10 Best LinkedIn Automation Tools According To Business Experts

It’s not a secret that LinkedIn takes the winning position among all the sources for lead generation. In fact, about 96% of B2B marketers use this platform for sales and marketing efforts. 

Why so many?

This giant offers vast opportunities for networking with people, building meaningful connections with businesses all over the world, and thus finding potential customers for your solutions. 

However, prospecting on LinkedIn isn’t a five-minute job. It takes time and nerves. Luckily, the world has seen lots of LinkedIn automation tools appear, tailored to ease your pain and help you get most of this lead generation machine. 

What are LinkedIn automation tools?

LinkedIn automation tools are software that keeps you away from manual work of finding contacts according to specific parameters, sending connection requests, following up prospects, or doing any other activity on LinkedIn. 

Benefits of using LinkedIn automation tools

Let’s be honest: instead of washing dozens of dishes with your hands, you’ll wish to simply switch on the dishwasher and let it do the job for you. The same goes for LinkedIn automation tools:

They spare your resources

LinkedIn automation platforms save much of your time that you would otherwise spend on finding your perfect leads. That’s probably their main benefit, yet not the only one. 

They provide personalization options

LinkedIn automation tools can help you personalize your outreach so that your prospects will get human-like messages with a relevant offer no matter how many of them are on your list. 

They help you with outreach reporting

LinkedIn automation tools track your performance, such as the number of replies and conversions, so you can get regular reports on your campaigns. 

They help A/B test your LinkedIn campaigns

Owing to A/B testing features, they allow you to experiment with outreach templates and analyze which of them bring you more replies.

Weak points of LinkedIn automation tools

In spite of the perks you’ll get from using LinkedIn automation tools, there is one big problem — LinkedIn poses restrictions as to the number of sent invitations and overall connections, hence disapproving of automation as it commonly fosters bulk connections and other activities. 

LinkedIn restrictions and safety

To protect the overall member experience, since March, the platform doesn’t allow sending too many invitation requests within a short period or keeping too many pending invitations. Otherwise, your LinkedIn account may be temporarily restricted. The worst outcome is that you may be completely banned from the platform, so all your time and effort go out the window. 

Keep in mind: You can now send ONLY about 100 invitations per week, which is approximately 20-25 connection requests per day, and you can’t afford to have more than 70% of pending invitations.

That is why automation tools are not safe in the eyes of LinkedIn. So you should be careful because:

• The history of your web operations is kept in the browser cache, which makes these tools easier to detect. 
• Working within a sales team presupposes you’ll use different IP every time you log in. This raises red flags for LinkedIn. 

With these drawbacks in mind, you should find the most reliable automation tools and know how to use them safely, without falling into the LinkedIn jail. 

And we’re here to help you with your choice. We asked business experts to share their experiences. Having received about 30 responses, we then compiled a list of the eight most popular LinkedIn automation tools and added some tips on how to use them safely. 

Let’s dive in! 

1. Snov.io LI Prospect Finder

This tool isn’t tailored for outreach on LinkedIn directly, but it will help you get emails of valuable contacts on this platform and reach out to them, bypassing LinkedIn restrictions. Meanwhile, Snov.io integration  with such tools as Phantombuster will allow you to automate LinkedIn social selling from the beginning till the deal closing stage.

Features:

• Compatibility with a LinkedIn free account – the tool works on LinkedIn’s Search page, Person’s profile page, and Company profile page.
• Push notifications – you’ll always be informed whenever any tool updates occur.
• Other Snov.io tools included in the price – if you have a Snov.io account, you can use LI Prospect Finder together with Email Verifier, Email Drip Campaigns for outreach, and sales CRM.
• Powerful integration capabilities (with other LinkedIn automation services, e.g. Phantombuster). 

How you can deal with LinkedIn limits and restrictions using Snov.io LI Prospect Finder:

According to Warmy.io Head Of Sales Max Tulenko, 

You can start with an advanced search using LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which will enable you to use LinkedIn capabilities safely. Then launch LI Prospect Finder from Snov.io on the results page to get prospects’ email addresses and finally reach out to them with an email using Snov.io Email Drip Campaigns. This way,you’ll avoid the routine of connecting to your prospects directly on LinkedIn.

Let’s look at how easy it is: 

1. Search for targeted prospects using advanced features of Sales Navigator. 

2. Use the previously downloaded Snov.io LI Prospect Finder Chrome extension on the results page, find emails of the selected prospects, and save them to the prospect list in your Snov.io CRM.

3. Launch an email drip campaign to reach out to the list of prospects you’ve just found on LinkedIn via email, without sending them connection requests directly.

Pricing:

You can save up to 50 email addresses with Snov.io LI Prospect Finder tool on its forever free plan. To get more credits, choose among the following plans:

• $39 for 1,000 credits.
• $99 for 5,000 credits.
• $189 for 20,000 credits.
• $369 for 50,000 credits.
• $738 for 100,000 credits.

2. Expandi

Being a cloud-based platform, Expandi has presented itself as one of the safest LinkedIn automation tools with lots of advanced features to expand your prospect list. Not a surprise it is one of the most popular tools according to our research. 

Grant Aldrich, the founder and CEO at Online Degree, considers this tool the most reliable solution:

The best LinkedIn automation tool I’ve found is Expandi. Since it’s cloud-based software, it uses a dedicated IP address, works on the back-end, and gives access to advanced personalization, which boosts conversion rates.

Features:

• Dedicated country-based IP that allows using the tool wherever you are, still having the same virtual location. (If you are wondering what dedicated IP is, it’s an address that one sender can only use. It involves many direct benefits, such as quickly troubleshooting deliverability issues.)
• Multiple accounts you can manage.
• Advanced dynamic personalization that allows pulling images from prospect’s profiles and including them into messages.
• Integration with CRMs and other marketing tools.

How you can deal with LinkedIn limits and restrictions using Expandi:

You can use its auto warm-up feature that gradually increases daily limits, mimicking human behavior.

The tool offers smart limits that ensure you don’t exceed the number of connection requests and messages per day required by LinkedIn.

Its functionality presupposes random delay between activities that helps deceit LinkedIn algorithms.

Besides, instead of sending connection requests, you can use Expandi open InMail campaigns (a premium LinkedIn subscription is needed in this case). Here’s how the service recommends doing that:

1. Go to a LinkedIn event to narrow down your lead generation to a highly specific audience.
2. Scrape the list of leads with the help of Expandi. 
3. Use Lyne.ai for writing personalized first lines based on the profiles of your leads.
4. Create a connector campaign on Expandi filtering those accounts who can receive open InMails. 
5. Start sending InMails, bypassing LinkedIn restrictions, and not worrying about 100 invitation requests. 

Pricing:

There is only one pricing plan at $99/month. You can start with a 7-day free trial. 

3. LinkedHelper

That’s the case when the name speaks for itself — LinkedHelper is ambitious to make your LinkedIn activity more effective with its list of versatile features.

According to Aaron Agius, the co-founder and managing director of Louder Online, 

LinkedHelper is all about natural integration with LinkedIn and maintaining relationships. Its automation features cover the surface level LinkedIn capabilities, which work just fine with limits and restrictions.

Features:

• Automatic connection requests and removals.
• Personalization possibilities: personalized first message, follow-ups, endorsements, and invitations to join a group, to follow your company page, or to attend your LinkedIn event.
• Profiles auto-visitor that allows visiting a selection of LinkedIn profiles one or several times and getting profile views in return.
• In-built CRM for managing leads.
• Outreach templates you can easily customize.
• Outstanding integration capabilities.

How you can deal with LinkedIn limits and restrictions using LinkedHelper:

The tool offers smart human mimicking: it clicks buttons or types messages without inserting any of its code into LinkedIn.

Its smart action limits allow setting maximum allowed actions for invites, messages, and follow-ups.

Its integration with Snov.io allows you to find the email addresses of prospects even if they are not available on a profile page and send email messages instead of contacting prospects directly on LinkedIn.

Pricing:

Linked Helper offers a 14-day free trial, after which you’ll have to pay $15 a month to access the app. The price per month might be lower if you order a 3-month, 6-month, or 12-month plan.

4. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

This tool is tailored for existing active users of LinkedIn interested in advanced features.

Nathan Murphy, the co-founder of QuizBreaker, considers it one of the greatest solutions for sales professionals.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a favorite tool of ours. It helps us engage with different prospects on the platform with ease, and the many features that filter out irrelevant groups help us boost conversions in the end stages by only focusing on the leads that matter.

Features:

• Advanced Lead and Company Search that allows finding more relevant prospects.
• Lead Recommendations that help find the right people with suggestions customized for your needs. 
• CRM integration that lets you automatically save leads and prospects and connect your activity to your CRM.
• Real-time updates that allow you to learn about the changes happening to your leads and accounts.
• Notes and Tags that help you organize your leads and accounts with tags and take notes that can be linked back to CRM.
• Smart Links that let your prospects see your content without downloading and let you track the views in real-time.
• TeamLink that lets you connect with prospects through your company’s combined network.

What about the restrictions?

Sales Navigator claims to boost your Social Selling Index by 20%, which means fewer warnings, more freedom to do sales, and eventually more chances to close a deal.

Meanwhile, its InMail messages allow contacting LinkedIn members even if you’re not connected to them, which will keep you away from exceeding your daily and weekly invitation request limits. 

Besides, LinkedIn Sales Navigator can work great in combination with other tools. For instance, by combining it with Snov.io LI Prospect Finder, as mentioned above, you can get a long list of relevant prospects, find their email addresses, and reach them via email, bypassing LinkedIn contact invitations. 

Pricing:

LinkedIn Sales Navigator offers three plans:

• Professional — $79.99/month.
• Team — $103.33/month. 
• Enterprise — Custom package.

Besides, you can start with a 30-day free trial and cancel whenever you wish. 

5. Dux-Soup

Who knows what Dux-Soup owners wanted to say using the pun for the name, but if to assume that ‘Dux’ means a ‘leader’ in Latin, the guys didn’t wish to be modest about the tool’s potential. Well, and they did it right. This is indeed one of the leading tools for LinkedIn automation.

According to Miklos Zoltan, CEO & cybersecurity researcher at Privacy Affairs:

You can use Dux-Soup to automatically connect, message, or InMail prospects after you’ve generated prospect lists. You can keep track of prospects by adding comments and tags to profiles, which can then be exported to your CRM.

Features:

• Automatization of your LinkedIn activity: the tool views prospect profiles, endorses their skills, and follows their behavior.
• LinkedIn drip campaigns feature that helps you automate your outreach by sending first-contact messages and follow-ups on your behalf.
• Prospect management that lets you easily find previously tagged LinkedIn profiles for follow-ups and upload your list of profiles for microtargeted sales campaigns.
• Downloading Profile Details feature that lets you find relevant LinkedIn profile data and upload it into your CRM, growing your lead generation and management capacity. 
• Availability in 9 languages and a highly responsive support team.

How you can deal with LinkedIn limits and restrictions using Dux-Soup:

To make your activity on LinkedIn human-like, you can randomize waiting time between actions and schedule operations.

Don’t hurry up sending contact invitations. You can use the Dux-Soup Visit profile feature that will help you make prospects aware of you and your brand and record their details. Then export their list and just contact them outside LinkedIn, say with email. As an option, you can upload this list to your Snov.io account and reach out to your prospects by launching an email drip campaign. This will allow you to play a fair game following LinkedIn regulations.

Pricing:

Dux-Soup has three plans: 

• A forever free Starter plan (it doesn’t offer an auto-engage feature, though).
• Professional plan at $14.99.
• Turbo plan at $55.

6. Zopto

Zopto developers call it the #1 social selling tool for LinkedIn and focus mainly on safe automation.

Meanwhile, Kristaps Brencans, CMO at On The Map, considers Zopto a top choice for lead generation on LinkedIn:

It’s a tool that helps you easily narrow down a target customer audience with selective filters such as location or industry. You can also easily manage engagement with users and choose the way you want to communicate and interact with the leads you create. Finally, Zopto has fantastic means for tracking data and statistics, enabling you to know at any point exactly where your lead generation progress is on LinkedIn.

Features:

• Dedicated country-based IP that allows accessing the tool from any device.
• Customer Filtering that allows you to filter prospects by location, industry, company size, title, seniority level, and more. 
• Levels of Engagement feature that lets you match the desired level of engagement with different prospects like connection invites, message sequences, free InMails, etc.
• Managing Leads feature that allows tracking your leads on your live dashboard and sharing information with team members owing to multiple profile management.
• Automated campaigns & messaging that lets you program your outreach campaigns, A/B test them and get alerts when prospects reply.
• Integrations with marketing automation and CRM tools, and thousands of integrations through Zapier and webhooks.

How you can deal with LinkedIn limits and restrictions using Zopto:

You can use the Zopto Email enrichment feature that allows you to get business emails of prospects and contact them outside LinkedIn messages.

You can set the connection invite and message limits not to worry about LinkedIn regulations.

You can use the Post feature to schedule your content posting on a regular basis, establishing thought leadership, brand awareness, and increasing your SSI.

Using the Zopto InMail feature, you can send InMails to LinkedIn premium users with an open profile instead of inviting them to connect to you. 

Pricing:

Zopto offers 3 plans:

Personal plan at $215/month.

Grow plan at $395/month.

Agency plan at $895/month.

7. Phantombuster

Phantombuster has also turned out to be one of the most beloved LinkedIn automation tools as per our research. This code-free software offers dozens of phantoms (automations) to help you scrape audiences, generate leads, and boost growth.

Christen da Costa, the founder of Gadget Review and co-CEO at Superlative, calls Phantombuster one of the most valuable tools for outreach and lead generation:

Phantombuster allows for data-scraping, which circumvents some of LinkedIn limits. It helps us get the information we need without coming up against LinkedIn’s restrictions.

Features:

• LinkedIn Scraping that helps you collect every data from a list of LinkedIn profiles, company pages’ information, scrape LinkedIn profiles, names & positions of up to 2,500+ members of a LinkedIn group.
• LinkedIn URL Finder that helps you find LinkedIn profile URLs from first and last names and company page URLs from a list of company names.
• LinkedIn Search Export that helps scrape and export the results of a LinkedIn Search automatically to a Google/Excel Spreadsheet or a JSON file.
• LinkedIn Network Booster that allows you to auto-connect on LinkedIn by sending invitations with a personalized message to a list of users.
• LinkedIn Message Sender that automatically sends personalized messages to your LinkedIn connections.
• LinkedIn activities automation — auto liking, auto endorsement, auto following, auto accepting of invitations, auto commenting, auto posting, auto connection withdrawing, auto invitations to join groups, and much more.
• Sales Navigator Search Export that helps you collect LinkedIn Sales Navigator search results and export them to a spreadsheet.

How you can deal with LinkedIn limits and restrictions using Phantombuster:

Phantombuster has an option to set the maximum connections and messages you can send to your prospects, hence helping you control LinkedIn limits. 

Meanwhile, you can use multiple accounts across your sales team for getting a sufficient volume of connections. 

To contact targeted prospects without sending them invitation requests, just get their professional emails with Phantombuster LinkedIn profile scraper and export the data into an Excel file. Then get in touch with these contacts with email outreach tools such as Snov.io. 

Pricing:

Phantombuster offers a 14-day free trial so that you can evaluate its features. Paid plans start at $30 per month.

8. Octopus CRM

This is an all-in-one LinkedIn automation CRM aimed at improving prospecting and lead generation on this platform. Basically, it’s a Chrome extension that you need to download and integrate with your LinkedIn account.

According to Shane Barker, a digital marketing consultant, 

The ease of use that this tool provides, along with the level of efficiency with which you can automate tasks is impressive. You no longer need to spend hours browsing LinkedIn profiles and trying to make connections when software can do it for you. Moreover, their customer support team is always happy to help and provide all the guidance you need to start using this tool effectively. They also provide tons of useful resources that you can use to learn more about the tool and how to use it.

Features:

• Automated (personalized) connection requests you can send to 2nd and 3rd level connections on LinkedIn.
• Messaging 1st level connections in bulk.
• Automatically endorsing up to 7 skills on profiles of your LinkedIn contacts.
• Visiting hundreds of profiles automatically.
• Personal LinkedIn lead generation funnel for managing prospects.
• Tracking your LinkedIn performance.
• Import / Export possibilities
• Integrations with Zapier and Hubspot.

How you can deal with LinkedIn limits and restrictions using Octopus CRM:

Octopus CRM allows you to take control of your LinkedIn performance and track your SSI score. Just like with Dux-Soup, you can avoid sending connection invites by just viewing bulk prospect’s profiles, adding the prospect list to your CRM, and exporting the data (first name, last name, email, website, LinkedIn URL, company, etc.) of your processed users to the CSV file. 

When you have a list of emails, reach out to your prospects outside LinkedIn, e.g., via an email campaign.

Pricing:

Octopus CRM offers four pricing plans, from $9.99 per month for the Starter plan and up to $39.99 per month for the Unlimited plan. All plans offer a free trial option for 7 days.

9. We-Connect

We-Connect is a cloud-based LinkedIn automation tool focused on safe and affordable prospecting and outreach on this platform with abundant features.

According to Joshua T. Boswell, CEO and Business Growth and Marketing Consultant at Strahes: 

This software is very simple to use and saves us so much time and money! I’ve been able to grow my business significantly in the past month because of this software – without spending hours trying to connect, message, and follow up with people who never respond. The live chat customer support has been really helpful in resolving all our issues.

Features:

• A dedicated IP address that allows using the service from any device.
• Intuitive smart sequences – Set up one campaign that does everything from visiting a profile, liking a post, and inviting to connect to following the contact. 
• Free InMails to open profiles.
• Easy user management – Add many users to your account and monitor the performance of your LinkedIn outreach campaigns from a single dashboard.
• Free support and help library with answers to frequently asked questions, articles, videos, and best practices.

How you can deal with LinkedIn limits and restrictions using We-Connect:

We-Connect is a cloud-based service, which is already safer than browser tools. It has Limit detection and Safe mode, allowing you to control your limits. Meanwhile, the platform offers randomized delay between actions, which helps you look natural to LinkedIn algorithms.

Moreover, the free InMails feature enables you to message open profiles without sending connections to these accounts, which will reduce the number of connections you send daily.

Pricing:

We-Connect provides a 14-day free trial and a single pay-as-you-go plan that costs $49/month.

10. Dripify

Dripify is a multifunctional cloud-based LinkedIn automation tool designed to help sales teams improve LinkedIn prospecting and close more deals. 

According to Brian Hartman, a Managing Member and President at Pharus Global:

Dripify has helped our team with lead generation through LinkedIn tremendously. It makes it simple to use and it is on autopilot. I would highly recommend it to all business owners.

Features:

• Dedicated country-based IP that allows accessing the tool from any device.
• Complete performance automation – you can run LinkedIn lead generation on complete autopilot, even if your browser is closed and your PC is switched off.
• LinkedIn drip campaigns – build a LinkedIn sales funnel using a variety of LinkedIn actions.
• Data export – download your leads’ email addresses and phone numbers.
• Analytics – track and evaluate campaign performance and conversion rates.
• Team management – onboard team members and watch their statistics from your control panel.
• Integrations – connect Dripify with 1, 000+ software like Google Sheets, Hubspot CRM, Zoho, SalesForce, Asana, and more through Zapier with just a few clicks.

How you can deal with LinkedIn limits and restrictions using Dripify:

Dripify boasts of an extra safety algorithm that mimics human behavior (random delays between page views and button clicks). 

In addition, Dripify’s activity control – an advanced safety feature – ensures gradual growth of your LinkedIn performance and can adjust your daily connecting and messaging limits to prevent your account from being flagged by Linkedin for excessive activity.

What is more, Dripify can send connection requests by email, bypassing LinkedIn weekly invite limits.

Pricing:

Dripify offers a 7-day free trial and three paid plans:

• Basic — $59/month.
• Pro — $79/month.
• Advanced — $99/month.

Tips on how to work with LinkedIn automation tools

Even if you’ve chosen a LinkedIn automation tool, you still should keep in mind LinkedIn restrictions and set reasonable limits for the number of daily connections, messages, or searches. 

Here are some tips on how to use LinkedIn automation safely:

Choose the tool that allows setting limits

You should control your automation. Say, if LinkedIn notices a suspicious activity at 3 am according to your local time, your credibility and safety will be at risk. So, automation must be smart. Look for tools that encompass the ability to set maximum daily limits and offer clever scheduling to make it seem like the process is run by a human being. 

Set your LinkedIn range

To use automation safely, set your LinkedIn Range (LR) and don’t exceed it. The perfect LR makes 3-5% of your total connections. So, if you have only 1,000 contacts, your maximum connection requests shouldn’t exceed 20.

Benefit from compound connection growth technique

If you don’t have a considerable number of connections, don’t hurry up to invite every Tom, Dick, and Harry. You can set your automation tool to visit up to 100 profiles a day without sending connection requests. Remember that some of these contacts will view your profile in return. 

Provided you have an appealing profile, this can result in getting up to 10-15% inbound connections of the total number of profiles you visited.

Ensure the tool offers personalization options

No need to repeat that personalization is everything when it comes to successful outreach. If you are choosing the tool that automates your communication with the prospect, make sure there’s an in-built personalization option. 

For instance, if you use Snov.io, its email drip campaigns allow you to personalize your message by adding variables both to the subject line and email body.

Delete old connection requests

You won’t open the door to the stranger, will you? The same with LinkedIn users. Some won’t wish to accept your connection requests, and that’s okay. 

But it’s not okay if you don’t delete these old connections where you received no responses, as it might indicate that you are trying to connect to people you are not acquainted with. So, please, don’t forget to do regular LinkedIn cleaning, withdrawing the connection invites that haven’t been accepted.

Stay active

Never rely solely on the automation tool to find contacts for you. LinkedIn likes it when you are active, writing original content, participating in discussions, liking posts, and so on. Ensure you are a real person with expertise worth sharing to be given the green light to build meaningful connections.

Wrapping up

LinkedIn automation tools are a real finding when it comes to bulk prospecting on LinkedIn. However, this platform has its own rules of the game, which you need to comply with to play it fairly. Unfortunately, LinkedIn algorithms don’t ally with automation tools, so to be adrift, you should use them wisely.

We hope the expert opinions on the above-mentioned tools will help you choose the right solution for your business. 

And if you are looking for a reliable prospecting companion, Snov.io is full of enthusiasm to help.