Is Dux-Soup or PhantomBuster cheaper?

Dux-Soup starts at $14.99 per month (Pro Dux), or $11.25 per month billed annually (14 days trial). PhantomBuster starts at $69 per month (Start), or $56 per month billed annually (free plan available).

Dux-Soup vs PhantomBuster

An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.

The short answer

Both sides assessed

Dux-Soup compared with PhantomBuster

Different jobs that get confused constantly. PhantomBuster is a cloud extraction platform with excellent data plumbing and indifferent sending; Dux-Soup is an outreach tool with a proper inbox, campaigns, and CRM sync but no scraping pipeline or non-LinkedIn sources. Many teams run both: PhantomBuster to build and enrich the list, Dux-Soup Turbo to work it. If you must pick one, pick by whether your bottleneck is data or conversations.

PhantomBuster compared with Dux-Soup

Dux-Soup is a $14.99 browser extension that automates outreach from your own machine and IP; PhantomBuster is a $69 cloud runtime that scrapes brilliantly and sends indifferently. A solo seller who wants LinkedIn drip campaigns on the cheap should take Dux-Soup. An operator who wants scheduled data extraction feeding another system should take PhantomBuster, and quite a few people sensibly run both.

Choose Dux-Soup if

Buyers who want a long-established vendor with a genuine upgrade path, starting at $14.99 in the browser and moving to $99 cloud execution when unattended running becomes necessary, and teams whose CRM is HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Freshsales, SharpSpring, or HighLevel and who want a native connector rather than a Zapier bridge.

Choose PhantomBuster if

Operators and technical marketers who want raw LinkedIn and Sales Navigator data on a schedule, feeding a pipeline they assemble themselves, and who are comfortable configuring their own rate limits rather than buying an opinionated campaign tool.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Dux-Soup	PhantomBuster
Category	LinkedIn	LinkedIn
Starting price	$14.99 per month (Pro Dux), or $11.25 per month billed annually (14 days trial)	$69 per month (Start), or $56 per month billed annually (free plan available)
Pricing model	Per-user edition pricing across three capability levels, each available as an individual, team, or agency plan, with the edition determining both feature depth and execution model.	Metered subscription: each tier bundles a monthly allowance of execution time, configured automation slots, AI credits, and email credits. Allowances reset monthly and do not roll over.
Free plan	No	A permanent free plan after the trial with roughly 30 minutes of execution time per month, one slot, 50 MB of storage, no AI or email credits, and the 10-row export cap still in force. It is a demo, not a working tier.
Free trial	14 days, no credit card required	14 days, no credit card, all features unlocked with 2 hours of execution time, 5 slots, 1,000 AI credits, and 50 email credits, but exports capped at 10 rows per file
Best for	Buyers who want a long-established vendor with a genuine upgrade path, starting at $14.99 in the browser and moving to $99 cloud execution when unattended running becomes necessary, and teams whose CRM is HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Freshsales, SharpSpring, or HighLevel and who want a native connector rather than a Zapier bridge.	Operators and technical marketers who want raw LinkedIn and Sales Navigator data on a schedule, feeding a pipeline they assemble themselves, and who are comfortable configuring their own rate limits rather than buying an opinionated campaign tool.
Setup time	Twenty minutes for Pro or Turbo: install the extension, open LinkedIn, run a search, scan the results, and start a campaign. Cloud editions add an account provisioning step handled by the vendor and take a day or so to be fully live.	About an hour to a first useful result. Sign up, install the extension, capture the LinkedIn session cookie, pick a Phantom, paste a search URL, and launch. Building a Flow that chains three Phantoms and fires a webhook is a half day.
Learning curve	Moderate, and mostly caused by the edition structure rather than the software. Understanding which of Pro, Turbo, and Cloud you need, in individual, team, or agency form, takes longer than learning to build a campaign. The campaign builder itself is conventional and the documentation is mature.	Moderate and genuinely the main barrier. You have to internalize four concepts (Phantom, slot, execution time, container) before the pricing page makes sense, and the difference between a Phantom that finishes in four minutes and one that eats four hours is not obvious until you have run both.
Platforms	Google Chrome extension (Pro and Turbo editions), Managed cloud execution (Cloud editions), Web dashboard for campaigns, inbox, and reporting	Web application, Chrome extension (session cookie capture only), Cloud execution, nothing runs on your machine, REST API, Webhooks
Compliance	GDPR (operated by a Dutch entity subject to EU data protection law)	GDPR (French company subject to EU data protection law), Data processing agreement available
Founded	2015	2016
Headquarters	Netherlands (operated by Supertec BV)	Paris, France
Ownership	Privately held, founder-led	Privately held, lightly venture-backed

Strengths and limitations

Dux-Soup

Strengths

Ten years of continuous operation and over 300,000 claimed users, which in a category where LinkedIn enforcement regularly removes vendors is the strongest available evidence of durability.
Three execution models under one ladder, so you can start in the browser and move to managed cloud execution without changing vendors or rebuilding campaigns.
The best native CRM connector list here: HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Freshsales, SharpSpring, and HighLevel directly, not through a Zapier bridge.
Slack and Microsoft Teams notifications, with Teams support being genuinely uncommon in this category.

Limitations

The $14.99 Pro edition is not a complete outreach tool. No drip campaigns, no inbox, no CRM integrations, which makes the headline price a poor guide to what you will actually pay.
Pro and Turbo stop the moment Chrome closes. If unattended running matters, you are on the $99 Cloud edition and comparing against a very different set of competitors.
No email finder, no email sending, and no multichannel sequencing at all. LinkedIn is the whole product.
Cloud at $99 per seat is expensive against multi-account cloud rivals, and Cloud Agency at $371 for five accounts is roughly triple Aimfox's per-account rate at twenty seats.

PhantomBuster

Strengths

The broadest automation catalogue in the category by a wide margin, covering LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, Instagram, X, Facebook, Google Maps, and generic web scraping in one subscription.
Genuinely excellent data plumbing: CSV and JSON results retained per run, webhooks on completion, a real REST API, Google Sheets sync, and Flows for chaining steps.
Post engagement, group, and event extraction produce higher-intent audiences than filter-based search, and few competitors do all three well.
Cloud execution means Phantoms run on a schedule with your machine off, unlike extension-based tools that only work while a browser is open.

Limitations

No dedicated country-matched residential IP per LinkedIn account. Your session cookie is used from PhantomBuster's cloud, which is a weaker location story than Expandi, Closely, SalesRobot, or LinkedCamp offer, and it is the main reason experienced operators keep PhantomBuster for scraping and send from something else.
Safety is your responsibility. Rate settings are configurable and the vendor does not enforce a hard ceiling or a warm-up ramp, so an inexperienced user can quite easily configure their way into a restriction.
The session cookie breaks. Logging out, changing password, or a LinkedIn security event kills your Phantoms until you refresh the cookie, and this is a recurring operational chore.
No unified inbox, no reply detection, and no conversation view. Sending is possible, managing the conversation that follows is not.

Pricing compared

Dux-Soup

Per-user edition pricing across three capability levels, each available as an individual, team, or agency plan, with the edition determining both feature depth and execution model.

Pro Dux$14.99
Turbo Dux$55
Cloud Dux$99
Turbo Team and Cloud Team$55 and $99
Cloud Agency$371

Turbo at $55 is fair rather than cheap: you get unlimited drip campaigns, a central inbox, a lead dashboard, and the best native CRM connector list in the category, from a vendor with ten years of history, in exchange for accepting that campaigns only run while your browser is open. Cloud at $99 removes that constraint and is priced at the top of what a single-account tool can justify, since Closely covers three accounts for $127 and Aimfox covers twenty for $499. The place Dux-Soup wins decisively is the upgrade path: no other vendor lets you start at $14.99 in the browser and end at managed cloud execution without changing tools, and for a buyer who genuinely does not know yet how far this channel will go, that optionality is worth paying for.

PhantomBuster

Metered subscription: each tier bundles a monthly allowance of execution time, configured automation slots, AI credits, and email credits. Allowances reset monthly and do not roll over.

Start$69
Grow$159
Scale$439

Priced as a data platform, PhantomBuster is fair: $159 a month for eighty hours of scheduled extraction plus 2,500 email credits undercuts buying scraping and enrichment separately, and the export, webhook, and API surface is better than anything else in this category. Priced as a LinkedIn outreach tool it is poor value, because at $159 you could have Expandi's safety architecture or HeyReach's multi-account inbox instead, and PhantomBuster gives you neither. Judge it on the data pipeline, not the sending, and the arithmetic works. For a single user running one account it is expensive relative to Dux-Soup or Octopus CRM; for a five-account agency it is cheap per account but offers nothing built for agency operations, which is exactly the wrong trade.

Editorial verdict on each

Dux-Soup

Dux-Soup is the safe, unglamorous choice, and there is a real argument for making it. It has survived a decade of LinkedIn enforcement, it has the best native CRM connector list in the category by some distance, its browser editions act from your own IP without ever handing a session credential to a vendor, and it needs no Sales Navigator seat, so a complete working setup is $55 a month. Above all, it is the only vendor here that lets you start cheap in the browser and move to managed always-on cloud execution without changing tools. What you give up is modernity and scale economics: there is no email channel, no event extraction, no voice messages, the interface shows its age, and Cloud Agency at $371 for five accounts is expensive next to Aimfox or HeyReach. Buy Turbo at $55 if LinkedIn is your channel, your CRM is on the native list, and you value a vendor that will still exist in three years. Ignore the $14.99 headline; it is not the product you want.

Read the full Dux-Soup profile

PhantomBuster

Innovation

PhantomBuster is the best data-extraction tool in this category and a mediocre outreach tool, and buyers get into trouble by not deciding which one they are buying. The Phantom catalogue, the Flows, the webhooks, the API, and the retained CSV and JSON results make it the obvious choice for anyone whose real requirement is a scheduled supply of clean LinkedIn and Sales Navigator data feeding something else. Post, group, and event extraction alone justify the subscription for many teams. But it does not run your account from a dedicated country-matched IP, it enforces no warm-up ramp or hard daily ceiling, and it has no inbox, so using it as your primary sender means accepting more account risk than a purpose-built vendor imposes, in exchange for features you would not use anyway. Buy it for the data. Send from something built for sending.

Read the full PhantomBuster profile

Dux-Soup profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; PhantomBuster last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.