In short
- 1"PhantomBuster bills per workspace from $69/mo and meters execution hours, so its price moves with runtime, not with how many LinkedIn accounts you run"
- 2"HeyReach bills $79 per LinkedIn sender per month and gives team seats away free, so its price moves with account count and nothing else"
- 3"HeyReach does not build your list, it sends to one you import; PhantomBuster builds lists across more than fifteen platforms and is weak as a campaign manager"
- 4"Only HeyReach bundles a dedicated proxy into the price, one per sender, and only on its entry plan; PhantomBuster does not offer one at any tier"
- 5"HeyReach's Agency bundle overtakes per-sender pricing at 13 senders, and hands you the proxy bill it used to cover"
Two products, one search box, and they are not the same class of tool. PhantomBuster is a marketplace of automation scripts where LinkedIn happens to be the most popular target. HeyReach is a sending platform built to run many LinkedIn accounts at once, mostly for agencies working accounts that belong to somebody else.
That difference decides the purchase before any feature list does. If you type this comparison into Google you are usually holding one of two problems: either you have no list and need one built, or you have a list and need it sent from several profiles without logging in and out all day. Each tool answers one of those and mostly ignores the other.
Every price and plan detail below was read off heyreach.io/pricing and PhantomBuster's own published plan breakdown in August 2026. Both vendors default their pricing display to a discounted term, so check which toggle you are reading before you compare two numbers from two different articles.
PhantomBuster vs HeyReach, decided in one paragraph
PhantomBuster is better if you need to build and enrich lists across many platforms and you are comfortable assembling the workflow yourself. HeyReach is better if you already have leads and need them sent from a rotation of LinkedIn accounts with one shared inbox. PhantomBuster meters runtime. HeyReach meters accounts.
Two rows in that table decide most purchases, and neither is the headline price: the billing unit, and the proxy row. Everything else is preference.
What PhantomBuster is actually for
PhantomBuster is a catalogue of single-purpose automations, called Phantoms, that you configure and chain into Flows. It has been running since 2016, and its LinkedIn Phantoms sit alongside ones for Sales Navigator, Instagram, X, Google Maps, Reddit and GitHub. You buy capability, not a campaign.
The breadth is the real product. If your pipeline needs Google Maps listings, then the people who follow a competitor's account, then LinkedIn post engagers, all landing in the same sheet, almost nothing else covers that spread. Each Phantom does one job well: extract a search result, read a profile, pull the likers of a post, find an email, fire a connection request.
What you pay for is capacity, and the shape of it catches people out. Every plan gives you three separate meters:
- Execution hours. 20 a month on Start, 80 on Grow, 300 on Scale. That is roughly 40 minutes a day on the entry plan. Continuous automations eat it faster than anyone expects, and hours do not roll over.
- Automation slots. 5 on Start, 15 on Grow, 50 on Scale. This is how many Phantoms can be live at once, which caps how many parallel motions you can keep running.
- Three credit pools. Email credits (500, 2,500, 10,000), AI credits (10,000, 30,000, 90,000) and URL Finder credits (1,000, 10,000, 20,000). Separate pools, separate exhaustion, no rollover.
The free plan is a look around rather than a working tier: 30 minutes of execution a month, one slot, no monthly credits, and a 10-row export cap. The 14-day trial adds 2 run hours and 5 slots with the same 10-row output limit.
Where PhantomBuster stops is campaign management. It will fire a templated sequence at a list, but it has no unified inbox, no account rotation, and no notion of a client workspace. Managing five LinkedIn accounts on PhantomBuster means five sets of credentials, five Phantom configurations, and one shared pool of hours and slots that all five draw down. It is a data and actions layer that you are expected to wrap in your own process.
What HeyReach is actually for
HeyReach connects many LinkedIn accounts to one dashboard, rotates sending between them, and pools every reply into a single inbox. Its own definition is unambiguous: a sender, also called a seat, is a LinkedIn account you add to your organization, and it does not charge for adding teammates, VAs, clients or users.
That one pricing decision is why agencies pick it. If eight people need to see the pipeline but only three LinkedIn accounts are sending, you pay for three. Waalaxy-style per-seat tools invert that and charge you for the eight. HeyReach also gives you client workspaces that keep each account's data separate under one login, whitelabel branding on the Agency plan, and multi-brand whitelabels as a $500 add-on.
The feature set follows the same logic. Campaigns are built around connection requests, messages and profile views with conditional steps. Leads are imported from Sales Navigator, Clay, RB2B, HubSpot or anything that produces a list. There are native integrations with Instantly, Smartlead and EmailBison for the email half of a sequence, HubSpot sync that tracks connection, message and reply events, and a connector that lets Claude or ChatGPT drive campaigns.
Where HeyReach stops is sourcing. It is not a finder. Nothing in the product goes out and discovers who your buyers are, and nothing reads a market you have not already mapped. You arrive with a list or you do not use it. That is a deliberate boundary, and it is exactly the boundary PhantomBuster is built to sit on the other side of.
The clean way to hold these two in your head: PhantomBuster produces rows. HeyReach consumes them. Teams that buy both are not confused, they are wiring the front of a pipeline to the back of one.
How each one connects to your LinkedIn account
PhantomBuster only touches your account for the length of a run: you supply credentials to a Phantom, it does its job, and the connection ends when the run does. HeyReach keeps every sender connected continuously, because rotating sends across a pool of always-on accounts is the entire product.
That continuous connection is also why the proxy line in the pricing tables matters. HeyReach's Growth plan bundles a dedicated proxy into the price for every sender. Its Agency and Unlimited plans do not: both require you to bring your own. PhantomBuster does not offer a proxy at any tier.
PhantomBuster has a different weak point. It reads LinkedIn's page structure directly, so when LinkedIn changes that structure, the affected Phantoms break until PhantomBuster ships a patch. There's no dramatic event, just a Tuesday extraction that quietly returns nothing, and you find out from an empty spreadsheet.
What each one costs, and what you are charged for
Here are both ladders side by side. PhantomBuster's discount is on annual billing; HeyReach discounts at 10 percent quarterly and 20 percent yearly.
Now the comparison that actually settles it. PhantomBuster charges per workspace, so the account count column is flat. HeyReach charges per sender, so it is a staircase.
The bundle crosses per-sender pricing at 13 senders, and the crossing holds on annual terms too, since 13 seats at $63 is $819 against $799. Below 13 senders, Growth. Above, Agency, plus a proxy bill the $999 no longer covers. That is the sort of line item our guide to the true cost of LinkedIn automation pricing exists to surface.
Read the PhantomBuster column with suspicion, though. $69 for 25 LinkedIn accounts is arithmetic, not a plan. Twenty execution hours divided across 25 accounts running daily outreach is a few minutes each, and you would hit the 5-slot ceiling long before the hours. PhantomBuster's flat price is real for one or two accounts and fictional past a handful. Its price does not scale with accounts because the product was never designed around accounts at all.
Multiple accounts is the axis that separates them
Account count is a first-class primitive in HeyReach and an afterthought in PhantomBuster, and this is the single clearest reason to pick one over the other.
In HeyReach, adding a sender is one action, and the platform then rotates sending across the pool, paces each account within its own daily limits, and files every reply into one inbox tagged by account. Nobody logs in and out of a client profile to answer a message. That is the entire job.
In PhantomBuster, each LinkedIn account is a separate session you supply to each Phantom that needs it. There is no rotation logic, no shared inbox, no per-client separation. You can absolutely run several accounts, and plenty of people do, but the orchestration is yours to build and the shared workspace meters mean the accounts compete with each other for hours and slots.
If you run one or two profiles, this row does not matter and you should decide on the sourcing question instead. If you run ten, it is the only row that matters.
The number neither price tag changes
Both tools sell sending capacity or automation capacity. Neither sells the thing that decides whether sending works, and it is worth being blunt about the arithmetic before you buy either.
One LinkedIn account can safely send roughly 100 invitations a week. That figure is practitioner consensus rather than anything LinkedIn publishes, and the reasoning behind it is in our guide to LinkedIn connection request limits. No plan on either vendor lifts it, because it is not their limit to lift. HeyReach's answer is to add accounts, which is a real answer if you have accounts to add. PhantomBuster's answer is to run more Phantoms, which does not help at all if the constraint is one profile.
The other half is who you write to. Belkins' 2026 study of 15.1 million touchpoints measured a 12.2 percent reply rate on warm LinkedIn outreach against 7.9 percent on cold. That gap is targeting, not tooling, and neither of these products will do the targeting for you.
Which is why the cheapest useful step is to test the audience before you pay either vendor. Pick the post in your market that framed your problem best, and pull its commenters into a list to see the actual names sitting under it. If that list is thin or wrong, no amount of execution hours or extra senders will fix the campaign downstream.
Where BeReach fits instead
Both of these tools are built to send. PhantomBuster helps you build the list yourself and fire actions at it; HeyReach sends a list you already have from a rotation of accounts. Neither one tells you who on that list is actually worth messaging, or what to say to them.
BeReach starts one step earlier and stops one step short of both. It is an AI agent that finds people who just showed interest on LinkedIn, works out who is worth your time and why, and drafts one personal message per person. Nothing goes out until you approve it, one send at a time, from your own account, at a pace enforced server side: 50 invitations and 300 profile visits a day, with visits held under 120 an hour. It is not a scraper and it is not unattended automation, so it will not do PhantomBuster's multi-platform extraction and it is not built for an agency rotating twenty-five accounts the way HeyReach is. We do not store your credentials or your data: a search runs against your own account and the leads go straight to you. Plans are 89 EUR a month on Pro billed quarterly, 99 at the regular rate, with Max at 179 and Max+ at 269 on the same quarterly terms, and a 3-day free trial. The current ladder is on the pricing page.
Every viral post is 100+ warm conversations waiting.
Tell your agent who you want to reach. It finds them, says which ones are worth your time, writes the first line, and follows up.
How to choose
Pick PhantomBuster if:
- You need to build and enrich lists, and LinkedIn is one source among several.
- You are technical, you enjoy assembling Flows, and you want raw building blocks rather than a guided campaign.
- You run one or two LinkedIn accounts, so per-workspace pricing works in your favour.
- You can live with a Phantom breaking when LinkedIn changes a page.
Pick HeyReach if:
- You already have lists and the bottleneck is sending them from several profiles.
- Your headcount is larger than your account count, so free team seats save you real money.
- You need one inbox across accounts, client separation, and whitelabel branding.
- You are running fewer than 13 senders, where Growth is still the cheaper side of the crossover, or more than 25, where the bundles are the only sane option.
Pick neither if:
- You have one LinkedIn account and no list. PhantomBuster will build you rows you have no motion for, and HeyReach will charge you $79 a month to send to a list you do not have.
The honest summary: PhantomBuster is the better list builder and the worse campaign manager. HeyReach is the better sender and does no sourcing at all. Teams that end up happy with either one have usually solved the other half somewhere else.
Frequently asked questions
Is HeyReach better than PhantomBuster?
Only for a specific job. HeyReach is better if you have leads and need them sent from several LinkedIn accounts with rotation and one shared inbox. PhantomBuster is better if you need to build and enrich the list in the first place, across LinkedIn and more than fifteen other platforms. They solve opposite ends of the same pipeline, so the answer depends on which end is broken.
What is the difference between PhantomBuster and HeyReach?
PhantomBuster is a marketplace of automation scripts billed per workspace and metered in execution hours, automation slots and credit pools. HeyReach is a LinkedIn-only sending platform billed per connected LinkedIn account, with unlimited team members. PhantomBuster produces lists and fires actions. HeyReach sends campaigns from a rotation of accounts and pools every reply into one inbox.
Can PhantomBuster run multiple LinkedIn accounts?
It can, but it is not designed around them. Each account is a separate session you supply to each Phantom, with no rotation logic, no unified inbox and no client separation. All accounts also share one workspace pool of execution hours and automation slots, so they compete with each other. Past a handful of accounts the flat per-workspace price stops being realistic.
Does HeyReach include proxies?
On the Growth plan only. HeyReach provides a dedicated proxy for each sender at $79 per sender per month. The Agency and Unlimited plans require you to bring your own proxies, which reverses part of the saving in the bundle since proxy cost and proxy management move to you at exactly the point you have the most accounts connected.
Which is cheaper for LinkedIn prospecting, PhantomBuster or HeyReach?
For one or two LinkedIn accounts, PhantomBuster, at $69 a month per workspace against $79 per sender. The comparison stops being useful past that, because PhantomBuster's execution hours, not its price, become the binding constraint. For many accounts, HeyReach's Agency bundle at $999 for 25 senders overtakes per-sender pricing at 13 senders.
Can you use PhantomBuster and HeyReach together?
Yes, and it is a common pairing. PhantomBuster extracts and enriches the list, then you import it into HeyReach, which accepts leads from Sales Navigator, Clay, RB2B, HubSpot and other sources. The tradeoff is two subscriptions, two failure modes, and a handoff where personalization tends to flatten into whatever merge fields survive the export.
Reading this in an AI assistant? Hand it the page and let it summarize, so you can ask follow-up questions against the whole argument rather than the part you have read so far.
