Free LinkedIn Scraper: 10 Tools Compared on Real Quotas and Limits (2026)

A genuinely free LinkedIn scraper exists in 2026. Several do. What none of them advertise is where the limit sits, and every one of them has one: a daily quota, a binding to your own session cookie, a feature locked behind the paid tier, or a trial clock that runs out.

The useful question is therefore not which tool is free. It is which kind of free matches the work you actually have. A hundred profiles once, for a piece of research, is a completely different problem from two hundred a month, forever, for outbound, and a tool that solves one is often useless for the other.

Below are the ten worth knowing, their real limits rather than their marketing-page limits, the four shapes that "free" takes in this market, and the point where free stops being cheaper than paying.

Here are the 10 free LinkedIn scrapers worth knowing in 2026, with their real (not marketing-page) limits.

The 10 free LinkedIn scrapers in 2026

1. Derrick (free plan)

Limit: 100 credits per month. No time limit and no card required.
What that buys: LinkedIn profile and company enrichment run at 1 credit per row, so 100 credits is 100 enriched profiles a month, every month.
Where it stops: the finders are paid features from the MINI plan at 9 EUR per month, and they are billed per result found (5 credits per email, 150 per phone number), so a row that returns nothing is never charged. Unused credits roll over on paid plans.

It runs in the Google Sheets sidebar rather than as a browser extension on your session, which is the reason it does not put your own LinkedIn account in the loop. The same enrichment is reachable from an MCP client such as Claude or ChatGPT, and from a REST API from the STANDARD plan.

2. Wiza (free plan)

Limit: 20 contacts/month with email enrichment.
Catch: enough for testing, not for ongoing prospection.

3. Skrapp (free plan)

Limit: 100 lookups/month.
Catch: low hit rate on smaller companies - usable for medium/large only.

4. Apollo.io (free tier)

Limit: 10,000 contacts in their DB, 50 email credits/month, 25 mobile credits/month.
Catch: the free credits only reach their pre-indexed database, so a profile created or updated recently is frequently not covered.

5. Lusha (free plan)

Limit: 5 credits/month (email or phone).
Catch: barely usable as free, more like a perpetual trial.

6. Hunter.io (free)

Limit: 25 searches + 50 verifications/month.
Catch: domain-based not profile-based - needs the company website.

7. Snov.io (free trial)

Limit: 50 credits then paid.
Catch: time-limited (7-14 days), not a real free plan.

8. RocketReach (free)

Limit: 5 lookups/month.
Catch: token gesture - designed to push you to paid.

9. Phantombuster (free trial)

Limit: 14-day trial, then ~$59/month minimum.
Catch: not free, just a trial.

10. PhantomBoost / browser extensions (various)

Limit: free with cookie-based scraping, soft cap ~50-100 actions/day.
Catch: real ban risk if you exceed soft cap.

What "free" actually means in this space

4 patterns:

1. Perpetual mini-tier: small monthly quota that never expires (Wiza 20/mo, Derrick 100/mo, Hunter 25/mo). Honest, usable for testing.
2. One-shot trial: 7-14 days then forced upgrade (Snov, Phantombuster). Not really "free", just a trial.
3. Free-with-cookie: extensions that work as long as you stay under the soft cap (most Chrome scrapers). Real ban risk if abused.
4. Open-source libs: zero cost but you pay in maintenance and account risk (covered in our Python article).

The hidden limits to ask about before relying on "free"

1. Credit rollover: do unused credits carry over? Most don't.
2. Bulk workflow: can you process a list of 100 URLs at once, or only one at a time?
3. Export format: CSV/Sheets included or paid feature?
4. API access: usually paid-only, even on otherwise generous free plans.
5. Account ban risk: cookie-based tools transfer the risk to YOUR LinkedIn account.

When a Free LinkedIn Scraper Is Enough, and When to Pay

How to Read a Free LinkedIn Scraper's Quota

Two tools can both advertise "100 free" and give you wildly different amounts of work, because the unit is never the same. Before comparing numbers, resolve three things.

• What counts as one unit. A credit spent per row processed and a credit spent per result returned are not comparable. On a segment with a 50% hit rate, per-result billing does twice the work for the same number.
• Whether the clock resets. A monthly quota that renews is an ongoing capability. A one-time allocation labelled "free" is a trial with better marketing, and it will run out in the middle of the first real project.
• What the quota is attached to. Per account, per seat, or per LinkedIn session. The third is the one that bites: it means the limit follows your personal account rather than the tool.

Once those three are answered, most free plans sort themselves into an obvious order for your specific workflow, and it is rarely the order the comparison tables suggest.

The Free LinkedIn Scraper Risk Nobody Puts on the Pricing Page

This is the part that makes "free" expensive, and it applies to an entire category rather than to individual tools.

Any scraper that works by driving your logged-in browser session is performing those actions as you. LinkedIn sees your account making the requests, at your IP, at whatever rate the tool is configured for. The tool bears none of the consequence. You do, and the consequence scales from a temporary restriction to losing an account with a network you spent years building.

Three signals that a tool sits in this category, whatever the marketing says:

• It asks you to install a browser extension and stay logged in while it runs.
• It talks about a daily cap in actions rather than in records, which is a rate limit on your account, not on their service.
• It gets faster when you upgrade, which usually means the paid tier simply lets you push your own account harder.

The alternative architecture resolves data without your session in the loop at all. It is the reason a sidebar in a spreadsheet behaves differently from an extension on a profile page, and it is worth understanding before you decide which free plan to build a workflow on. Our comparison of LinkedIn scraper tools goes through the architectures in detail, and LinkedIn's actual limits covers what the platform enforces.

What a Free Plan Realistically Gets Done in a Month

Abstract quotas are hard to plan against, so here is the same question in hours of work rather than in credits.

A hundred enriched profiles is a full ICP research pass on a target segment: enough to see the pattern in job titles, to check whether the companies you assumed are the right size actually are, and to decide whether the segment is worth a campaign at all. That is a week of manual work compressed into an afternoon, and it fits inside a renewing free plan.

Two hundred a month is where the arithmetic turns. You can technically get there by combining free plans across several tools, and people do, but the cost moves from money to attention: separate logins, separate export formats, separate quota calendars, and a merge step at the end that has to reconcile three different column layouts. The hour spent on that merge every week is more expensive than the plan you were avoiding.

A thousand a month is not a free-plan workflow under any combination, and treating it as one produces the worst outcome of all: a list assembled from three partial sources, none of them verified, all of them stale in different ways.

Free LinkedIn Scraper Versus Paid: the Real Break-Even

The comparison people run is monthly price against monthly quota, and it is the wrong one, because it prices only the half of the cost that appears on an invoice.

The half that does not appear is time. Running a workflow across three free plans means three logins, three export formats, three quota calendars to track, and a merge step at the end that reconciles column layouts nobody designed to fit together. On a weekly cadence that is comfortably an hour, every week, forever. An hour of a salesperson's week is worth considerably more than a nine euro subscription, and it is worth it every single month rather than once.

The second hidden cost is data quality, and it compounds. Records assembled from several partial sources arrive with different freshness, different formats and no shared notion of what "verified" means. You find out which ones were wrong at send time, from the bounce rate, which is the most expensive place to find out.

So the break-even is not a volume number, it is a repetition number. A one-off research pass, however large, belongs on a free plan: you assemble it once, you use it once, and the merge overhead happens once. Anything you will run again next month belongs on a single tool, even a cheap one, because you are paying the assembly cost every cycle rather than once.

That framing also explains why the free plans that renew monthly are worth more than the ones with a bigger one-time allocation, even when the one-time number looks larger. A renewing quota is a capability you can build a habit on. A one-time allocation is a sample.

Making a Free Plan Go Further

Three habits roughly double what a fixed monthly quota produces, and none of them require paying for anything.

Clean the input before you spend a credit. Malformed URLs, names in a single cell, trailing whitespace: each one returns an empty result on a tool that charges per row. Normalising the input column first is free and it converts wasted credits into results.

Deduplicate against what you already have. Enriching a profile that is already in your CRM is the single most common way a monthly quota disappears without producing anything. A lookup against the existing list costs nothing and is the highest-return step in the whole pipeline.

Enrich the segment, not the list. A free quota spent on the 100 accounts that actually match your ICP beats the same quota spread across 100 rows chosen because they were at the top of the export. Qualify first, enrich second.

If your list already lives in a spreadsheet, exporting LinkedIn data to Google Sheets covers the mechanics, and the cleanup step is exactly what our guide to Google Sheet formulas is for.

Key takeaways

• 10 free LinkedIn scrapers exist in 2026. None are "infinite free" - they all cap somewhere.
• Compare the UNIT before the number: per row processed and per result found are not the same quota, and a one-time allocation is a trial rather than a free plan.
• Derrick's free plan renews every month at 100 credits, with profile and company enrichment at 1 credit per row and no card required.
• Cookie-based extensions are technically free but transfer the ban risk to your LinkedIn account.
• Below 200 profiles/month, you can run a workflow on free tiers alone if you combine 2-3 tools.
• Above 200/month, the time cost of juggling free quotas exceeds the cost of one paid tool.