More than 51% of companies today use marketing automation tools and this share continues to increase.
Phantombuster is one of the leading tools on the market today.
In this article, we give you our opinion and we explain why it is not the ideal tool if you are prospecting in B2B.
Our opinion on Phantombuster in summary
Phantombuster is a great help for marketers and growth hackers who can benefit from the power of APIs for mass prospecting.
However, the complexity and prices of the tool make it a fairly uncompetitive tool compared to similar tools like LeadIn.
What is Phantombuster?
Phantombuster is SaaS marketing and sales automation software. The solution is aimed at developers and allows them to integrate an application programming interface (API) on all the websites they create.
Companies today are multi-channel. They use several social networks for their prospecting:
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LinkedIn
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Facebook
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instagram
One of the challenges is the tracking and automation of these time- consuming processes.
Phantombuster works thanks to phantoms, which save time and obtain relevant statistics on the performances achieved.
The principle is simple: by sending information to the tool, it sends back data.
For example, by sending the URL of a Linkedin event , the tool returns the list of participants. Phantombuster therefore also has significant potential in terms of growth hacking .
Phantombuster Features
If the goal of your business is to generate leads and generate revenue, acquiring high-performance tools is a priority. The features of Phantombuster are significant assets.
Automation of tasks
Scrapping data, processing it and keeping it are time- consuming and energy-intensive tasks. Phantombuster allows marketing teams to focus on their core business by automating all low value-added tasks if they are done by a human.
To go further, the tool offers workflows created upstream. In particular, they make it possible to create .
Lead data collection
The main objective of a business is to sell . However, the condition is to collect leads . Some of them will be closed by the commercial team.
Collecting leads is the priority for 85% of B2B prospecting experts.
The Phantombuster teams have understood this and have created a product capable of extracting a multitude of information , via LinkedIn.
We find in particular:
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Exporting leads from your Sales Navigator account
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Export data of people who liked a post
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Participants in an event
These are extremely useful features but they are common to the best prospecting tools on LinkedIn , including LeadIn .
Provision of an API Store
The goal of Phantombuster is to allow growth marketers to make themselves known to as many prospects as possible .
The Phantombuster teams quickly realized that the list of automations they had built was insufficient for market needs.
So they created the API store in 2017. Since then, anyone can develop and operate APIs and participate in the Phantombuster ecosystem.
Linkedin prospecting automation
Linkedin now generates 80% of B2B leads. Indeed, all the trades are present there and LinkedIn allows, thanks to the Boolean search and Sales Navigator, to refine its searches to an extremely precise level .
The must is to have an automation tool to enjoy the best of both worlds:
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Use the power of LinkedIn targeting
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Automate the process with a LinkedIn automation tool
This is what Phantombuster offers, as mentioned above.
Who is Phantombuster for?
Phantombuster works with a system of phantoms . Each phantom corresponds to an API. Being the main added value, it is mainly this parameter that varies the price of the tool.
The phantom system promotes growth hacking , more than classic sales automation. Although the tool allows you to send personalized messages or track the progress of prospects in the funnel, it is mainly aimed at growth hackers .
Another target is developers, who can exploit and develop APIs .
As Phantombuster puts more than 200 automation and extraction tools, marketing teams or decision makers can combine them together to achieve a new workflow in line with business needs, such as generating leads , or increasing the size of the community.
Phantombuster prices
The Phantombsuter offers are divided into 5 categories:
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A freemium plan with the “Free for ever” offer. You have 10 minutes per day to use basic features such as email notifications, around ten Captachat verifications per day and 1 Gb of storage.
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With the Growth Hacker plan , you get one hour a day for $30 a month . You will also benefit from 5 slots, the features of the free offer and 100 Captachats per day.
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The Business offer, which allows the same things as the Growth Hacker offer, with 10 slots, at 70 dollars per month.
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The Enterprise plan also offers the same features, with 20 slots, and consulting services by the Phantombuster team (for annual plans).
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If you need to handle large volumes of emails and large storage capacity, you’ll need the $900 Premium plan.
There are also two other plans similar to the others, the price of which varies from 70 to 200 dollars per month , depending on the features. It’s relatively expensive for the few features of the tool, which offers nothing on prospecting by email . Yet it is 40 times more effective than prospecting via social networks (according to a McKinsey study ).
We recommend that you use a tool allowing multi-channel prospecting, and not email, like Leadin .
Advantages and disadvantages of Phantombuster
Overall, reviews of the tool are quite positive. Now let’s see the pros and cons .
Advantages of Phantombuster
The tests carried out made it possible to highlight the speed with which the extraction of leads is carried out. The tool eliminates any unnecessary human intervention .
In fact, the opinions of Capterra users are rather positive.
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Global mark |
4.8 |
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Ease of use |
4.3 |
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Customer service |
4.4 |
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Features |
4.8 |
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Value for money |
4.5 |
Disadvantages of Phantombuster
In use, we noted 3 main drawbacks to Phantombuster.
First, the handling of the tool is very unintuitive , especially for beginners. This is because installing and manipulating APIs can be complicated .
The second problem is the very poor documentation and help pages. They would not be too much when you see the difficulty in setting up an API.
Finally, the last drawback concerns the limits of the paid plans, which are reached quite quickly, while the prices are quite high. At €200 per month, you will only have 20 phantom slots available. In comparison, tools like LeadIn allow you to send an unlimited number of prospecting campaigns.
LeadIn: the ideal alternative to Phantombuster
LeadIn is a solution that offers more features than Phantombuster, for a more affordable price.
In addition, the security of your LinkedIn account is Leadin’s priority. For this, a proxy IP address is granted to you according to your region. Finally, again to avoid being banned from your account, the actions taken by the tool are modeled on what a human would do to be as undetectable as possible.
This is paramount given the number of accounts that LinkedIn permanently bans for being automated .
Click here to try LeadIn free for 14 days .
