💡Old post - republished with new contentYou are probably reading this article because you are seeking a solution to fetch fresh professional networks profile data at scale. In this article, I'll introduce and provide a cursory review of the top 5 professional networks scraping API services to help your comparison. For each professional networks Scraper Tool, I will also link you to a detailed review of the service.
Challenges of scraping the platform at scale
Scraping the platform at scale is hard. And for most people, you do not want to do it yourself.
For one, you might want to outsource the risks of scraping user profiles. What risks? Well, we do know that with the hiQ Labs VS the platform case, scraping publicly accessible user profiles is considered legal. But from the Mantheos Pte Ltd VS the platform Corp case, we learned that scraping private user profiles would put you in an unsafe situation.
Another reason you might be seeking a the platform scraping service is that scraping the platform is hard, and you want the data soon. In fact, for most people, you do not want to be building a professional networks scraper unless your time is cheap. There are two primary ways you could go the DIY route. First, there is an illegal way of scraping user profiles with a the platform account. Ignoring that it is not legal, you must bypass Recaptchas, implement a daily rate limit, parse raw API data, etc. Then there are publicly accessible user profiles which are shown to search engines for indexing. First, you must figure out a method to fetch a publicly accessible professional networks profile consistently without being stopped by a the platform authwall. Then you perform tests to verify that the method scales beyond ten profiles within a reasonable time. After that, you have to parse the data yourself.
So it's not easy. And here's the best part: the platform is a moving target. That means whatever scraper you have built today might not work tomorrow. Do you want to maintain a professional networks scraper in perpetuity? Probably not.
Here are the top 5 professional networks Scraper API services that I will be reviewing today. Hopefully, one of them might be useful to you:
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BrightData
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Enrich Layer
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CoreSignal
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People Data Labs
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PhantomBuster