A PhantomBuster alternative for 2026

PhantomBuster has been the default "scrape LinkedIn and other stuff from a dashboard" product since 2016. It ships a catalog of 100+ pre-built "phantoms", it handles scheduling, it stores results, and it costs somewhere between 69 € and 900 € a month depending on how many "execution slots" you need. For a lot of small growth teams it is the first scraping tool they ever touch.

Stekpad is a different shape. We are API-first, with a Chrome extension used only as a cookie bridge — never as a scraping UI. Our pricing is pay-as-you-go credits with an optional Cloud subscription. Our catalog is 5 verbs and 19 enrichers, composed by you, not 100 pre-built flows picked from a menu. We ship an MCP server out of the box so Claude, Cursor and Claude Code can drive scraping directly.

This post is the honest comparison. What PhantomBuster does well, what Stekpad does differently, and which phantoms map to which Stekpad verbs if you decide to migrate. No slogans. No "we are better". Real trade-offs.

The structural difference: where the scraping runs

This is the one that matters more than pricing.

PhantomBuster runs scrapes on their servers. You give them your session cookie (typically li_at for LinkedIn), they store it, and their backend logs into the target site from a datacenter IP using that cookie. Their scheduler triggers phantoms on a cron. Your session sits on their infra for the duration of the phantom's validity. If their infra gets breached, a stranger has your LinkedIn. If LinkedIn flags the datacenter IP, your session can get soft-banned.

Stekpad runs authenticated scrapes in your own browser. You install the Stekpad Chrome extension, you enable a domain like linkedin.com in the Sessions panel, and from that point on any call to /v1/scrape with use_session: "linkedin.com" is routed through your Chrome over a WebSocket. Your cookies never leave your browser. The extension logs every fetch in a local journal you can export. The fetch uses your real residential IP and your real browser fingerprint — the same as when you click a link yourself.

PhantomBuster stores your session on their servers. Stekpad never touches it. The fetch runs where your cookies already live — in your browser.

Neither approach is free of trade-offs. PhantomBuster's model means you can run phantoms while your laptop is asleep — they are running on their infra. Stekpad's model means authenticated fetches only happen while your Chrome is open with the extension active. If you need overnight scheduled runs on authenticated sites, PhantomBuster wins that slot.

For everything else — control, audit, security, freshness, the ability to confidently delete your account and know the cookie is gone — the cookie bridge wins.

Pricing side by side

As of April 2026:

PhantomBuster

• Starter: 69 €/month, 20 execution hours, 5 "slots"
• Pro: 159 €/month, 80 execution hours, 15 slots
• Team: 439 €/month, 300 execution hours, 50 slots
• Team 2X/4X: up to 900 €/month

Execution hours are wall-clock time your phantoms spent running. Slots are concurrent active phantoms. You pay whether you used the hours or not.

Stekpad

• Free: 300 credits/month, 1 active dataset
• Starter pack: 9 € for 2,000 credits, 12-month expiry, no subscription
• Builder pack: 29 € for 10,000 credits, 12-month expiry
• Pro pack: 99 € for 50,000 credits, 12-month expiry
• Cloud Starter: 29 €/month, 10,000 included credits + scheduling, webhooks, monitoring
• Cloud Growth: 99 €/month, 50,000 credits + team seats

A scrape call costs 1 credit. An extract call costs 5 credits. An enrichment costs 1 credit per row. 10,000 credits in the Builder pack maps to roughly 2,000 enriched rows or 10,000 plain scrapes. For most small growth teams, 29 € for 10,000 credits (no monthly commitment, 12 months to use) lines up with what PhantomBuster charges 69 € a month for. See the full pricing page for the breakdown.

If your workload is genuinely continuous — hundreds of scheduled phantoms running every hour — the Cloud Growth plan at 99 € is the right comparison, and the cost is similar. For bursty, exploratory, "I want to enrich 500 companies this week and another 500 next month" workloads, the pack pricing is dramatically cheaper.

Output model: CSV versus dataset

PhantomBuster outputs CSV. Each phantom run writes a CSV file to your account, you download it, you upload it to the next tool in your stack. Some phantoms can push to Google Sheets directly via integrations, and the pro plans support webhooks. The file is the output.

Stekpad outputs a dataset. Every `scrape`, `crawl`, `extract` and `search` call stores rows in a dataset you can re-query, re-enrich, export, and re-run with the stored source_spec. The dataset is the product, the CSV is a view. You can export to CSV any time with one API call, but the canonical shape is rows that keep growing.

That matters because the second-most-common growth ops task (after "run the scrape") is "re-run the scrape next month with updated data". In PhantomBuster you get a new CSV each time and you merge them by hand (or with a script). In Stekpad the dataset updates in place, bumps _scraped_version on changed rows, adds new ones, and fires a row.changed webhook if you asked for one. The `crawl` reference documents the full dedup and versioning model.

MCP and the agent workflow

PhantomBuster has no MCP server. You cannot drive it from Claude Desktop in plain English. You can trigger phantoms from Zapier or from their API, but the shape is "call a phantom with parameters and wait for a file".

Stekpad ships an MCP server in every plan, free included. Install the Stekpad MCP in Claude Desktop, Cursor, or Claude Code, and Claude gains five tools — scrape, crawl, map, extract, search — plus all 19 enrichers. You can ask Claude to "search for the top 20 SaaS invoicing tools, scrape each, extract pricing, and build a dataset", and it runs the whole pipeline in a single chat message. See MCP explained for growth teams for the full worked example.

If your team already uses Claude Desktop as a daily driver, the MCP integration is the reason you switch. It turns your scraping stack into a chat-driven workflow instead of a dashboard you have to remember to check.

Enrichers: 19 in-house versus third-party dependencies

PhantomBuster has a catalog of enrichment phantoms that mostly lean on third-party data vendors: Hunter, Dropcontact, Clearbit, NumVerify, Proxycurl. Every enrichment call ends up at a partner's API, gets re-billed, and the data passes through their stack before it returns to yours.

Stekpad ships 19 enrichers in-house. Read the full list in the enrichers catalog:

• ai_extract, ai_summary, ai_classify, ai_translate, ai_clean, ai_embed — LLM-native enrichers on Workers AI
• find_emails, find_phones, find_socials, find_tech_stack, find_company_info, find_favicon — web-derived from the row's URL
• email_verify, whois, dns — validation via direct protocol calls
• phone_enrich (libphonenumber), company_enrich (OpenCorporates, Companies House, SIRENE, EDGAR), email_finder (pattern detection), geocode (Nominatim)

Zero third-party data vendors in v1. Your scraped data never leaves our stack. That is not a pose, it is the architecture. Cloud plans unlock an opt-in linkedin_enrich via Proxycurl for teams that need it, explicitly labeled, priced at 12 credits per row.

Migration map: which phantom → which Stekpad verb

If you are switching from PhantomBuster, here is what maps to what. This covers the ~20 most popular phantoms.

• LinkedIn Profile Scraper → `scrape` with use_session: "linkedin.com" and a schema. See the LinkedIn guide.
• LinkedIn Company Scraper → same, on the company URL.
• LinkedIn Search Export → search on a Sales Nav URL with use_session, then extract on each result.
• LinkedIn Auto Connect → not supported. We do not do actions that write to third-party sites. This is by design.
• Google Maps Search Export → search + extract with the schema shown in the Google Maps tutorial.
• Instagram Profile Scraper → scrape with use_session: "instagram.com" plus schema.
• Twitter/X Profile Scraper → scrape with use_session: "x.com".
• Company Website Scraper → scrape with schema, or crawl if you want the whole site.
• Email Finder → find_emails enricher + email_finder enricher + email_verify enricher, chained.
• Phone Number Finder → find_phones + phone_enrich.
• Domain WHOIS Lookup → whois enricher.
• Tech Stack Detector → find_tech_stack enricher.
• Google Search Scraper → search verb.
• SERP Scraper → search verb with num_results and country.
• Site Map → map verb.
• Page Content Monitoring → crawl with webhook_events: ["row.changed"].
• CSV Enricher → upload a CSV to a dataset, attach an enrichment pipeline, done.

The phantoms that do not map are the action phantoms — auto-connect, auto-follow, auto-comment, auto-DM. Stekpad does not ship those and will not. They are outside the ToS envelope we are willing to build inside. If that is 80% of your PhantomBuster usage, we are not the alternative for you, and we will tell you that in the sales chat too.

Honest verdict

PhantomBuster wins if: you want a dashboard with 100 pre-built flows, you run phantoms overnight while your laptop is off, your workflow is heavily LinkedIn-action-based (connect, follow, DM), and you are okay with your session cookie sitting on their servers.

Stekpad wins if: you want a real API and SDKs, you want the scraping to run in your own browser with zero cookie exfiltration, you want pay-as-you-go pricing that does not bill you for months you do not use, you want MCP integration with Claude / Cursor / Claude Code, you want in-house enrichers instead of third-party data vendors, and you want your data to land in a queryable dataset instead of a dumped CSV.

One tool runs in their cloud with your cookies on their disk. The other runs in your Chrome with your cookies in RAM where they belong. Pick based on that, not on the pricing table.

Next steps

• Read the Stekpad pricing page for the full credit-pack and Cloud-plan breakdown.
• Browse the enrichers catalog to see the 19 in-house enrichers you can chain into pipelines.
• Install the Stekpad MCP server in Claude Desktop and test a scrape from a chat window.
• If you were using PhantomBuster primarily for LinkedIn, read the safe LinkedIn scraping guide.
• For the Zapier angle of the same story, read why we replaced Zapier with MCP.