THE BRIGHT DATA ALTERNATIVE FOR PEOPLE & COMPANY DATA

Buy the Data, Not the Scraping Project

Bright Data hands you the raw scraping infrastructure — and the job of assembling it. Datamagnet hands you finished people & company data endpoints: stable schema, live collection, search and signals, one API key.

Get API Key View Pricing
Datamagnet
Bright Data
People & company data
Finished endpoints
DIY scraping
Stable response schema
Varies by scraper
Setup effort
Minutes
Scrapers & parsing
Signals & webhooks
Delivery webhooks only
Scrape any website
Profiles in Bright Data's stored LinkedIn dataset
600M+Profiles in Bright Data's stored LinkedIn dataset
Per Datamagnet profile, fetched at request time
1 creditPer Datamagnet profile, fetched at request time
Datamagnet credits on signup, no card
10 freeDatamagnet credits on signup, no card

Datamagnet vs Bright Data: the short answer

Bright Data and Datamagnet solve different problems. Bright Data is web scraping infrastructure — 400M+ residential IPs, unblocking, 1,000+ ready-made scrapers and stored datasets — and it is the right choice when the professional network is one target among many or you need proxies for crawlers you run yourself. Datamagnet is a finished people & company data product: POST a profile, company or post URL and get structured JSON fetched live at request time, plus ICP search and job-change signals. Pick Bright Data to build a pipeline. Pick Datamagnet to skip building one.

Our verdict

Bright Data is excellent at what it does, and what it does is not what we do. If you collect from many sites, need to control the browser, or want to own the proxy layer, nothing on this page beats it — and its stored LinkedIn datasets are cheaper per row than any live API, ours included. The case for Datamagnet is narrower and sharper: people, companies and posts only, fetched when you ask, with a fixed schema, search and signals already built. What you are buying is the absence of a project.

Which one should you pick?

Straight guidance, including the cases where we're the wrong answer.

Choose Datamagnet if

  • Professional profiles are the only data you need, and you want them as an API rather than a pipeline
  • You want the profile as it is right now, not a row read from a dataset snapshot on a refresh schedule
  • You need commenters, reactors and reposters as their own paginated endpoints, not fields attached to a post record
  • ICP search, Sales Navigator URL search and job-change signals matter more to you than breadth of site coverage
  • You want one published credit price per endpoint instead of separate meters for records, bandwidth and IPs
  • Nobody on the team wants to own parsers that break when the source markup changes

Choose Bright Data if

  • The professional network is one of many sites you collect from — Bright Data lists 1,000+ ready-made scrapers, Datamagnet covers one site
  • You need proxies, unblocking or a remote browser for crawlers you run yourself; Datamagnet sells no infrastructure
  • You want a bulk snapshot up front — Bright Data lists 600M+ LinkedIn people records at roughly $0.0025 each on a $250 minimum, a unit price no live API can match
  • You need LinkedIn job-listings data, which Datamagnet has no endpoint for
  • You want raw HTML and full control of page interaction rather than a fixed JSON schema
  • Procurement wants an enterprise vendor with an uptime SLA, an account manager and a courtroom record on public-data scraping

Datamagnet vs Bright Data, feature by feature

What each tool actually returns, how fresh it is, and what it costs to run.

Data & API coverage

Data & API coverage: Datamagnet compared with Bright Data, feature by feature
FeatureDatamagnetBright Data
Purpose-built people & company endpointsPerson, company, posts, search, signalsGeneral scraping infrastructure
Structured, stable response schema YesDepends on scraper/dataset used
Data collected at the moment of request YesScraper API live · datasets periodic
Commenters, reactors & reposters as separate endpoints YesComments inside the post record; no reactor or reposter endpoint
ICP / Sales Navigator / DB search YesPeople-search scraper & Deep Lookup; no Sales Navigator
Job-change & engagement signals6 signal typesDataset refresh schedules, no signals product
Setup effortOne API key, first call in minutesConfigure scrapers, delivery & parsing
Pricing modelFlat credits per endpointPer record / per GB / per IP
Charged only on successful requests YesYes on Scraper API & Unlocker
Free tier10 credits once, no card5,000 credits/month, no card
Scraping any website (not just the professional network) No Yes
Proxy network & unblocking infrastructure No Yes
Bulk multi-site datasets No Yes
LinkedIn job-listings data No Yes

Bright Data capabilities are summarized from their public documentation and pricing pages, last checked July 2026. Products change — verify against their current offering before you buy.

The hidden cost is maintenance

A DIY professional-network pipeline on scraping infrastructure means owning parsers that break when page layouts change, retry logic, schema drift and proxy economics. Bright Data supplies excellent raw materials for that job and leaves the assembly to you. Datamagnet absorbs it behind versioned endpoints — you consume full_name and employee_count, we chase the HTML. The trade is real: you give up control of the collection layer in exchange for never thinking about it again.

  • Stable schema across the People, Company and Posts APIs — fields do not move under you
  • Retries, blocking and rate handling are server-side, and a failed request is not a charged request
  • Signals push job changes and engagement to a webhook, so you re-enrich on change rather than on a schedule
0
Scrapers, proxies and parsers you maintain on Datamagnet. That is the whole pitch.

Pricing, side by side

What you pay Bright Data versus what you pay us, for the same work.

Bright Data

Metered separately per product line: records for the Web Scraper API, bandwidth for residential proxies, IPs for datacenter proxies, and per-row for datasets. Every account gets 5,000 free credits a month as one shared pool across the API products, no card required.

Web Scraper API — pay-as-you-go5,000 free credits/month, no card
$1.50/1K records
Web Scraper API — Scale384,000 records, then $1.30/1K
$499/mo
Residential proxies$2.50/GB on the $1,999/mo plan
from $4.00/GB
LinkedIn datasets~$0.0025 per record, less at volume
$250 / 100K records
EnterpriseVolume discounts, premium SLA, account manager
Custom

Datamagnet

Credits, not seats. Charged only on successful requests, and 10 free credits to test before you pay anything.

FreeOn signup, no card
10 credits
Starter1,000 credits/mo
$39/mo
Pro10,000 credits/mo
$99/mo
Scale25,000 credits/mo · webhooks + bulk export
$199/mo
Pay-as-you-go200 credits $10 → 100,000 credits $2,000
from $0.02/credit

Bright Data’s headline price per record is well below a Datamagnet credit, and that comparison holds if you already have the pipeline: their rate covers collection, not the scraper configuration, parsing, scheduling and schema maintenance around it — and dataset rows are read from a snapshot rather than fetched when you ask. Several of these were promotional rates at the check date — residential proxies listed at 50% off list, and a 25%-off code on the Scraper API — so published rates move. Competitor pricing is taken from their public pricing page and was last checked July 2026; list prices change and negotiated rates differ. See Datamagnet pricing for our current plans.

Where each tool genuinely wins

No tool wins everywhere. Here's the honest split.

Where Bright Data wins

  • The proxy network is the real product and it has no Datamagnet equivalent: 400M+ residential IPs across 195 countries, with Web Unlocker for blocks and CAPTCHAs and a 99.99% uptime SLA
  • 1,000+ ready-made scrapers — Bright Data collects from across the public web, while Datamagnet covers one professional network
  • Bulk LinkedIn datasets at a unit price live collection cannot reach: 600M+ people records at roughly $0.0025 each, with quarterly and monthly refresh subscriptions
  • Job-listings scrapers and datasets for the professional network, an entire data type Datamagnet does not offer
  • Deep Lookup answers a plain-English "find all…" query with structured records assembled from live public sources — a broader research surface than our people-and-company search
  • A remote browser and raw HTML control for sites that need custom interaction, rather than a fixed JSON response
  • A recurring free tier — 5,000 credits every month, shared across their API products, against our one-time 10 credits
  • Enterprise footing: SOC 2 and SOC 3 reports, ISO 27001:2022, ISO 27017/27018, a CSA STAR listing, account managers, and the January 2024 Meta v. Bright Data ruling that logged-off scraping of public data does not breach Meta’s terms

Where Datamagnet wins

  • Finished people & company data endpoints with a fixed schema — no scraper to configure, no parser to maintain
  • Every profile fetched at request time, with no dataset snapshot or refresh schedule to reason about
  • Commenters, reactors and reposters as separate paginated endpoints, not fields inside a post record
  • ICP people search, Sales Navigator URL search and an instant search database over previously enriched profiles
  • Six signal types delivered by email digest or HMAC-signed webhook, so records update on change
  • One published credit cost per endpoint instead of separate meters for records, bandwidth and IPs
  • First call in minutes with a single API key — no scrapers, collectors or delivery destinations to set up
  • No seat licences anywhere in the pricing

Datamagnet vs Bright Data: FAQ

Bright Data is general-purpose web-scraping infrastructure: proxies, 1,000+ ready-made scrapers and datasets you assemble into a pipeline for any site. Datamagnet is a finished people & company data product: purpose-built endpoints with a stable schema, plus ICP search and job-change signals. With Bright Data you build and maintain the collection layer yourself; with Datamagnet you call it. Bright Data is broader, Datamagnet is finished for one target.

Not on unit price. Bright Data lists its Web Scraper API at $1.50 per 1,000 records and LinkedIn dataset rows at roughly $0.0025 each on a $250 minimum, both far below a Datamagnet credit. Datamagnet is cheaper only once you count engineering time: no scraper configuration, no parsing drift when layouts change, no proxy management, no schema maintenance. If you already run that pipeline, Bright Data wins on cost.

Only for a different shape of work. Bright Data sells periodic snapshots of a stored LinkedIn dataset with hundreds of millions of rows. Datamagnet replaces that with request-time collection: enrich exactly the profiles you need when you need them, and use signals to catch changes between touches. If you genuinely want bulk breadth up front, or multi-site datasets, Bright Data remains the right shape.

Partly. Bright Data's Web Scraper API documents both a synchronous mode, described as one request and one response for single URLs, and an asynchronous mode that triggers a job for thousands of URLs and returns results by polling, webhook or cloud storage. Its LinkedIn datasets are separate and are stored snapshots. Datamagnet is synchronous only: you POST a LinkedIn URL and the profile comes back in the same response.

No to both. Datamagnet sells no proxy network, no unblocking service and no remote browser, and its endpoints cover people, companies, posts, engagement, search and signals only. If you need to collect from e-commerce sites, search engines or anywhere else on the public web, or you need IPs for crawlers you run yourself, Bright Data is the correct tool and Datamagnet is not a substitute.

When the professional network is one of many sites you scrape, when you need proxy and unblocking infrastructure for your own crawlers, when you want a bulk dataset up front rather than per-record lookups, when you need job-listings data, or when you want raw HTML control. Datamagnet wins the narrower case: professional network data as a finished API, collected live, rather than as an engineering project.

Sources

Every competitor claim on this page traces back to one of these.

  1. 1.Bright Data — Web Scraper API pricing ($1.50/1K records, Scale $499/mo for 384,000 records then $1.30/1K, 5K free) — checked July 2026
  2. 2.Bright Data — Proxy network pricing (residential $4.00/GB PAYG, $2.50/GB on the $1,999/mo plan; datacenter per IP) — checked July 2026
  3. 3.Bright Data — Dataset pricing ($250 for 100K records; one-time, biannual, quarterly and monthly refresh discounts) — checked July 2026
  4. 4.Bright Data — LinkedIn datasets hub (people, company, jobs, posts; $250 minimum) — checked July 2026
  5. 5.Bright Data — LinkedIn profiles dataset (record count, per-record price, refresh cadences) — checked July 2026
  6. 6.Bright Data — LinkedIn Scraper API (profiles, companies, jobs, posts, people search) — checked July 2026
  7. 7.Bright Data docs — professional-network scrapers (posts collector returns content, engagement metrics, hashtags, comments) — checked July 2026
  8. 8.Bright Data — Web Scraper API product page (1,000+ ready-made scrapers) — checked July 2026
  9. 9.Bright Data — Residential proxies (400M+ IPs, 195 countries, SLA guarantees 99.99% uptime) — checked July 2026
  10. 10.Bright Data docs — Web Scraper API overview (synchronous and asynchronous modes) — checked July 2026
  11. 11.Bright Data — Web Unlocker pricing ($1.50/1K requests, "pay only for success", 5K free) — checked July 2026
  12. 12.Bright Data docs — release notes (5,000 free credits/month as a single shared pool across API products) — checked July 2026
  13. 13.Bright Data docs — Deep Lookup overview (natural-language search over live public web sources) — checked July 2026
  14. 14.Bright Data — Trust Center (SOC 2, SOC 3, ISO 27001:2022, ISO 27017/27018, CSA STAR) — checked July 2026
  15. 15.Bright Data — Meta v. Bright Data ruling (N.D. Cal., 23 January 2024, logged-off scraping of public data) — checked July 2026

Try Datamagnet against Bright Data on your own data

10 free credits, no credit card. Run the same lookups through both and compare the JSON yourself.

  • Live data at request time
  • Charged only on success
  • No seats, no annual contract
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