connected through the browser extension or a session cookie; since July 2026, the help centre also documents a connection with the account's email and password.
- The invitation: with or without a note. A free LinkedIn account is limited to 200 characters and 5 personalised invitations a month; Premium allows 300 characters.
- Follow-ups: up to 3, each after a delay of up to 15 days, sent only if the lead accepted and has not replied.
- Pace: 20 invitations a day by default, 10-15 to warm up a new account, during office hours or at random times. PhantomBuster reminds you that LinkedIn allows "up to 100 invites a week", depending on the account.
- Other Phantoms: LinkedIn Auto Connect, LinkedIn Message Sender, Sales Navigator Message Sender and LinkedIn Auto Liker. Auto Connect alone sends invitations without follow-ups and takes 1 slot.
Is PhantomBuster safe? Limits it recommends but does not enforce
PhantomBuster publishes limits per type of account and calls them "recommended, not enforced": the tool will not stop you from going over. The help centre adds two rules: halve these figures when the Phantom also looks for emails (it opens two pages per profile), and divide them by the number of Phantoms running on the same account.
What PhantomBuster recommends
From its help centre, updated in August 2026.
- Invitations: 50-80 a week on a new account, 80-100 on a busy free account, up to 100 on Premium or Sales Navigator (120-150 for some high-trust accounts).
- Messages: up to 80 a week, 150 on a busy Premium account.
- Follows: 80 a day (150 on Premium); comments: 80 a day.
What does not add up
Its blog post on safe limits (July 8, 2026) gives other figures: 15-25 invitations a day, 60-100 a week, and 40-80 messages a day where the help centre says 80 a week. On proxies, PhantomBuster offers a built-in one and accepts your own HTTP proxy; we found nothing about a dedicated proxy per LinkedIn account. Several user reviews report LinkedIn or Instagram warnings even below these limits.
PhantomBuster sends no email: where the leads go next
The help centre says it plainly: "PhantomBuster does not send emails directly". It finds professional emails, then hands the leads over: Phantoms that push LinkedIn searches or profiles into a lemlist campaign, a HubSpot contact sender, Zapier, Make and n8n for everything else. So a PhantomBuster set-up that ends with cold email means a second subscription, priced by that other tool.
Emelia covers both channels in one plan: LinkedIn sequences and cold email from 3 mailboxes on Start, 50 on Grow and unlimited on Scale, with warm-up, sender rotation and a unified inbox. It also scrapes Sales Navigator and LinkedIn searches; what it does not do is extract Google Maps, Instagram or the other platforms PhantomBuster covers.
Google Sheets, HubSpot, Make, Clay: PhantomBuster's integrations and MCP server
- Native: HubSpot, Salesforce and Pipedrive (Salesforce from its Enterprise edition), lemlist, Clay and Google Sheets. A Google Sheet can feed a Phantom its list of leads.
- Automation: Zapier, Make and n8n, plus webhooks and the API.
- MCP server: from Claude or ChatGPT, you can launch, schedule and stop Phantoms, download results and manage leads.
- AI: AI credits are included (10,000, 30,000 or 90,000 a month) for the Phantoms that write messages or enrich profiles. With GPT-3.5, 1 credit covers about 100 tokens; GPT-4o costs 10 credits and GPT-4 30 for the same. Your own OpenAI key only works with the Advanced AI Enricher.
PhantomBuster news: new plan names, higher prices, a new email finder
- Renamed plans: Starter, Pro and Team became Start, Grow and Scale between December 2025 and February 2026, with the same resources.
- Higher prices: €59 → €69 (+17%), €139 → €159 (+14%), €399 → €439 (+10%), in place by January 29, 2026. The exact date is not published.
- Email finder: the built-in search now goes through BetterContact's waterfall of 20+ sources, according to a PhantomBuster blog post of July 2026.
- Referral discount: 10% off for customers who sign up through an affiliate link, since July 13, 2026; new terms of service dated July 9, 2026.
- The company: The Phantom Company, Paris, founded in 2016 by Guillaume Boiret and Martin Tapia, raised €600,000 in 2019 in a round led by OneRagtime to grow in the United States.
Hours and credits or unlimited scraping: PhantomBuster and Emelia for the same leads
PhantomBuster is first a scraping tool, so this is the comparison that matters: extracting leads from LinkedIn or Sales Navigator searches, then finding their emails. PhantomBuster sells it in execution hours (about 12 minutes per 1,000 leads, so about 100,000 leads on Start in theory; LinkedIn's limit of 1,000 search results a day per account, 2,500 with Sales Navigator, comes first) and in email credits spent per attempt. Emelia has no scraping quota on LinkedIn and Sales Navigator from Start and charges only the emails it finds. On this job, Emelia costs less at every volume below.
LinkedIn and Sales Navigator scraping, billed monthly
10,000 leads a month, no emails
500 leads a month, ≈ 300 emails found
2,500 leads a month, ≈ 1,500 emails found
10,000 leads a month, ≈ 6,000 emails found
Excluding VAT, same figures in euros and dollars on both sides; emails found at the 60% rate PhantomBuster considers good. Emelia's credits given once at signup are left out. Rows are computed with searches of at most 2,500 results on both sides; a larger search needs Emelia's segmented scraping, which its plan cards reserve for Grow and Scale. Where PhantomBuster wins: scraping Google Maps, Instagram and the other platforms, which Emelia does not do; one extraction spread over up to 4 LinkedIn accounts; a 14-day trial without a card, then a Free plan; AI credits included (10,000 to 90,000 a month). Yearly prices and a calculator: PhantomBuster pricing.
What PhantomBuster costs: a workspace, not a seat
Start €69, Grow €159, Scale €439 a month, excluding VAT, or €56, €128 and €352 a month billed yearly. PhantomBuster charges the same figure in euros and dollars. The plans differ only by their resources: 20 to 300 execution hours, 5 to 50 slots, 500 to 10,000 email credits a month.
When the hours run out, automations stop until the next billing date: nothing is charged on top, and neither hours nor credits can be bought separately. The full breakdown, the old €59 grid and the trial: PhantomBuster pricing 2026.
Before choosing PhantomBuster: ratings, competitors and the Waalaxy comparison
PhantomBuster is rated 4.5/5 on Capterra (64 reviews) but 3.3/5 on Trustpilot (113 reviews), where 34% of reviews give one star. The tools people compare it with depend on what they used it for: scraping, LinkedIn outreach or finding emails.
PhantomBuster login, API, extension and logo: quick answers
At phantombuster.com/login, with the email address and password of your account. PhantomBuster supports neither single sign-on nor "Sign in with Google".
Yes, on every paid plan, with webhooks and the option to chain Phantoms (Workflows cannot be launched through it). For the trial and the Free plan, the help centre contradicts itself: its API article reserves the API for paid plans, its plans article allows it with 10 rows per call at most. PhantomBuster does not publish a rate limit. There is also an MCP server for Claude and ChatGPT.
It connects your LinkedIn and other sessions to PhantomBuster in one click, and on LinkedIn it adds a panel to save leads (Chrome only) and send them to HubSpot. It also exists for Firefox. It is not needed for Phantoms to run: they run in the cloud. With Emelia, a Sales Navigator export starts on the search page itself: its Chrome extension adds an Export with Emelia button there, which hands your search over to Emelia to extract the leads, with no Phantom to configure (guide).
From the press kit linked at the bottom of phantombuster.com (a zip file of logos).
Yes. The Phantom Company is a SAS based in Paris, founded in 2016. Its terms of service are governed by French law, with the Paris courts as the venue, and it describes itself as a "data processor" under the GDPR.
No. It finds professional emails (BetterContact by default, or your own Hunter, Dropcontact or Snov.io key) but does not send them. Emelia finds the email, charges a credit only when it is found, and sends the sequence.
Emelia is a PhantomBuster competitor. We have tried to stay fair: every figure about PhantomBuster comes from its own website or public review sites.
