Apify LinkedIn Scraper: Which Actor Does What

Apify is a marketplace, so an Apify LinkedIn scraper is whichever actor you picked. The store carries a separate one for jobs, profiles, companies, posts and Sales Navigator, each written by a different author and priced per result. Some need no LinkedIn account at all. Others ask you to paste your own session cookies.

What an Apify LinkedIn scraper is

An Apify LinkedIn scraper is not one product. Apify is a marketplace where, in its own documentation’s words, “anyone is welcome to publish Actors in the store”, and a search of that store on 5 September 2026 returns 1,051 whose title or name says LinkedIn, from 331 separate accounts. Each one has its own author, its own price and its own requirements.

An actor is a hosted program. You give it an input, Apify runs it on its own infrastructure, and you collect a dataset. The platform supplies the servers, the proxies, the scheduler, the storage and an API for starting runs, and there is a platform MCP server at mcp.apify.com that lets an AI client “discover and run Actors from Apify Store”. What the platform does not supply is the scraping logic for LinkedIn. That belongs to whoever published the actor.

The spread inside those 1,051 listings is the part a search result cannot show you. The busiest authors have shelves of their own: 41 LinkedIn actors under one account, 32 under another, then 25, 22 and 20. Of the whole set, 1,024 charge per event and 27 are free to run, and 58 carried Apify’s “under maintenance” flag on the day we counted.

So the useful question is never whether Apify can scrape LinkedIn. It is which actor, written by whom, wanting what from you.

The five jobs, and the actors that do them

The store’s LinkedIn actors cluster into five jobs: job listings, profiles, companies, posts and Sales Navigator. Each has several competing actors, and the differences that matter are who wrote it, what it charges for one result, and whether it asks for your own LinkedIn session. The table reads twelve of them side by side.

Read the table down its columns and the marketplace shows through. Two actors doing the same job can price the same result at $4 and at $10, and disagree on whether your account is involved at all. Job listings are the least entangled of the five lanes, because LinkedIn serves job posts to logged-out visitors, and it is priced accordingly at about $1 per 1,000. Sales Navigator is the opposite corner: it sits behind a paid seat, so the actors that reach it work through a session that belongs to somebody.

Store users is Apify’s own count of accounts that have run the actor, and it is the closest thing to a popularity signal the store publishes. It says nothing about whether the actor still works today, which is the maintenance question further down.

Which ones run on your own account

Some do and some do not, and the actor page says which. The high-volume profile, company, post and jobs actors advertise that they need no LinkedIn account at all. The cookie ones ask you to export your session from the browser, which means the run happens as you, on your account, at your risk.

The authors of the no-cookie actors sell that as the feature, and two of them say why in their own copy. HarvestAPI’s profile scraper lists as its first benefit “No cookies or account required: Access profile data without sharing cookies or risking account restrictions”. Apimaestro’s posts scraper is blunter: “No account needed: Don’t risk your account security by sharing your cookies and don’t get your account restricted or banned!”

The cookie actors are equally direct about what they need. curious_coder/linkedin-profile-scraper opens its instructions with “You need to pass linkedin cookies to this actor to use the existing session to access profiles page and perform scraping”, then walks you through installing a cookie-export extension, logging in, and pasting the export into the actor input.

Four things follow from that.

• The daily ceiling is the author’s guess, and it can contradict itself on one page. The same actor’s store description carries “(⚠️ Warning: Viewing/scraping more than 300-400 profiles per day will result in Linkedin account warning)” while its instructions say “Don’t scrape more than 500 profiles per day from a single Linkedin account. If you exceed this number you will be logged out and get warning from Linkedin.” Both were live on 5 September 2026.
• The same author can ship both kinds. HarvestAPI’s profile, company and post actors advertise no cookies, and its Sales Navigator lead scraper names cookies in its own slug, linkedin-sales-navigator-lead-search-cookie. Picking an author does not pick an exposure.
• Sales Navigator is where cookies are hardest to avoid. The search sits behind a paid seat, so an actor reaching it works through somebody’s logged-in session. One competing listing on the same search states the prerequisite plainly: “Requires a Sales Navigator subscription.”
• A pasted cookie is a live credential. It carries the session, so anything done with it is done as the account holder, inside whatever limits that account already has. What LinkedIn does about pacing is its own subject, and our page on the commercial use limit covers the search side of it.

None of that makes the no-cookie actors invisible to LinkedIn. It moves the exposure off your account and onto whatever infrastructure the author runs, which is a real difference to you and no difference at all to LinkedIn.

What a run costs

Almost every LinkedIn actor now charges per result. Apify lists three models, pay per event, pay per usage and rental, and 1,024 of the 1,051 LinkedIn actors run on pay per event. Published rates on the ones people actually run sit between $1 and $10 per 1,000 records, with the platform plan underneath.

The platform half is a subscription that doubles as a usage wallet. Free is $0 with “$5 to spend in Apify Store or on your own Actors” and compute at $0.2 per unit. Starter is $19 a month with $19 to spend at the same compute rate, Scale is $199 with $199 to spend at $0.16, and Business is $999 with $999 to spend at $0.13. A compute unit is 1 GB of RAM for an hour. Residential proxy traffic is billed on top, from $8 per GB down to $7.

The actor half is whatever the author set. Apify’s own documentation is explicit that the two do not always merge: “Most pay-per-event Actors include platform usage in the price. However, some Actors may require you to pay for platform usage separately. Always check the Actor’s pricing section to understand what’s included.”

Three details decide what a bulk pull actually costs.

• Your plan changes the actor’s price. Authors may set per-unit prices by customer tier. On bebity/linkedin-jobs-scraper a job result is $0.0015 on the free tier, $0.00125 at Bronze and $0.001 from Gold upward, so the same 100,000 jobs land at $150 or at $100 depending on what you already pay Apify.
• Rental is being retired, and prices move with it. Apify is sunsetting the rental model: from 1 April 2026 no new rental actors or price changes, and on 1 October 2026 “Rental Actors are fully retired.” Bebity’s jobs scraper has been $29.99 a month since October 2023 and switches to per result on 15 September 2026, in the author’s words “Moving from monthly rental to pay-per-event: no subscription, pay only for what you use.”
• A price is a snapshot. The Sales Navigator actor in the table above moved onto pay per event on 3 September 2026, two days before we read it. Publishing terms cap a creator at one pricing change a month, taking effect fourteen days later, which is the speed to assume rather than a fixed rate card.

For a one-off pull the arithmetic is friendly. Ten thousand job posts is about $10 of actor charge, ten thousand profiles between $40 and $100 depending on whether you want an email attached, and the free plan’s $5 covers a genuine test.

Who maintains it, and what happens when it breaks

The author maintains it, and Apify’s publishing terms hold them to best effort. When an actor stops returning what it promises, Apify can flag it as under maintenance, and after 30 days it can be deprecated or removed from the store. On 5 September 2026, 58 of the 1,051 LinkedIn actors carried that flag.

The terms say it in two clauses. The obligation: “By publishing your Actor, you agree to use your best effort to maintain it in working condition and make updates to it from time to time as needed, in order to maintain its continuing functionality.” The enforcement: “We perform regular automated testing of the functionality and performance of all Actors published in Apify Store. If your Actor does not provide the declared functionality (a Faulty Actor), whether identified through testing or otherwise, we are authorized to mark it as under maintenance in Apify Store. If the Actor remains a Faulty Actor for 30 days or more, we are authorized to mark it as deprecated and/or remove it from Apify Store.”

LinkedIn supplies the reason this clause gets used. In August 2026 it replaced its job search, and the actor authors were left describing the damage in their own release notes. From curious_coder/linkedin-jobs-scraper: “Since Aug 2026 LinkedIn rolled out new AI powered job search which only supports a few URL filters: Date posted, Company, Easy apply, and Under 10 applicants. Old search filters like Experience level, job type, etc are no longer available seperately.” The actor’s workaround folds the retired filters into the search text, and the same note says what that is worth: “we can’t guarantee that this 100% works.”

Bebity, whose jobs scraper has been on the store since February 2023, published its own answer in September 2026, “Fully rebuilt for LinkedIn’s 2026 search filters”. So one platform change in August had at least two independent authors rewriting in public, and every actor is on its own author’s schedule.

The store does publish a maintenance signal of a kind, in the review score on each listing. On the profile lane the cookie actor sits at 1.8 out of 5 across 14 reviews while the no-cookie one from HarvestAPI sits at 4.6 across 88, on the same job and the same day. Both numbers are Apify’s, and neither is a statement about the code. They are what users of that actor reported.

The shape of job it fits

An actor is a good way to pull a LinkedIn dataset once and a hard way to run something every day. The actor is a third party’s code running against a site that changes, its price and pricing model can move under you, and the account exposure is a property of the actor you happened to choose.

The contract makes that concrete, and it is worth reading before a production plan rests on one. Apify’s publishing terms state that “Each Actor is made available directly to Users by you, and the contractual relationship for the use of your Actor is established between you and the User, not between Apify and the User”, and, one clause later, that “Apify is not a party to any End-User Terms, whether the Apify Standard Actor Contract or your own, and bears no responsibility or liability arising from or in connection with those terms or their enforcement.” The platform is the runway. The counterparty is whoever published the actor.

That is a fair trade for a dataset you need once. A list of job posts for a market study, a set of company pages for a territory plan, the posts a competitor published last quarter: pick the actor, pay for the results, keep the file. Nothing about that job needs an SLA or a session.

It is a different trade for a feature. A product that reads LinkedIn every day inherits the author’s release schedule, the author’s pricing decisions and, if the actor takes cookies, an account that can be restricted while your customer is watching. The general argument between scraping and an account-based API, with the breakage side worked through, is on LinkedIn scraping vs a safe API, the legal side is on Is scraping LinkedIn legal?, and the endpoint-by-endpoint official picture is on the jobs API and the posts API.

Where a product needs LinkedIn reads and actions as typed calls on an account it controls, the category holds account-based APIs such as Unipile, Linked API and GTM API, where a LinkedIn action is a typed endpoint on an account you connect yourself. Occasional reads run there too, on a connected account, free plan included. A single bulk snapshot of public data is still the scraper route’s job, and that is the honest dividing line: one file, or a system.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources & Further Reading

• Apify, store search for LinkedIn and its public store API (the 1,051 LinkedIn-named actors, 331 authors, 1,024 pay-per-event, 58 under maintenance, and every user count and review score on this page, read 5 September 2026)
• Apify docs, Actors in Store (anyone may publish, the three pricing models, platform usage billed separately, the rental sunset dates) · pricing (the four plans, the compute-unit rates and the proxy rates) · platform MCP server
• Apify, Store Publishing Terms (who the contract is with, best-effort maintenance, the Faulty Actor rule and the 30-day removal, one pricing change a month effective after fourteen days)
• Actor pages read on 5 September 2026, jobs: curious_coder/linkedin-jobs-scraper (the incognito search URL and the August 2026 AI job search note) · harvestapi/linkedin-job-search · bebity/linkedin-jobs-scraper (on the store since February 2023, the September 2026 rebuild and the move off the subscription)
• Actor pages, profiles and companies: harvestapi/linkedin-profile-scraper (no cookies or account required, $4 and $10 per 1,000) · dev_fusion/Linkedin-Profile-Scraper · curious_coder/linkedin-profile-scraper (the cookie instructions and both daily ceilings) · harvestapi/linkedin-company · apimaestro/linkedin-company-detail
• Actor pages, posts and Sales Navigator: apimaestro/linkedin-profile-posts (the no-account pitch quoted above) · supreme_coder/linkedin-post · curious_coder/linkedin-sales-navigator-search-scraper (cookies, user agent and the Sales Navigator subscription line on a competing listing) · harvestapi/linkedin-sales-navigator-lead-search-cookie
• gtm-api.com, product · pricing (our own numbers)
• Related: LinkedIn scraping vs a safe API · Best LinkedIn API · LinkedIn profile data API · LinkedIn jobs API · LinkedIn posts API · Sales Navigator API · Is scraping LinkedIn legal?

Michael SalamatovGTM engineerRuns the gtm-api.com blog. Covers LinkedIn limits, account health and the API side of outbound.in

Last updated: September 2026 · Every actor, rate, quotation and count on this page was read off Apify’s store, actor pages, documentation and publishing terms on 5 September 2026 and is linked in Sources. Actors change price, change hands and go under maintenance without notice, so re-read the actor page before you run it.