Captain Data Alternative (2026): Where No-Code Users Go After the v3 Sunset

The 12 tools, side by side

Every figure below came off the vendor's own pricing page or its own documentation, not off a review site, and every one was fetched on 5 September 2026 unless a different date is given in the notes. Where a vendor publishes two conflicting figures we print both. Where a vendor publishes nothing we write that it is unpublished instead of estimating. The column that matters most on this page is not price, it is interface, because that is the column Captain Data changed.

On the Captain Data row. The pricing page hides its ladder behind a client-side calculator, and only three data points came back on 5 September 2026: a base rate of EUR 59.99 per 1,000 credits, a SILVER rate of EUR 29.99 per 1,000 credits at 20,000 credits a month marked as 50 percent off, and a statement that enterprise volumes reach up to 96 percent off on the Titanium tier. The rest of the ladder is not published, so it is not in the table. Credit expiry is quoted verbatim in the section below. (captaindata.com/pricing, fetched 5 September 2026.)

*Waalaxy's pricing page currently advertises a 14-day trial only. A permanent freemium tier is described in Waalaxy's own blog documentation but is not surfaced on the pricing page, so we report what the pricing page shows and footnote the rest. PhantomBuster's pricing page is a JavaScript-only single page application, so its figures come from two vendor-owned posts published eight months apart that agree exactly. Kaspr's lower figure is the annual rate, not the monthly one, which is a detail that inverts easily. Apollo publishes annual per-user figures on its own pages; its monthly list prices did not render and are therefore not quoted here. Scrapingdog's top-of-ladder price returned two contradictory values on the same page, so no figure above LITE is quoted. All competitor pricing here is as published in September 2026 and it changes often. Check the vendor's own page before you buy, and tell us if you spot something out of date.

Why this page exists. It clears our publishing bar on three criteria rather than one: reconciled dated vendor pricing, with every figure carrying its source and fetch date; a primary-source citation, namely Captain Data's own dated changelog rather than a third-party summary of it; and a computed figure available nowhere else, namely the annual cost of credits that do not roll over, worked out below with the division shown.

Why we put ourselves on this page

Disclosure first: we build Leadsforlinked. We are not a neutral referee, and row 1 of that table should be read with exactly that in mind. We put ourselves at the top rather than hiding in the last row, and further down there is a section where we say plainly what Captain Data does better than us.

Here is why we belong on this page at all. When a vendor retires the interface you worked in, the search that follows is not really "who else has these features". It is "what do I open on Monday morning to get the same list". A lot of the people typing captain data alternative in 2026 are operations people, not engineers, and being told to go and call a REST endpoint is not an answer for them. That specific person is who we built for.

An interface, not an endpoint

Leadsforlinked runs in the browser: a web app plus an extension, with a Kanban CRM to hold what you find. There is nothing to deploy and nothing to authenticate from a terminal. That is a deliberate limitation as much as a feature, and it is the opposite of the direction Captain Data has taken.

We price a lead, not a call

One credit equals one lead, and duplicates are refunded, which matters more than it sounds when you are re-running overlapping searches. Packs start at EUR 1.99 for 500 leads and never expire, so a quiet quarter does not burn capacity you already paid for. Subscriptions are EUR 4.99 a month for Basic, or EUR 2.99 a month billed yearly, EUR 29 for Starter which adds campaigns, EUR 79 for Diamond Pro which adds the AI Responder, and EUR 149 for Diamond Plus. The full ladder is written up in how Leadsforlinked pricing works.

Eight sourcing methods, not one search box

Most tools in this category read one thing, the results of a LinkedIn search. Leadsforlinked reads eight: search results, post commenters, post reactors, event attendees, group members, post monitors that track a thread over time, your own profile visitors, and job-change signals. The warmest lists are usually not search results. Fourteen people who commented on a post about the exact problem you solve have publicly raised their hands, and no filter combination in a database reproduces that list.

No Sales Navigator line on the invoice

Sales Navigator is optional with us, not required. That is worth a number: Sales Navigator Core is $119.99 per month per seat and Advanced is $159.99 (LinkedIn Sales Navigator pricing, verified September 2026). Most comparison pages still quote roughly $99, which understates every total-cost claim built on it. If you want the workflow without that line at all, we covered it in how to scrape LinkedIn without Sales Navigator.

Paced deliberately

The extension paces itself on purpose. Delays between actions are drawn from a normal distribution rather than a fixed interval, pages are separated by several seconds, and every click scrolls into view and pauses first. The 100 free leads arrive in batches of 20 rather than in one burst. We describe the mechanisms rather than making promises about outcomes, because outcomes here are not within any vendor's control, and the category's most-repeated enforcement statistic turns out to have no source at all, as we traced in the LinkedIn ban statistics fact check.

What actually happened to Captain Data

Captain Data in 2026 describes itself on its own homepage as "People & Company Data API for AI agents & B2B SaaS" and "One REST API to discover and enrich people and companies", claiming more than 750 million profiles and more than 54 million firmographics. That is a data infrastructure company. It is not the same shape as the workflow product a lot of people remember buying.

The sunset, with the vendor's own date on it

The citable fact is in the changelog at docs.captaindata.com, dated 9 January 2026: "Captain Data v3 has been officially sunset. All v3 features and endpoints are no longer available." Everything around it is consistent with a company that has finished a platform migration rather than paused one. On 15 January 2026 the page parameter was removed in favour of cursor pagination. On 12 March 2026 the limit maximum went from 20 to 100 and the headline field was renamed summary. On 20 March 2026 the legacy pagination headers were deprecated. The documentation sitemap now lists v1 URLs only, and /v4/quickstart returns a 404.

Two things we are deliberately not going to tell you, because we cannot source them. Other sunset dates circulate in third-party write-ups; no vendor page states them, so we cite the changelog date and nothing else. And there is a widely repeated story about lifetime-deal holders being force-migrated, which no vendor page we fetched confirms, so it does not appear on this page as fact. If you have vendor correspondence that settles either one, send it and we will update this page with the source attached.

What the no-code user actually lost

As of 5 September 2026, no no-code product, workflow builder, or Make, n8n or Clay integration appears on the homepage or the pricing page. There is no end-user interface and no CSV export documented anywhere: the product returns API responses. A 19 February 2026 changelog entry covers MCP configuration examples, which helps if you are wiring an AI agent and does nothing if you wanted a screen with a button on it.

One more gap worth naming rather than filling: whether the caller needs a Sales Navigator seat is unverifiable from the published pages. A 28 January 2026 changelog entry says you can reuse a Sales Navigator people search and apply it to a company's employees, which implies Sales Navigator is an input, but no page states whether you must hold a seat. We are not going to resolve that by guessing.

Where Captain Data is simply better than us

If you are a developer building a product on top of people data, Captain Data is the better tool and we are not close. One documented REST surface over a claimed 750 million profiles and 54 million firmographics, cursor pagination, MCP configuration examples, and volume pricing the vendor describes as reaching up to 96 percent off at Titanium tier is a serious offer. We do not publish a public data API at all. Nothing else on this page changes that, and if programmatic enrichment inside your own product is the job, stop reading and go and read their docs. The annual pooling option is also genuinely good design: the pricing page describes a 1 million credits a month plan that can be unlocked as 12 million credits for the year, which removes the monthly cliff for anyone who buys annually.

What non-rolling credits cost you

The rule, verbatim

From captaindata.com/pricing, fetched 5 September 2026: "Unused credits do not roll over from one month to the next." Alongside it: "Most operations cost 1 credit per record. Some may vary depending on complexity." Those two sentences together are the whole budgeting problem, because your consumption is lumpy and your allowance is not.

The arithmetic, with the division shown

Two prices are published, so both get costed. Our usage assumption is stated openly and you should replace it with your own.

• The SILVER entry ticket. EUR 29.99 per 1,000 credits requires 20,000 credits a month. 20 times 29.99 is EUR 599.80 a month, which is EUR 7,197.60 a year. The discount is real, and so is the commitment that unlocks it.
• The cost of the months you underuse. Assume a team that buys 20,000 credits and consumes 12,000 in an average month, which is a 60 percent utilisation rate. The 8,000 unused credits cost 8 times EUR 29.99, which is EUR 239.92 gone that month. Repeated across twelve months that is EUR 2,879.04 a year paid for records never pulled.
• The effective rate that implies. At 60 percent utilisation you paid EUR 599.80 for 12,000 records, which is EUR 0.0499 per record, or EUR 49.98 per 1,000 records actually used. The headline said EUR 29.99. The gap is not a hidden fee, it is arithmetic that the pricing page does not do for you.
• At the base rate. EUR 59.99 per 1,000 credits is EUR 0.06 per record before any discount band applies.

To be careful about what that does and does not mean: 60 percent is our assumption, not a measurement of anyone's account, and a team that consumes its full allowance every month loses nothing to expiry. The point is not that the price is bad. The point is that a per-1,000 rate is only the price you pay if you spend every credit, and no ranking page in this category ever does that second calculation.

The same method applied to everyone else

Each figure is the vendor's own published price divided by the vendor's own published unit count. A credit is not the same unit everywhere, so this is a list-price comparison and not a quality verdict.

• Leadsforlinked: EUR 1.99 for 500 leads. 1.99 divided by 500 is EUR 0.00398, so EUR 3.98 per 1,000 leads, and the pack never expires.
• Scrapingdog LITE: $40 for 200,000 credits, and a LinkedIn profile request costs 50 credits, so 200,000 divided by 50 is 4,000 profiles. 40 divided by 4,000 is $0.01, so $10 per 1,000 profiles. Protected profiles cost 100 credits, which doubles that, and failed requests are never charged (scrapingdog.com, fetched 5 September 2026).
• Apollo Basic: $49 per user a month on annual billing for 30,000 credits a year, which is 2,500 a month. 49 divided by 2,500 is $0.0196, so $19.60 per 1,000 credits, and Apollo states credits expire at the end of each billing cycle and do not roll over (apollo.io/pricing/about-credits, fetched 5 September 2026).
• Evaboot: 500 credits for $29. 29 divided by 500 is $0.058, so $58 per 1,000 credits, before the mandatory Sales Navigator seat (evaboot.com/pricing, verified September 2026).
• Lix Leads 300: EUR 39 for 300 email credits. 39 divided by 300 is EUR 0.13, so EUR 130 per 1,000 email credits, and Lix credits roll over but expire 12 months after they are credited (lix-it.com, fetched 5 September 2026).
• Lusha Starter: $49.90 for 400 credits. 49.90 divided by 400 is $0.124750, so $124.75 per 1,000 credits (lusha.com/pricing, verified September 2026).

Read down that list and the shape of the market appears. Raw scraping capacity is cheap, contact records with verified phone numbers are expensive, and orchestration sits in between. If cost per unit is the axis you care about most, we went deeper on it in the cheapest LinkedIn scraping tools.

The other ten tools, briefly

PhantomBuster is the closest no-code replacement for what Captain Data used to be: 130 plus Phantoms across 15 plus platforms, chained into workflows, priced in execution hours and slots rather than seats so unlimited users share one bucket. Start is $69 a month or $56 annual, Grow $159, Scale $439. The free tier exists but is crippled at 30 minutes a month, one slot and a 10-row export cap, which is enough to see the interface and not enough to judge the data. We wrote it up in more detail as a PhantomBuster alternative for LinkedIn.

Clay is the other no-code option, and a more powerful one: spreadsheet-style tables where each column can call a provider, an AI research agent or your own endpoint, with waterfall enrichment across more than 150 providers. Note the pricing oddity we recorded on 5 September 2026, when the plan cards read $167 a month for Launch and the FAQ lower on the same page read $185. The permanent free plan gives 500 actions, 100 data credits and unlimited seats, which is a fair way to test it.

Scrapingdog is the like-for-like move if it was the API you wanted. A free plan at $0 forever with 200 credits, LITE at $40 a month for 200,000 credits, and a stated policy that failed requests are never charged. Its LinkedIn Profile Scraper page states plainly that it does not use Sales Navigator and does not use your account or anybody's account.

Lix is unusual in giving you both halves: a browser extension for people who want to click, and a realtime API for people who want to call. Every plan includes 3 users. Watch the expiry rule, which is 12 months from the date credits land, and the overage rate of EUR 0.15 per email.

Apollo.io replaces the data half and adds sending, with a permanent free plan of 900 credits a year and a public REST API. Its credit rules are unusually clear: never more than 1 credit per contact, phone costs the same as email, and you are only charged for email addresses Apollo can verify. Credits expire at the end of each billing cycle. Compared side by side in our Apollo alternative write-up.

Evaboot cleans and enriches Sales Navigator exports and does it well. Two things to know: there is no free tier and no trial, and Sales Navigator is a hard requirement stated in Evaboot's own FAQ, which puts $119.99 a month per seat underneath the $29 you were quoted. Seats themselves are unlimited and free on one shared balance, which is genuinely generous. More in the Evaboot alternative write-up.

Waalaxy is LinkedIn automation and an email finder, priced per user: Pro EUR 19, Advanced EUR 49, Business EUR 69. Per-seat pricing is what makes it expensive for agencies running several client accounts.

Kaspr is a contact data provider rather than automation, with a real permanent free tier: 5 phone and 5 direct email credits a month, 3 CSV launches, 25 rows per CSV, and you need 20 plus LinkedIn connections to use it. Starter is EUR 59 monthly or EUR 45 on annual billing, priced per seat.

Lusha is the same category with a more generous permanent free tier at 40 credits a month, no rollover, on one shared credit balance rather than per seat.

LeadFuze is the cautionary tale that rhymes with this one. It left the self-serve market entirely and is now a Data Licence reported at $1,500 to $2,000 a month behind a request-access form, with no end-user interface. If you are a small team, you are no longer the customer. For the wider database picture we compared the category in B2B contact databases compared.

When to choose each

Stay on Captain Data if you write code and the API is the product you wanted. If your volume is high and steady, the SILVER band at EUR 29.99 per 1,000 credits is competitive against anything on this page for enrichment records, and the annual credit pool removes the monthly expiry problem. Model your utilisation first, using the arithmetic above.

Choose Scrapingdog if you want an API back but not a commitment. A free plan and a $40 rung with 200,000 credits make it the cheapest place to re-point your code and find out whether the data holds up.

Choose PhantomBuster or Clay if the no-code workflow was the point. PhantomBuster if the work is scraping and chaining across many platforms and you can live inside execution hours. Clay if the work is enrichment with fallback logic across many providers and the package price is justifiable.

Choose Apollo or Lix if you want one vendor to cover both the interface and the endpoint, and you are willing to accept credit expiry as the price of that convenience.

Choose Kaspr or Lusha if what you are actually missing is phone numbers or verified contact records on people you have already identified, and you want a permanent free floor to test data quality before paying.

Choose Leadsforlinked if the list does not exist yet, if the people you want are not sitting in a search result, if you would rather pay for leads than for seats or API calls, and if you want nothing to expire. Take the 100 free leads, open the CSV, and count the rows you would genuinely contact. That number tells you more about a tool than any comparison table, this one included. If you want the broader field first, we ranked it in the best LinkedIn scrapers of 2026.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best Captain Data alternative in 2026?

It depends on whether you were using the no-code side or the API. If you were building lists and running workflows in a browser, Leadsforlinked covers the LinkedIn sourcing half at EUR 1.99 for 500 leads, which is EUR 3.98 per 1,000 leads, and PhantomBuster or Clay cover the multi-step orchestration half. If you were calling the API from your own code, Scrapingdog is the closest self-serve substitute, with a free plan of 200 credits and a LinkedIn profile request costing 50 credits. Decide which half you actually consumed before you pick, because those are two different products with two different price shapes.

Did Captain Data shut down its no-code product?

The vendor's own changelog carries a dated entry on 9 January 2026 reading that Captain Data v3 has been officially sunset and that all v3 features and endpoints are no longer available. As of 5 September 2026 the homepage describes the product as a people and company data API for AI agents and B2B SaaS, and no no-code product, workflow builder or Make, n8n or Clay integration appears on the homepage or the pricing page. Other dates circulate in third-party write-ups with no vendor page behind them, so we cite the changelog date and nothing else.

How much does Captain Data cost in 2026?

Pricing is usage based and sits behind a calculator on the vendor's pricing page. Three figures were returned on 5 September 2026: a base rate of EUR 59.99 per 1,000 credits, a SILVER rate of EUR 29.99 per 1,000 credits at 20,000 credits a month, marked as 50 percent off base, and a statement that enterprise volumes reach up to 96 percent off on the Titanium tier. The rest of the ladder is not published, so we do not guess at it. Reaching the SILVER rate means buying 20,000 credits a month, which is EUR 599.80 a month.

Do Captain Data credits expire?

Yes on monthly billing. The vendor states that unused credits do not roll over from one month to the next. There is an annual exception: the pricing page describes a 1 million credits a month plan that can be unlocked as 12 million credits for the year, which pools the allowance and removes the monthly cliff. Most operations cost 1 credit per record, and some cost more depending on complexity. If your volume is seasonal, model the months you underuse before you sign, because on monthly billing that unused balance is simply gone.

Does Captain Data require LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

We could not verify either way, and we would rather say that than invent an answer. The changelog cites Sales Navigator searches as an input, in a 28 January 2026 entry about reusing a Sales Navigator people search across a company's employees, but no page we fetched states whether the caller has to hold a seat. For comparison, Evaboot does require Sales Navigator in the words of its own FAQ, and Sales Navigator Core is 119.99 dollars per month per seat. Sales Navigator is optional with Leadsforlinked.