Proxycurl Alternatives: Best LinkedIn Data APIs After the Shutdown (2026)

Proxycurl shut down on July 4, 2025 after LinkedIn Corp. v. Nubela, leaving teams that relied on its person and company endpoints scrambling for a replacement. The best Proxycurl alternative depends on what you actually used it for — profile enrichment, company data, or search — but for most developers the closest fit is a live third-party LinkedIn API. Here are the best options in 2026, ranked, and how to migrate.

Why Proxycurl shut down

Proxycurl was a popular API for pulling LinkedIn person and company data as structured JSON. In 2024–25 LinkedIn pursued legal action (LinkedIn Corp. v. Nubela Pte. Ltd.), and Proxycurl ceased operations on July 4, 2025. Existing API keys stopped working, so anyone with Proxycurl in production needs a replacement that maps cleanly to their old calls — ideally one built with a clearer compliance posture.

What to look for in a Proxycurl alternative

• Endpoint parity: can it return a person and a company profile from a LinkedIn URL, the way Proxycurl did?
• Freshness: live reads at request time vs a pre-collected dataset that can be stale.
• Coverage beyond enrichment: search, Sales Navigator, and messaging if you need to act, not just read.
• Compliance & reliability: SOC 2, a DPA, versioned REST, and a company that takes operating posture seriously.
• Migration effort: how closely its request/response shape maps to your existing Proxycurl integration.

The best Proxycurl alternatives in 2026

1. Edges — closest drop-in for developers

Edges is a LinkedIn Actions API: one REST call returns a person or company profile as structured JSON, read live, with managed identities (no LinkedIn account needed for reads). It covers what Proxycurl did — profile and company enrichment, URL resolution — plus search, Sales Navigator, signals, and messaging, so you're not stitching several vendors together. Versioned REST, SOC 2 Type II, usage-based pricing. See the Proxycurl → Edges endpoint mapping for a direct migration path. Best if you want the closest developer replacement and room to grow beyond enrichment.

2. People Data Labs — best for bulk person/company datasets

PDL provides large person and company datasets via API and flat files, aggregated from many sources. It's a fit if you need to enrich big databases in bulk and are comfortable with multi-source data that isn't read live from LinkedIn at request time. Less suited to real-time, LinkedIn-specific lookups or to acting on LinkedIn.

3. Coresignal — best for analytics & ML at scale

Coresignal ships large pre-collected B2B datasets (people, companies, jobs) for teams training models or building market intelligence. Great volume, but it's data-as-a-service rather than live LinkedIn actions — see Edges vs Coresignal if you need to act on LinkedIn, not just query a dataset.

4. Bright Data — best for general-purpose scraping infrastructure

Bright Data is a proxy and dataset platform covering the whole web, with LinkedIn among many targets. Powerful if you need broad scraping infrastructure and are willing to manage more moving parts; heavier than a dedicated LinkedIn API for a focused enrichment use case (Edges vs Bright Data).

5. Other options

Smaller LinkedIn-data providers — Crustdata, ScrapIn, Piloterr, and others — each cover part of Proxycurl's surface. Evaluate them on endpoint parity, freshness, and compliance using the checklist above before committing a production integration.

How to migrate off Proxycurl

1. Inventory the Proxycurl endpoints you actually call (person profile, company profile, URL lookups) and the fields you consume downstream.
2. Map each to the new API's action and response fields, and adapt any field-name differences in your parsing layer.
3. Run both in parallel on a sample to diff outputs, then cut over once coverage and freshness check out.

Common questions

Is Proxycurl still working?

No. Proxycurl ceased operations on July 4, 2025 and API keys no longer work. If you had it in production, you need an alternative.

What is the closest drop-in replacement for Proxycurl?

For developers who used Proxycurl's person and company endpoints, a live LinkedIn API like Edges is the closest fit — it returns the same kinds of profiles as JSON and adds search, Sales Navigator, and messaging. There's a published endpoint-to-action mapping to speed migration.

Are there free Proxycurl alternatives?

Most production-grade LinkedIn data APIs are paid, but several (Edges included) offer free credits to test coverage before you commit. Free scrapers exist but tend to break and risk account restrictions at scale.

Migrating off Proxycurl? See the Proxycurl → Edges migration guide — endpoint mapping, live reads, and 100 free credits to start.