Linkedin Outreach Guide

Top 12 Linkedin Prospecting Tools in 2023

Published , Updated 12 mn
Profile picture for Axel Lavergne

Axel Lavergne

Co founder and chief editor

Axel is one of Salesdorado's co-founders. He's also the founder of reviewflowz.com, a review management tool for B2B SaaS companies

LinkedIn is a bit of a prospecting Eldorado for generating B2B leads, but it remains a fairly human social network where poorly targeted messages can really tarnish your company’s reputation.

Hence the importance of choosing your LinkedIn automation tools carefully so that your prospecting remains relevant (for your leads) and effective (for your business). In this vast and growing market, there are different types of tools: all-in-one tools that are not limited to LinkedIn, tools specialized in LinkedIn prospecting, and then simpler tools for scraping or social selling.

We tell you more in this article about the best LinkedIn tools!

What type of LinkedIn automation tool should you choose?

writing linkedin posts

#1 Linkedin prospecting tools

These are the tools we usually think of when we talk about LinkedIn automation tools, especially because they are the most expensive and do the most marketing. The promise is an all-in-one tool that lets you manage complex prospecting campaigns across multiple channels: LinkedIn, email, telephone, …
In real life, it is very heavy and complex to succeed in this kind of campaign, and micro actions often allow to get much more results much faster. And once the message, channel, target set is right, you can move on to these kinds of tools. Tools like LinkedHelper, Waalaxy, LGM, or the lighter Closely come to mind.

#2 Linkedin Automation tools

In addition to extracting data from the social network, these tools are able to interact with LinkedIn to create connections, send messages, etc. We think of tools like Phantombuster, or CaptainData for example. It’s formidable when you know what you’re doing, and these tools have the merit of automating many more things than LinkedIn. On the other hand, if you want to launch complex campaigns with precise reporting and very personalized icebreakers, these tools are a bit light.

#3 Simple Linkedin scraping tools

The aim of scraping tools is to extract data from LinkedIn, so that you can use it as you wish outside LinkedIn. The oldest and best known by far is Dux-Soup, but we can also mention Evaboot for example.

#4 Social selling tools

These tools specialize in producing and promoting content on LinkedIn to generate inbound leads that then contact you on their own. ShieldApp is an analytics tool on your LinkedIn posts for example to do better, LinkedIn pods like Podawaa also help promote your posts (when done right).

#1 Waalaxy: all-in-one LinkedIn prospecting tool

screen waalaxy

Waalaxy, formerly Prospectin, is an extremely powerful prospecting tool because it is not limited to Linkedin. As an extension for Google Chrome, Waalaxy allows you to set up multi-channel prospecting campaigns, especially via email and Twitter.

Among the interesting features is the ability to override the 100 connection requests per week limit imposed by LinkedIn since 2021. You can also run campaigns directly to LinkedIn profiles that interact with your posts or visit your profile.

A plus: you can check the upcoming functional evolutions on the Waalaxy public roadmap.

On the pricing, 4 plans are available:

  • A free plan, with all Linkedin features but limited to 100 Linkedin invitations per week.
  • Pro at 21 euros/month, which offers 280 Linkedin invitations/week.
  • Advanced at 40 euros/month: up to 700 invitations/week, this plan also allows you to synchronize with your CRM and especially offers the possibility to launch campaigns to Linkedin profiles that have interacted with your posts.
  • Business at 64 euros/month: this plan also offers email prospecting features with the email finder function, which finds the emails of Linkedin profiles that interest you.

Note however that their customer support is only available through livechat.

Discover Waalaxy

You can test Waalaxy for free (without even entering your credit card) here.

#2 Captain Data, to automate any LinkedIn action

screen captaindata
Captain Data is an ultra-powerful tool to automate the recovery of all kinds of data from the Internet. Including LinkedIn’s.

The software allows you to extract and collect data from the LinkedIn profiles you are interested in and the companies they work for, but also to find their email addresses thanks to the email finder. The depth of the scraping and data enrichment features is amazing.

Their site offers a wide range of case studies (how to enrich your campaigns with connections from your LinkedIn contacts, etc.) to help you use their tool.

At the pricing level, there are 3 plans:

  • A free plan, available for 14 days and limited to one user.
  • Growth Plan, at $399/month. It offers the automation of 25,000 tasks/month as well as integration with your CRM. It is limited to 5 users.
  • Enterprise Plan, at $2500/month. Intended for companies with more than 50 users of the software, it offers all the options mentioned above but in an unlimited and personalized version.

Since we are not simply using a LinkedIn prospecting solution, the tool is significantly more expensive than its competitors, but this is justified by the wide range of possible automations.

Discover Captain Data
You can test CaptainData for free for 14 days to get an idea of the tool (and this without entering your bank details). For paid plans, you can also request a demo.

Going further

We can only recommend our mini-series written with Captain Data:

#3 ShieldApp, reporting tool for your content performance on Linkedin

screen shieldapp
Shieldapp is a reporting tool specifically designed to analyze the performance of your content and actions on LinkedIn. It’s a kind of Google Analytics but focused only on your LinkedIn data.

The advantage for prospecting is that the tool gives you a lot of information about what works and what doesn’t, which then allows you to expand the reach and engagement of your posts.

ShieldApp pricing is based on 3 offerings:

  • Starter – $6/month for 1 LinkedIn account and basic features: content performance and profile growth.
  • Creator – $12/month for 1 LinkedIn account, all the features of the Solo plan, plus your audience demographics and csv exports.
  • Influencer – $19/month for an unlimited number of LinkedIn accounts, all the features of the Plus plan, plus aggregated data from various LinkedIn accounts and premium support among others.

Discover ShieldApp

ShieldApp offers you a 10-day trial to discover their tool!

#4 Linkedhelper, complete LinkedIn CRM tool

screen linkedhelper
We can only recommend our full review of LinkedHelper, as the tool is so rich in features. I might as well warn you that this is sometimes at the expense of ease of use, but the FAQ and numerous videos can help you get used to the tool.

Note that it is an application to download on your computer, which launches a browser with a whole interface to launch campaigns. The good thing is that everything is done locally (even if the tool manages proxies), which makes all your actions much less suspicious for LinkedIn.

Among the key features, there is of course the automation of all your LinkedIn actions, but also prospecting and contact management functions directly integrated to their CRM: for example, on their application, you can import all your LinkedIn contacts in CSV without difficulty.

Two plans are available:

  • Standard at $15 per month: the plan limits you to 20 LinkedIn invitations and 20 messages per day.
  • Pro at $45/month: the features are the same as for the Standard plan but with unlimited access.

Both of these plans cost less if you take quarterly or even annual subscriptions.

Discover LinkedHelper

Take advantage of a 14-day free trial to discover all the features of LinkedHelper!

#5 Closely, all-in-one prospecting tool to centralize your campaigns

screen closelyhq
Closely is an all-in-one tool for prospecting on LinkedIn. It’s a Chrome extension, but the software claims human intelligence that makes it undetectable by LinkedIn so it can exceed the invitation limit the social network imposes.

The tool is built around 3 key features:

  • Explorer: a tool that allows you to build advanced searches on LinkedIn (the equivalent of Xray search) and to export all contacts in CSV with their email addresses.
  • Campaign creation: You can build email or LinkedIn campaigns, or both. The software offers a few templates and an intuitive editor to easily build your campaign.
  • Inbox: If you’ve ever worked a bit on LinkedIn you know how complicated it is to manage the inbox. Closely allows you to optimize that too, with a well-designed inbox and tags to qualify your messages.

But where the tool is very, very strong is that it allows you to manage a fleet of accounts, and to launch campaigns on each account from the same tool, and the same interface.

The tool is available for free with 150 credits per month. Then it starts at $50/account/month (but prices go down if you commit for more than a month). You can also buy credits directly, which are imperishable.

Discover Closely

You can test the tool for free with the 150 credits offered!

#6 Phantombuster, flexible and easy LinkedIn automation

screen phantombuster
Phantombuster is a very interesting tool in that it doesn’t work like other LinkedIn prospecting solutions: the principle of a phantom is a bit like an API route. You send an input, and it returns an output.

For example, you give the URL of a LinkedIn post, and the phantom returns a list of LinkedIn profiles that have commented on that post.

This allows you to automate a large number of LinkedIn actions, with almost infinite possibilities of customization. What we find particularly compelling about Phantombuster is that by importing all the data into Google Sheets, you can keep control over the automation with human validation processes.

The solution is therefore much more flexible than its competitors, although it also offers ready-made workflows for novices. The downside of this flexibility is that the tool is much slower than other software.

In terms of pricing, PhantomBuster offers 5 packages whose prices vary according to the time of use of the tool as well as the number of users within your organization:

  • Free Forever – Free. 2 hours of execution time per day and 5 slots. Bonus: 50 email credits.
  • Starter – $59/month for 20 hours/month and 5 slots.
  • Pro – $139/month for 80h/month and 15 slots. This plan gives you access to priority customer support.
  • Team – $399/month for 300h/month and 50 slots. In addition to priority customer support, you get a dedicated expert for your account. 10,000 bonus email credits/month.

Discover Phantombuster

Take advantage of a 14-day free trial without entering your credit card details to discover all the features of Phantombuster !

#7 Dux-Soup, to generate B2B lead lists

screen dux-soup
Dux-Soup is a Chrome extension designed for LinkedIn that stands out for its age and therefore its rather advanced understanding of LinkedIn algorithms and their evolution.

What’s more, it’s an ultra-complete LinkedIn prospecting tool that allows you to automate numerous actions, such as retrieving all the profile data resulting from a query, and visiting each of these profiles so that a notification – a sign of your interest – is sent to them.

In its paid version, the tool allows you to export the automatically collected profile data into a CSV file to generate lead lists or to export the notes you have taken. However, we appreciate the low price compared to the functional depth.

In terms of pricing, for individual accounts, you have a free plan that gives you access to basic profile viewing and profile searches. Then there are two plans:

  • Pro-Dux: for 12,99 euros/month, you have access to all the functions of automation of LinkedIn actions and generation of lead lists.
  • Turbo-Dux: for 49 euros/month, in addition to the functions of the Pro-Dux plan, you have access to advanced LinkedIn campaign generation and lead management functions.

Discover Dux-Soup

You can take advantage of the free Dux-Soup map to discover all the possibilities of the tool.

#8 Evaboot, to scrape your Sales Navigator data

screen evaboot
Evaboot is a Chrome extension that leverages the LinkedIn Sales Navigator goldmine to find your prospects’ emails quickly. From your Sales Navigator searches, you can easily generate lead lists in CSV format.

The functions of Evaboot are therefore very simple:

  • Extract and enrich your leads from your search using Sales Navigator filters to obtain the LinkedIn profile URL and company information, including the website URL.
  • Clean up your data and generate a clean file: Evaboot removes duplicates and other special characters that could affect the quality of your data.
  • Filtering: the idea is to detect leads that don’t match your Sales Navigator search to avoid misdirected messages.
  • Find and verify your prospects’ professional emails: thanks to integrations with the main email Finder, Dropcontact or Hunter in particular.

Evaboot’s plans are based on the volume of leads you want to extract from Sales Navigator:

  • Small: 45 euros/month for 2,000 leads per month (and professional emails).
  • Medium: 90 euros/month for 5000 leads and access to priority support.
  • Large: 181 euros/month for 20 000 leads. This plan also offers Sales Navigator coaching.

Discover Evaboot

Evaboot offers a free trial of its plans to get you started!

#9 Mirror Profiles, to boost the volume of your Linkedin campaigns

If you’ve ever struggled with the prospecting limits on your Linkedin account – in particular the 200 invitations / week – MirrorProfiles will be invaluable. MirrorProfiles lets you rent secure, warmed-up Linkedin accounts to increase the scale of your outreach campaigns.

Renting accounts also means that your sales teams don’t have to use their personal Linkedin accounts (and leave with all the leads…): Linkedin profiles belong to the organization, and so do the leads generated by these profiles.

As an added bonus, they’ve developed an add-on called MirrorChat to bring together all the conversations from all your Linkedin accounts in a single interface.

Prices start at €100 / month / Linkedin account, and they also offer a Waalaxy Business subscription for €40 / month (instead of the usual €100). If you want to use English-language accounts, they offer US accounts from $150 / month.

Discover MirrorProfiles

MirrorProfiles starts at €100 / month / Linkedin account with no commitment. Try it out for a month and see what it’s like, or contact them to go straight to scale and take advantage of a sliding-scale rate.

#10 Podawaa, to increase the reach of your Linkedin posts

screen podawa
Podawaa is the Chrome extension developed by the Waalaxy suite that allows you to generate links and comments on your LinkedIn posts.

It is based on “pods”, groups of individuals who organize themselves in order to comment or like certain publications to make them visible in the LinkedIn algorithm. Other tools like Lempod or Alcapod had been created to automate this process, but they were closed by LinkedIn.

The principle is very simple – Podawaa connects you with other LinkedIn users in “pods” to increase the reach of your posts:

  • You can earn credits by commenting or liking LinkedIn posts (3 likes earn 1 credit, 1 comment earns 2 credits).
  • Then, you can spend these credits to get likes or comments (1 like costs 1 credit, and 1 comment costs 5).

The pricing is composed of three plans:

  • Freemium: this plan gives you access to 100 credits per month, which allows you to get 100 likes in total.
  • Pro: for 9.99 euros/month, this plan gives you access to 500 credits per month.
  • Advanced: 24,99 euros/month. Here you have 2000 credits per month, and soon access to the Podawaa dashboard, which you can follow on their public roadmap.

Discover Podawaa

Take advantage of Podawaa’s free trial to test all the features of the tool and earn up to 500 likes on your posts!

#11 Piwaa, to manage your LinkedIn messaging system

screen piwaa
Piwaa is also a tool from the Prospecting suite, which has since migrated to Waalaxy. It complements the LinkedIn messaging, which is not very intuitive.

The goal is to optimize LinkedIn messaging, with features that save you time:

  • Pre-configured answers, with personalization of first and last names.
  • Automated reminders, a note-taking function on prospects
  • Lead tags to easily track their activity on LinkedIn and easily find your conversations
  • Centralized messaging for multiple LinkedIn accounts.

The tool also integrates with your CRM to update your prospect lists.

Piwaa offers 3 price plans:

  • Freemium – Free of charge, you benefit from the ergonomic interface, the programming of reminders and grouped actions in particular.
  • Advanced – $4.99/month/user for Freemium features, plus Zapier and Integromat integrations, intelligent response suggestions and Sales Navigator & Recruiter.
  • Enterprise – 3,99€/month/user (2 users minimum) for advanced features, as well as multi-account management and thus the monitoring of the global performance of your sales team.

Discover Piwaa

You can be part of the Beta testers of the tool and its different versions. This allows you to get 30% off the plans when the Beta trial ends!

#12 Apollo, the best Chrome extension on the market for LinkedIn


Apollo is one of the largest B2B databases in the world with nearly 200 million contacts. For LinkedIn prospecting, this is a particularly successful chrome extension, which allows you from any LinkedIn profile to access a phone number, and an email address.

But the tool doesn’t stop there: you can write your email (using a template or not) directly from the LinkedIn profile of your prospects, with all the information in front of you. For the more experienced, you can also simply add them to your prospecting sequences. The tool manages email, phone, and reminders, and it integrates with all CRM software on the market.

It’s a true all-in-one prospecting platform, accessible from LinkedIn.

At the pricing level, there are 3 plans:

  • A Freemium offer, which gives you access to the LinkedIn extension but is limited to 50 emails/month for prospecting
  • Basic: for $49/month, you get 200 emails per month,
  • Professional: at $99/month, this plan gives you access to an unlimited number of emails and 50 phone numbers.

There is also a customized plan available on request, to adapt the tool to your needs.

Discover Apollo

For paid plans, Apollo offers a 14-day free trial to get an idea of the tool’s features!

Going further

Discover our best articles to optimize your LinkedIn prospecting:

About the author

Profile picture for Axel Lavergne

Axel is one of Salesdorado's co-founders. He's also the founder of reviewflowz.com, a review management tool for B2B SaaS companies