Proxycurl Alternatives for LinkedIn Scraping in 2025

With Proxycurl shut down by LinkedIn, find the best legally-compliant alternatives for your data needs.
13 min read
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In this article, you will learn:

  • What Proxycurl was and how it operated as a scraping company.
  • Why it was shut down following a federal lawsuit filed by LinkedIn.
  • The legal issues that led to this outcome and what to avoid when selecting alternatives.
  • The best Proxycurl alternatives available on the market today.
  • A summary table of these solutions and why they all offer scraping APIs.

Let’s dive in.

TL;DR: Top Proxycurl Alternatives for LinkedIn Scraping in 2025

  • Bright Data: Industry leader with extensive LinkedIn scraping APIs, high legal credibility (successfully defended web scraping in U.S. courts), and advanced ethical practices. Offers robust proxy infrastructure, GDPR/CCPA compliance, a free trial, and strong user reviews. Most reliable and transparent choice for businesses that need scalable LinkedIn data scraping.
  • Scrapingdog: Simple, affordable LinkedIn scraping APIs with a focus on scraping public data only. No login required. Good user reviews and a generous free trial, but lacks a track record of legal wins or detailed information about ethical standards.
  • Nimble: Cloud-based LinkedIn Scraper API powered by AI and a large proxy network. Focuses on speed and GDPR/CCPA compliance. Offers batch processing and a trust center, but does not have a legal track record or established court victories.

These providers were selected because they only offer LinkedIn scraping via public APIs. None require the use of LinkedIn accounts or fake identities. This approach helps ensure the highest level of compliance and reduces legal risk, compared to tools that automate real user logins or browser activity.

What Was Proxycurl?

Proxycurl was a service that offered fresh web data on people and companies, primarily from LinkedIn. It provided APIs to access detailed people and company profiles, along with enrichment and search capabilities.

In short, Proxycurl was one of the leading LinkedIn web scraping tools, making it easy to collect and structure data for B2B use cases. All of this is in the past tense because Proxycurl was recently shut down. Learn why in the next section!

What Happened Between Proxycurl and LinkedIn?

On January 24, 2025, Sarah Wight, VP of Legal – Litigation, Competition, and Enforcement at LinkedIn, publicly announced that the company had filed a federal lawsuit against Proxycurl and its founder.

The reason was “the unauthorized creation of hundreds of thousands of fake accounts and the scraping of millions of LinkedIn member profiles”, which directly violated LinkedIn’s User Agreement.

Sarah Wight's post on LinkedIn

As a result, a few months later, on July 4, 2025, Proxycurl was officially shut down. This was confirmed in a statement by Steven Goh, CEO of the scraping company. As he explained, there was simply no point in fighting the lawsuit.

Proxycurl’s announcement that it was shutting down

For existing Proxycurl customers, CEO Steven Goh assured that “I have been assisting our existing customers with deboarding Proxycurl as best as I can.” That is helpful for current clients, but it means you will need to find a Proxycurl replacement for LinkedIn web scraping.

So, let’s explore the best Proxycurl alternatives available today.

Legal Aspects to Consider When Evaluating Proxycurl Alternatives

When evaluating scraping tools, it is critical to look beyond features and pricing and closely consider the legal and ethical practices of any provider, especially in light of recent enforcement actions in the space.

Several court rulings in recent years, such as the hiQ Labs vs. LinkedIn case, have found that scraping publicly available, non-authenticated data may in some cases be legitimate, especially where there is a strong public interest in data access. Legal interpretations in this space continue to evolve and may vary by jurisdiction and situation.

Given this climate, it is essential to ensure that any Proxycurl alternative you consider is transparent about its compliance approach and practices. You should be cautious of providers that require you to use real or fake LinkedIn accounts, or that encourage practices which clearly violate platform policies. At the same time, remember that even logged-out scraping of publicly available data may still carry risks.

Neglecting proper legal due diligence is not just risky. It can have operational, reputational, and financial consequences. A solution that does not prioritize compliance can result in forced disruptions, wasted integration efforts, and potential legal exposure. Make sure any LinkedIn data provider you work with understands these nuances and operates within a clear, well-documented legal framework.

If you are unsure, consult your own legal team before moving forward with any LinkedIn scraping solution or provider.

Top 3 Alternatives to Proxycurl for LinkedIn Web Scraping Now That It No Longer Exists

There are many LinkedIn scraping solutions online that could serve as strong alternatives to Proxycurl. To decide which one is the best fit for your needs, these are the main aspects to evaluate:

  • Ease of replacement: How complex it is to swap out your existing Proxycurl scraping workflow for this solution.
  • Main features: The core capabilities and functionalities the tool provides.
  • Legality: Look for a provider that demonstrates clear legal compliance not just through claims on their own blog (for example, as Proxycurl did in the past), but also through transparency about data sources and compliance approach.
  • Ethical practices: Evidence of ethical standards applied by the Proxycurl alternative in how it approaches LinkedIn data scraping.
  • Free trial: Whether the tool offers a trial period so you can test all its features before committing to a paid plan.
  • Pricing: The available plans and overall cost.
  • User reviews: Feedback and ratings from platforms like Trustpilot, G2, or Capterra.

With these criteria in mind, let’s now look at the top three Proxycurl alternatives!

1. Bright Data

Bright Data LinkedIn Scraper

Bright Data ranks #1 among the best scraping tools. One of its main advantages over other providers is that the company controls one of the largest, fastest, and most reliable proxy networks in the world. This network includes millions of ethically sourced residential proxies, which are ideal for supporting web scraping workflows, including LinkedIn scraping.

More importantly, compared to other Proxycurl alternatives on this list, Bright Data is the only provider with a positive legal record. In 2024, it won court cases against Meta and X, becoming the first web scraping company to be thoroughly examined—and prevail—in U.S. courts.

When it comes to LinkedIn scraping, Bright Data offers multiple specialized tools:

  • LinkedIn Scraper API: A cloud-based service that simplifies extracting public web data from LinkedIn, parsing it into structured formats. It enables efficient, scalable data collection tailored for businesses needing seamless access to valuable web data.
  • LinkedIn Profile Scraper: An API dedicated to scraping public LinkedIn profiles. It retrieves detailed data such as name, summary, education, interests, company, job title, experience, and more.
  • LinkedIn Company Scraper: A scraping API to get public data from LinkedIn company pages. It gathers information such as company name, industry, location, company size, and more.

The above solutions share a set of advanced features designed to legally and ethically extract public data from LinkedIn pages—without requiring any LinkedIn user credentials.

For users who prefer not to handle web scraping themselves, Bright Data provides an extensive LinkedIn dataset.

Ease of replacement: High, since Bright Data’s LinkedIn Scraper can be called via API in a similar way to Proxycurl.

Main features:

  • 99.99% uptime
  • Automatic IP and user agent rotation
  • Native integration with a proxy network of 150M+ IPs in 195 countries
  • HTTP header customization
  • LinkedIn data discovery capabilities
  • Bulk request handling, up to 5k URLs
  • Data validation features
  • Structured data in JSON, NDJSON, or CSV files through Webhook or API delivery
  • Unlimited scalability
  • GDPR and CCPA compliant
  • 24/7 live support
  • No-code integration available
  • Access to rich LinkedIn datasets (available at an additional cost)

Legality:

  • In 2024, Bright Data won court cases against Meta and X, becoming the first web scraping company to be thoroughly examined in U.S. courts—and win twice. This underscores the legal legitimacy of its web scraping practices.
  • Bright Data’s privacy practices comply with data protection laws, including EU data protection regulatory framework, GDPR, and the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA).
  • Maintains a dedicated Legal & Governance page to provide high transparency around compliance and oversight.

Ethical practices:

  • Bright Data’s Trust Center is one of the largest and most transparent trust centers in the industry, with dedicated ethical practices that support their customers, partners, and even the evolution of the web as a whole. Bright Data is widely recognized for leading the way in setting standards for ethical web data collection.
  • The company is listed in the CSA STAR Registry and compliant with GDPR, ISO 27001, SOC 2, SOC 3, and many other certifications and regulatory standards.
  • Bright Data’s network products are trusted and whitelisted by major antivirus providers.
  • Supports the Bright Initiative, a global program that uses public web data to drive positive change. Through this initiative, Bright Data empowers leading organizations, academic institutions, and governments to responsibly access and utilize public web data for the greater good.

Free trial: Yes, on all plans

Pricing: Starts from $0.0015/record

User reviews:

  • Trustpilot: 4.4/5 (851 reviews)
  • G2: 4.6/5 (247 reviews)
  • Capterra: 4.7/5 (66 reviews)

2. Scrapingdog

LinkedIn Profile Scraper API by Scrapingdog

Scrapingdog sells APIs for web scraping, based on simplicity and efficiency. Its LinkedIn scraping suite includes:

  • LinkedIn Jobs API: Scrape LinkedIn job listings in specific locations or extract detailed data from individual job posts.
  • LinkedIn Profile Scraper API: Access real-time data such as name, location, followers, company size, and more. This API allows large-scale scraping of both company and individual profiles.

The provider has received numerous positive reviews on Trustpilot. Scrapingdog assures that it focuses exclusively on scraping publicly available data, avoiding any login-required information. Still, it lacks a reliable track record in legal matters, and its website provides limited information about its ethical scraping practices.

Ease of replacement: High, as it exposes separate scraping APIs for LinkedIn, just like Proxycurl used to.

Main features:

  • Advanced filtering
  • Seamless pagination management
  • Batch scraping
  • Automatic IP rotation
  • Structured JSON output

Legality:

  • No track record of successful court cases or comparable legal matters.
  • In a blog post, Scrapingdog states, “We don’t use your account or any LinkedIn account to scrape data from the platform.” This is supported by the fact that no session cookie (which is used to simulate a logged-in session) is required to use their scraping APIs.

Ethical practices:

  • GDPR compliant.
  • No additional information or dedicated trust center detailing their approach to ethical practices.

Free trial: Yes, 30-day free trial

Pricing:

  • Lite: $40/mo for 40000 LinkedIn job pages / 4,000 LinkedIn profiles
  • Standard: $90/mo for 200,000 LinkedIn job pages / 20,000 LinkedIn profiles
  • Pro: $200/mo for 600,000 LinkedIn job pages / 60,000 LinkedIn profiles
  • Premium: $350+/mo for 1,200,000 LinkedIn job pages / 120,000 LinkedIn profiles

User reviews:

  • Trustpilot: 4.8/5 (567 reviews)
  • G2: 3.8/5 (4 reviews)
  • Capterra: — (0 reviews)

3. Nimble

Nimble's LinkedIn Scraper

Nimble is an online platform focused on simplifying web data collection workflows. As a Proxycurl alternative, it offers a LinkedIn Scraper API built to extract actionable insights from LinkedIn’s publicly available pages.

This scraping solution is powered by AI and supported by a large proxy network with millions of IP addresses. Just like Proxycurl’s endpoints, Nimble’s LinkedIn Scraper API integrates with any HTTP client across programming languages.

The API prioritizes speed, reliability, and compliance with GDPR and CCPA regulations. However, personalized support is only guaranteed with the Professional plan, which starts at $1,500. Additionally, the company has no record of winning court cases against known platforms.

Ease of replacement: High, since these solutions operate as a scraping API (like Proxycurl).

Main features:

  • Support for scalable batch processing
  • Management dashboard platform
  • Detailed dev documentation

Legality:

  • No history of winning court cases or similar legal disputes.
  • The website clearly states that the products focus only on scraping “public web data,” which implies they avoid data behind login pages.

Ethical practices:

  • Via the Nimble Trust Center, the company ensures that all browser activity complies with strict enterprise governance standards, regulatory requirements, and data collection best practices.

Free trial: Yes

Pricing:

  • Pay As You Go: $3/CPM
  • Essential: $600 for 600 credits ($2.1/CPM)
  • Advanced: $1,500 for 1.5k credits ($1.6/CPM)
  • Professional: $3,000 for 3k credits ($1.4/CPM)

User reviews:

  • Trustpilot: 4.1/5 (5 reviews)
  • G2: 5.0/5 (11 reviews)
  • Capterra: — (0 reviews)

Best Proxycurl Alternatives: Summary Table

Take a look at the best Proxycurl alternatives for scraping LinkedIn in the summary table below:

Aspect / Proxycurl Alternative Bright Data Scrapingdog Nimble
Ease of Replacement High (via API) High (via API) High (via API)
Features Many Some Few
Relies on LinkedIn Accounts
Scrapes Only Public Data ✔️ ✔️ ✔️
Legality / Security Won court cases against Meta and X No public legal track record No record of court victories
Ethical Practices Very high Basic Good
Pay-as-you-go Plan ✔️ ✔️
Free Trial ✔️ ✔️ ✔️
Pricing Starts at $0.0015 per record Starts from $40+ per month Starts from $3 per CPM
User Reviews 4.5+/5 (1,000+ reviews) 4.5+/5 (500+ reviews) 4.0+/5 (10+ reviews)

Why Only Providers Offering LinkedIn Scraping APIs Were Considered

Below are the two main reasons why all the Proxycurl alternatives for LinkedIn scraping mentioned above have products that are API-based:

  1. Proxycurl itself was based on APIs, so it makes the most sense to replace it with a similar solution. By switching to another API provider, you can more easily swap out Proxycurl API calls for those of Bright Data or any other alternative. This is far simpler than setting up a completely different type of tool, such as browser extensions or desktop automation software.
  2. LinkedIn-specific browser extensions and desktop/cloud automation tools typically require you to log in with your personal LinkedIn account (e.g., that is the case with Scrupp, Skrapp, PhantomBuster, LinkedIn Helper, HeyReach, Dripify, and many others). These solutions control your browser session to automate actions and extract data. This seems to be directly violating LinkedIn’s policies against members using extensions to automate their behavior.

In summary, LinkedIn scraping API providers that have a clear track record of targeting only public data and not using fake accounts (unlike how Proxycurl used to operate) are by far the safest, most reliable, trusted Proxycurl replacements for long-term use.

Conclusion

In this article, you saw what Proxycurl was and why its misuse of LinkedIn’s User Agreement led to a federal lawsuit and eventual shutdown. We explored these reasons in detail so you can choose a Proxycurl alternative that avoids similar issues. This helps you save time and effort building an integration that might be discontinued due to illegal practices.

As you learned here, the best approach is to choose a provider offering a LinkedIn web scraping API. This must access only publicly available data, require no LinkedIn login, and have a proven track record of ethical and legal compliance.

Specifically, Bright Data’s LinkedIn Scraper stands out as the leading Proxycurl alternative. It offers similar data access but with more functionality. Also, most importantly, it operates legally.

If you do not need to scrape LinkedIn yourself but just want the data, consider exploring our ready-to-use LinkedIn datasets.

Create a Bright Data account today for free and start testing our ethical LinkedIn scraping solutions!

Antonello Zanini

Technical Writer

5.5 years experience

Antonello Zanini is a technical writer, editor, and software engineer with 5M+ views. Expert in technical content strategy, web development, and project management.

Expertise
Web Development Web Scraping AI Integration