Are you unsure of the different plans offered by LinkedIn? Would you like help with deciding which LinkedIn plan is right for you? Well, you’ve come to the right place.
Comparing the features and pricing of LinkedIn’s different Premium plans hasn’t been made easy by LinkedIn itself. They offer no single resource comparing their plan features, and it's difficult to learn about pricing. This makes it hard to decide which plan is the right one for you.
Do you go for Premium Business or Sales Navigator? Premium Career, Recruiter Lite or Recruiter?
That’s why we’ve created this useful guide to LinkedIn’s Premium plans, covering the features, and pricing - all right here in this single, easy-to-use resource.
Whether you’re using LinkedIn on its own, or with automation tools like Dux-Soup to scale your activity and save time, this is your answer to getting off to the right start with LinkedIn. And best of all? From here you can Try Dux-Soup for free with our 14-day trial. Just hit the button below to get started.
How many plans does LinkedIn offer?
LinkedIn offers 7 different plans in total, including a free plan. Although, if truth be told, there are actually 9 plans - LinkedIn also offers bespoke enterprise Sales Navigator (Advanced Plus) and Recruiter (Professional Services) plans.
We won’t cover the bespoke enterprise plans here as they are tailored to individual customers, requiring a sales call to discuss your requirements. But it’s useful to know that they exist if you want to speak to LinkedIn directly.
The 7 plans we will cover here are designed with different user types in mind depending on whether you’re a recruiter, a sales professional, business owner, or looking for your next step on the career ladder.
Of the 7 plans, one is free, and the other 6 are paid plans - termed by LinkedIn as “Premium subscriptions.”
Free Premium Trial
LinkedIn offers a free 1 month LinkedIn Premium subscription trial, after which you can save up to 50% on their Annual Premium Career plan and up to 36% if you buy a Premium plan on an annual, rather than monthly, subscription.
One thing to note before we begin is that if you’re serious about using LinkedIn for job seeking, lead generation, or networking, you’ll soon find that you need to upgrade from a free to a Premium plan.
LinkedIn continues to add more and more restrictions to its free plan, making it harder to drive results of meaningful quantity. On a free plan, you’ll see messages like ‘You’ve reached your limit for this month.’
These limits were introduced to encourage users to upgrade to a Premium plan, driving revenue for LinkedIn. But there are big benefits to gain by upgrading, which we’ll cover in this article.
The 7 LinkedIn plans
Here are the 7 LinkedIn plans and their prices:
- Free LinkedIn account - $0
- LinkedIn Premium Career - $29.99/month
- LinkedIn Premium Business - $59.99/month
- Sales Navigator Core - $99.99/month
- Sales Navigator Advanced - $149.99/month
- Sales Navigator Advanced Plus - POA
- LinkedIn Recruiter Learnings - $19.99/month
- LinkedIn Recruiter Lite - $170/month
- LinkedIn Recruiter Professional- $835/month
We can break them down into 4 categories, based on the type of user they were designed for: Free, Premium, Sales Navigator and Recruiter.
Premium offers both a job seeker and business owner plan, Sales Navigator is designed for sales professionals, and Recruiter for recruiters. Sounds pretty obvious, right?
But Sales Navigator and Recruiter plans offer more tools designed to help businesses, teams and agencies to work collaboratively on LinkedIn, and we’ll come onto that.
First, let’s look at what the free plan has to offer.
Free LinkedIn Plan $0
61% of people have a free LinkedIn plan. This means that 39% of users are paying for a LinkedIn subscription. With over 1 billion users on the platform, that equates to 390 million paid customers. It’s an impressive statistic.
A free plan is great to get started, and if you want to showcase your resume, work experience and company page.
With a free LinkedIn plan, you can:
- Publish content
- Create a company page
- Grow your network by sending connection invitations.
- Once your invitation has been accepted, send a direct message to your 1st-degree connections
- Request and provide recommendations
- Receive unlimited InMails
- Save up to 3 searches and get weekly alerts on those searches
But, as mentioned, a free LinkedIn plan comes with increasing limitations, meaning you’ll soon hit some barriers.
Free LinkedIn Plan limitations
- Recently LinkedIn restricted the number of personalized messages you can send each month to just 5. After your 5 personalized invitations, you can only send an invitation using the default LinkedIn connection message.
- LinkedIn has reduced the characters allowed in personal connection invitations from 300 to 200, giving you less space to add a meaningful message
- All accounts, whether free or premium are subject to LinkedIn’s weekly invitation limits With a free LinkedIn account, you can send no more than 100 connection invitations each week
- With a free LinkedIn account, LinkedIn search limits allow you to view only 1000 profiles or 10 pages of search results
- You can’t see everyone who’s viewed your profile
- You can’t send any messages or InMails to anyone other than 1st degree connections
With a free plan, you’ll find it harder to grow your network and to find leads. If the limitations are hampering your business growth, it’s time to consider upgrading to a paid plan.
LinkedIn Premium Plans
LinkedIn Premium will instantly give you access to more features and more LinkedIn activity. New to Premium plans is their AI addition, which can automatically enhance your profile, create your outreach messages and provide takeaways on topics of your choice, learned from your behavior on LinkedIn.
You can try LinkedIn Premium for 1 month for free.
In addition to the features you get with a free LinkedIn plan, Premium plans offer:
- Top job postings that match your skillset
- LinkedIn learning - with access to over 22,000 expert-led courses
- A custom button to drive visitors to your website
- AI
- InMails to reach people beyond your network
- Top choice jobs to tell hiring managers their job is your top choice
- Open Profile membership - allowing anyone to contact you
In the small print, LinkedIn highlights the following terms to their Premium plans:
- “InMail credits will expire after 90 days. For ‘Who’s Viewed Your Profile’, first and last names may not be listed for profile viewers who have chosen to remain semi- or fully anonymous via their privacy settings”.
- “Certain search and browsing restrictions apply if an unusually high number of queries are executed in a short time period, in order to prevent system abuse.
So, Premium plans are still subject to LinkedIn search limits. Now let’s dig a little deeper into the two Premium Plans - one aimed at job seekers, the other aimed at business owners.
Premium Career $29.99/month or $239/year
Designed for LinkedIn users looking for their next career step, LinkedIn claims that a Premium Career plan will make you 2.6x more likely to get hired on LinkedIn than if you have their free plan.
Their additional Career tools that help you hone in on your perfect career aim to get you there faster, offering up jobs that meet your skillsets, allowing you to tell hiring managers their job is your top choice and improving your profile and message content with AI.
With Premium Career you can:
- Send 5 InMails a month for free. InMails are messages (containing up 1900 characters in the body, plus 200 for the subject line) that you can send to contacts outside of your network, which is great for getting straight to the inbox of your ideal hiring manager when you want to get noticed.
- Access 365 days of profile viewer insights, allowing you to connect with or message users who have viewed your profile. You can filter profile viewers by date range, industry, location or company
- View 2500 search results per search
- View 1000 profiles every day
- Send up to 250 personalized connection invitations a week
- Become an ‘Open Profile’ member. This means that anyone can contact you, whether you are in their network or nor
If you’re an individual looking for your next career move, then Premium Career is likely to be a good contender for the right plan for you.
Premium Business $59.99/month or $575.88/year
Premium Business is for business leaders looking to expand their business. Users can access over 30 million companies, keep on top of valuable industry news and explore competitor data insights.
With a Premium Business plan you get:
- 15 InMails a month for free
- 365 days of profile viewer insights
- Business insights
- 2500 search results per search
- 1000 profile views a day
- Up to 250 personalized connection invitations a week
- Open Profile membership
So if you’re looking to grow your network faster, make use of sending more personalized connection invitations then Premium Business would be a good choice for you.
The main benefit of Premium Business is that it allows more activity, lifting its restrictions. If you’re looking to use a LinkedIn automation tool then we advise Premium Business as a minimum, to gain the benefits from your automation tool.
Sales Navigator Plans
Sales Navigator is a sales solution from LinkedIn, for sales and marketing professionals and business owners looking to grow sales.
There are 3 Sales Navigator plans - Core, Advanced and Advanced Plus (which we’re not going to cover here). The winning feature of Sales Navigator, in our eyes, is its advanced search filtering and lead management capability.
The ability to create lead and account lists that are targeted using over 40 search filters, plus its account mapping feature helps to build excellent target audiences and keep track of your leads and accounts within Sales Navigator.
The Advanced Plus plan offers CRM integrations if you want to easily share and manage leads across your business.
Let’s compare the prices and core features of Sales Navigator Core and Advanced.
Sales Navigator Core $99/month or $958.88/year
If you’re in the business of lead generation business, then Sales Navigator is our plan of choice. Why? Because of its advanced search filter capability, allowing you to build highly targeted lead and account lists. The extra cost over LinkedIn Premium Business is worth it, we think. And it works really well with LinkedIn automation to turbo charge your results.
LinkedIn raises the limits with Sales Navigator, meaning you can scale your activity with more search results and more connection invitations. And you’ll get some powerful prospecting tools:
- Advanced search filters. Sales Navigator lets you find and filter people who are members of your groups, who have changed jobs, recently posted on LinkedIn, in your saved lists and more. This allows you to be much more targeted with your outreach, improving outreach response rates.
- Lead recommendations. Based on your searches, LinkedIn will recommend new leads for you to target - expanding your growth even further
- Account mapping. If your business has an account-based sales strategy, Sales Navigator allows you to map out key accounts with relevant decision makers.
With its brilliant lead management capability, and access to its huge database of prospects, Sales Navigator comes into its own if you’re using LinkedIn for outreach or lead generation.
For the LinkedIn lead generation experts among us, the combination of Sales Navigator with Dux-Soup will take you to new levels of lead generation for your business or for clients.
Sales Navigator Advanced $149.99/month or $1300/year
Think of Sales Navigator Advanced like Sales Navigator Core for teams. With Advanced you can start to combine the power of multiple LinkedIn accounts, offering:
- Share account lists, lead lists and account maps with team members
- Shared networking via TeamLink, meaning that you can view your team members’ connections and ask for introductions
- Usage reports for all team members including searches performed, profiles viewed and accounts and leads saved
- Buyer intent signals. Explore the journey of a person showing an interest in your business. View the buyer’s intent timeline, with a list of activities - from accepting an invitation to following your page. The Account Hub will show buyer intent from an account, helping you to prioritize your follow-up activities and win new clients faster
Recruiter Plans
As the name suggests, LinkedIn’s Recruiter plans are great for recruiting new talent.
Recruiter Lite is the more basic and less expensive of the two plans, suitable for recruiters who hire just a few candidates each year. If you’re hiring more regularly, or part of a recruitment agency, then the Recruiter plan will likely be better suited to your needs.
There is also a Recruiter Professional Services plan, which we won’t cover in this article, but it is for recruitment agencies at the top end of the hiring scale.
Let’s dig deeper into the differences between the Recruiter Lite and Recruiter plans.
Recruiter Lite $170/month or $1680/year
Recruiter Lite can be purchased online as a monthly or yearly subscription, and you can cancel at any time. If it is your first time using a Premium Plan, you will be eligible for a free 30-day trial. Recruiter Lite is not currently available to members in China.
Recruiter Lite is best suited to individuals and small teams with low-volume hiring needs. It allows you to:
- Find the right candidates faster, with additional search filters including job title, industry, location and more
- Access a wider talent pool with unlimited visibility of 1st, 2nd and 3rd-degree connections
- Get candidate recommendations, providing a list of candidate recommendations on your search criteria to help you discover the most promising candidates
- Message talent directly with 30 InMail credits a month
- See basic reporting and analytics for essential insights into applicant and job posting activity, as well as basic candidate demographic data and InMail performance metrics.
Recruiter Lite allows you to view up to 2,000 unique candidate profiles a day. The limit resets at 00:00 UTC.
If a user reaches 90% of their daily profile view limit, the following message will appear at the top of the search results: “You’ve reached 90% of your daily profile view limit.” Once a user reaches their limit, the following error message will appear: ”Sorry, you’ve reached your daily profile view limit.”
Recruiter $835/month or $8999/year
Recruiter lets you do more than simply connect with high-priority candidates. It helps you build meaningful relationships through advanced messaging features and tools.
Its high price can be a limitation for some recruiters, but you get access to people who are Open to Work, and the ability to collaborate with team members more effectively, integrating with your ATS for seamless talent management and tracking.
Key features of Recruiter include:
- Unlimited access to LinkedIn's entire network (yes, that’s right, everyone on LinkedIn is accessible) made up of 930M+ professionals
- 40+ advanced search filters to refine your criteria based on factors such as skills, years of experience, company size, and more
- ‘#OpenToWork’ spotlight lets you know if a candidate is actively looking for job opportunities. LinkedIn claims response rates are 20% higher when using this filter
- ‘More Likely to Respond’ spotlight identifies candidates who are active on LinkedIn and more likely to respond to your messages
- ‘AI-powered Recommended Matches’ surfaces hidden talent through tailored candidate recommendations by analyzing vast amounts of candidate profile data
- Unlimited candidate profile views, so you can explore as many potential candidate skills, experiences, recommendations, and more as you’d like
- 150 InMails per month to engage more with high-priority potential candidates, increasing the likelihood of a positive response
- AI-assisted personalized and tailored messaging helps you craft customized messages based on a candidate’s profile information
- Bulk messaging saves you time by allowing you to send personalized messages to multiple candidates at once
- Applicant tracking system integration (ATS) allows you to seamlessly import candidate information from Recruiter to your ATS — minimizing manual data entry and centralizing candidate management
- Advanced analytics provide you with valuable insights to improve your hiring strategies, including:
- InMail analytics to track message performance
- Jobs analytics to view job posting effectiveness
- Pipeline analytics to monitor candidate progress
- Usage analytics to understand tool utilization
- Custom reporting to view personalized reports tailored to specific metrics and goals
With Recruiter, companies can fast track their search to find the right talent, with less effort and higher success rates. The management data allows you to improve your hiring strategy, whilst working out which messaging is working best with your InMails.
Summary
So there you have a complete overview of LinkedIn Premium Plans. It’s now over to you to decide which one is right for you.
Regardless of which plan you choose, if you’re looking to save time on your LinkedIn activity, then automation tools including Dux-Soup can help. Their ability to automate personalized connection invitations, send drip campaigns, tag profiles, integrate with your CRM and ATS systems can significantly reduce your costs and improve your efficiency. If you're new to automation, check out our LinkedIn automation playbook to guide you through how to get started.
If you’d like to discuss Dux-Soup for your business, you can book a demo via the website, or try Dux-Soup for free for 14 days to see how it works with your free LinkedIn plan, or Premium plan of choice.
