A good LinkedIn prospecting tool takes that work off your plate. But they don’t all do the same job. Some help you target the right people, some automate your outreach, and some handle the whole prospecting process, from picking your audience to running the conversation.
This comparison walks you through the five tools sales teams use most, with their features, their limits and their pricing. To get a profile’s phone number, read our comparison of phone number finder Chrome extensions.
The 5 best LinkedIn prospecting tools at a glance
The prices below are the starting plans each vendor listed in October 2026, per user (or per account) per month. Check them before you commit, as they change often.
| Tool | Type | Channels | Starting price | Free trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Waalaxy | LinkedIn automation | LinkedIn, email | €19/month | 14 days |
| Waalaxy AI | AI prospecting agent | €100 / $100 per month per LinkedIn account (20% off yearly) | 14 days, with or without a card | |
| Sales Navigator | Search and targeting | LinkedIn (InMail) | €90.74/month billed yearly (Core) | 1 month, card required |
| La Growth Machine | Multichannel sequences | LinkedIn, email, calls, X | €60/month per identity | 14 days, no card |
| Lemlist | Multichannel cold email | Email, LinkedIn, calls, SMS | $109/month on Multichannel $87/month billed yearly | 14 days |
How to choose the right LinkedIn prospecting tool
The right tool depends on how you prospect on LinkedIn, how many people you reach out to and how much time you want to spend on it. Three things make the difference.
1. How much you want to hand off
A LinkedIn automation tool runs your playbook: you choose who to target and write the messages, and it sends them for you. An AI sales agent builds the playbook too: it suggests the audience, finds the prospects, writes every message and replies when prospects answer.
| Targeting tool | Automation tool | AI prospecting agent | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Example | Sales Navigator | Waalaxy, La Growth Machine, lemlist | Waalaxy AI |
| Who picks the audience? | You | You | The agent suggests, you approve |
| Who writes the messages? | You | You (with templates) | The agent, one prospect at a time |
| Who sends and follows up? | You | The tool | The agent |
| Who handles replies? | You | You | The agent, then you take over |
2. The channels you need
If LinkedIn alone fills your calendar, there’s no point paying for email, SMS or WhatsApp. If part of your audience never replies on LinkedIn, a tool that can switch to email starts to pay off. And for prospects who’ve shown interest, nothing beats a phone call.
3. Staying within LinkedIn’s limits
LinkedIn caps connection requests at around 200 per week per account, whatever tool you use. A good tool respects those limits and spreads activity across the day. Be wary of anything that promises thousands of requests a week: it’s the fastest way to get your account restricted. Waalaxy covers the rules in its guide to the LinkedIn weekly invitation limit.
The 5 best LinkedIn prospecting tools in detail
Each review covers who the tool is for, what it does, its strengths, its limits and its pricing.
1. Waalaxy: best for automating LinkedIn outreach without the complexity
Best for: sales reps, founders, recruiters and agencies who want to prospect on LinkedIn every week without spending hours on it.
Waalaxy is one of the most widely used LinkedIn outreach automation tools, with over 200,000 users and a 4.8/5 rating across more than 5,000 reviews. You import your prospects, pick a ready-made sequence, write your messages, and Waalaxy sends the connection requests, messages and follow-ups for you, from the cloud. 75% of its customers had never done automated prospecting before. You can launch a campaign in under 10 minutes.
Key features
- Automated campaigns: profile visits, connection requests with or without a note, messages and follow-ups.
- LinkedIn-then-email sequences to follow up with people who don’t reply (Business plan).
- Email Finder, plus Waami, an AI assistant that helps you write your messages.
- Auto-import from Sales Navigator, post comments or your profile visitors, and native HubSpot and Pipedrive integrations.
Strengths: quick to learn, LinkedIn limits built in, real human support. Limits: sequences come from a library of templates, email is only on the Business plan, and the Inbox is a paid add-on.
Pricing: Pro at €19/month (300 connection requests a month), Advanced at €49/month (800 requests), Business at €69/month (email sequences and 500 Email Finder credits). 14-day free trial.
2. Waalaxy AI: best for prospecting when you’ve never been trained to
Best for: founders, freelancers, consultants and small agencies who know how to sell their offer but have never been trained in prospecting.
Waalaxy AI is an autonomous LinkedIn outreach agent. It’s a standalone product, separate from Waalaxy, with its own app and its own subscription. Where Waalaxy runs your playbook, Waalaxy AI builds it, drawing on the strategies that work best across more than 100 million LinkedIn messages sent through Waalaxy over 7 years.
How the agent works
- It reads your website and suggests 2 to 4 target audiences. You pick one, along with your goal, such as booking a call.
- It finds the prospects itself, with no Sales Navigator required, and filters out anyone who doesn’t fit.
- It writes a personalized sequence for each prospect based on their profile: a connection request, then three messages.
- As soon as a prospect replies, it runs the conversation and hands it back to you when it’s time to close.
Strengths: it covers the whole job, you don’t need any prospecting experience, and you choose whether to approve every message or let the agent send on its own. You can step into any conversation whenever you want. Limits: one channel only (LinkedIn, no email), and LinkedIn limits are shared with Waalaxy when both run on the same account.
Pricing: a single plan at €100 / $100 per month per connected LinkedIn account, 20% off with yearly billing, with unlimited users and agents. 14-day free trial, with or without a credit card.
3. LinkedIn Sales Navigator: best for precise targeting
Best for: teams doing account-based selling who need to find the right decision-makers at the right companies.
Sales Navigator is LinkedIn’s paid plan for sales. It doesn’t automate anything: it’s a search and targeting tool, far more precise than standard LinkedIn search, and it’s often paired with an automation tool that imports its lead lists.
- 50+ advanced search filters for leads and accounts.
- Lead and account lists, alerts and buyer intent signals.
- 50 InMails a month, plus AI summaries of accounts and leads (Advanced plan).
Strengths: data comes straight from LinkedIn, so it stays current, and the targeting is the most precise on the market. Limits: no automation, expensive for a solo user, and no native lead export.
Pricing: Core at €120.99/month billed monthly, or about €90.74/month billed yearly. Advanced at about €141/month billed yearly. Advanced Plus on request. One-month free trial, credit card required.
4. La Growth Machine: best for advanced multichannel sequences
Best for: growth teams and agencies that want to build workflows across several channels.
La Growth Machine is a French multichannel prospecting platform. It enriches your leads, then runs them through workflows that combine LinkedIn, email, calls and X, with conditions and A/B tests.
- Customizable multichannel workflows.
- Waterfall email enrichment across several data providers.
- Unified inbox, AI voice messages and HubSpot and Pipedrive sync (Ultimate plan).
Strengths: very complete for multichannel outreach, built-in enrichment, and a trial with no card required. Limits: steeper learning curve, costs climb with the number of identities, and enrichment credits are capped.
Pricing: Basic at €60/month per identity (LinkedIn and email), Pro at €120/month (adds calls), higher tiers on request. 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
5. Lemlist: best for teams that prospect mainly by email
Best for: teams whose main channel is still email and who want to add LinkedIn and phone.
Lemlist started out as a cold email tool. Its Multichannel plan adds LinkedIn automation (profile visits, connection requests, messages) to email sequences, along with a built-in lead database.
- Personalized email sequences and email warm-up (lemwarm).
- LinkedIn automation, a dialer, SMS and optional WhatsApp.
- A database of more than 650 million leads.
Strengths: excellent email deliverability and one tool for several channels. Limits: LinkedIn is only on the most expensive plan, the interface is dense, and pricing is in US dollars only.
lemlist’s built-in calling has its own rules: minutes weighted by destination, numbers sold in a few countries and a one-line power dialer in beta. We detail them in lemlist calling limits.
Pricing:
- Email: $69/month (no LinkedIn).
- Multichannel: $109/month per user.
- Billed yearly, Multichannel drops to $87/month.
- Enterprise: on request. 14-day free trial.
Which tool fits your situation
| Your situation | Our pick |
|---|---|
| You’ve never prospected and you’re short on time | Waalaxy AI |
| You prospect on your own, a few hours a week | Waalaxy (Pro or Advanced) |
| You want to follow up by email with people who don’t reply on LinkedIn | Waalaxy Business |
| You target specific accounts and hard-to-find decision-makers | Sales Navigator, paired with an automation tool |
| You’re a growth team that wants custom workflows | La Growth Machine |
| Email is your main channel | lemlist |
LinkedIn opens the door, the phone closes the deal
A prospect who accepts your connection request or replies to your message is a warm lead. That’s the best time to call: they know your name, so the call is no longer a cold call.
- Find your prospects with LinkedIn search or Sales Navigator.
- Launch a campaign with Waalaxy, or let Waalaxy AI handle the prospecting.
- Spot the people who accepted or replied, and get their contact details. Our guide to B2B phone number enrichment explains how to fill in missing numbers, and our guide on how to find a cell phone number by name ranks twelve methods, from LinkedIn’s Contact info to extensions.
- Call them right away, using a phone system connected to your CRM. To turn a whole Sales Navigator search into a call list, follow our Sales Navigator to call list workflow.
Key takeaways
The right LinkedIn prospecting tool depends on how much of the work you want to hand off. If you know who to target and what to say, Waalaxy saves you hours every week, starting at €19 a month. If you’ve never learned to prospect, Waalaxy AI takes care of the audience, the messages and the conversations. Sales Navigator is still the benchmark for targeting, and La Growth Machine or lemlist suit teams working across several channels. Whichever you choose, test it during the free trial on a real list, and compare the number of meetings booked, not the number of messages sent.
