Swarmhit vs Edges

Comparison data last verified on 5 October 2026.

3 reasons to choose Swarmhit over Edges

What does Swarmhit do differently?

If the goal is a LinkedIn outreach feature that works and keeps your users’ accounts safe, Swarmhit gets you there without betting your roadmap on it: less an Edges replacement than the layer you were otherwise going to build on top of it.

When raw actions stop being enough

Nobody leaves Edges because the API is badly built. Teams start looking past it when they price what sits above it: a sequencer to design from the guide in its docs, a lead store to operate because run data expires at 90 days, an inbox to assemble from extract actions, and live-mode pacing judgment to get right on someone else’s accounts. The actions were the cheap part; the quarter of engineering on top is what triggers the search.

The comparison is also apples to oranges, which is worth being honest about. Edges is a LinkedIn actions and data API with unusually transparent quotas; Swarmhit is a Smart API with the outreach engine built in. Decide first which product you are actually shopping for: raw actions to build on, or outcomes your product can call. The wider field is in our Edges alternatives guide.

What does Edges actually give you?

Edges is a LinkedIn actions API. It exposes more than 80 actions across LinkedIn, Sales Navigator and Recruiter Lite, most runnable live, async or on a schedule, with automatic pagination, batching, retries on async runs, and published per-action quotas enforced in every mode. The connection machinery is serious: hosted login links, checkpoint resolution, per-identity dedicated IPs. For what it covers, it is capable plumbing. But plumbing is what it is: what comes out is raw actions, one call at a time. Everything that turns actions into an outreach feature, and everything that keeps accounts alive in live mode, is explicitly your job.

Where does Edges get the data, and who carries the risk?

One structural question outranks every feature row on this page, and it is not about the sequencer. It is where the profile data comes from, and whose name is on the contract when someone objects.

Edges shares people with Captain Data, the French B2B data API company, under a new brand and a new US entity. The artifact is public: the Edges GitHub organisation, linked from Edges’ own homepage, published its first repository on 17 September 2025 with a README that read, in full, “Skeleton code to build Chrome Extensions with Captain Data.” Twelve minutes later the same repository was rewritten to name Edges instead, in a commit sent from a captaindata.co address belonging to a Directeur Général of Captain Data SAS. Captain Data continues to trade separately in France. What is new is the entity carrying the risk: Edges Labs LLC, a Delaware company with its registered office in Dover, whose domain was registered in August 2025.

Edges does not need you to connect a LinkedIn account to return LinkedIn data. Its homepage sells that as the headline benefit: “No cookies, no LinkedIn account, no warmup, no seats to babysit.” The mechanics are described the same way: “Access health, rotation and pacing are handled on our side. You never touch a cookie or a credential.” On its own Proxycurl comparison page it names the model directly, “Reads on a managed session pool,” reserving connected seats for outreach rather than for reads.

That is collection on accounts the vendor operates, the model LinkedIn has already litigated. In January 2025 LinkedIn sued Proxycurl, its parent Nubela Pte. Ltd., and two of its executives personally in the Northern District of California, with claims including breach of contract and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The defendants settled, Proxycurl shut down on 4 July 2025, and the court entered a permanent injunction requiring deletion of the LinkedIn data. Edges describes that case accurately on its own site: “The lawsuit alleged scraping behind fake LinkedIn accounts. That architecture is what enforcement targeted.” It also states that nobody who touches LinkedIn data can promise immunity from LinkedIn’s terms, and puts itself inside that sentence.

Then read the contract. Edges Labs LLC is a Delaware limited liability company registered at 3500 South DuPont Highway, Dover, DE 19901. Its terms state that Edges Labs “DOES NOT CARRY OUT ANY VERIFICATION” and that the client is “RESPONSIBLE FOR VERIFYING THAT IT HAS THE RIGHTS AND/OR AUTHORIZATIONS REQUIRED.” The client agrees to “indemnify and hold Edges Labs harmless” from third-party claims.

Put those together and the deal is legible: the supplier operates the collection and the customer signs for the verification. If you embed this in a product, the failure mode is a supplier whose access stops, as Proxycurl’s did on 4 July 2025 to comply with its settlement with LinkedIn.

Swarmhit does not operate a read pool and does not sell cookie-less scraping, which we consider illegal. Every action, data collection included, runs on a LinkedIn account your customer owns and has connected, on a dedicated proxy, under caps we enforce: 2,500 Sales Navigator profiles a day and 1,000 from standard search. We do not resell data. That is a lower ceiling than a managed pool can quote you, and it is deliberate.

How do the API docs compare?

Edges has the largest documentation, by page count, of the raw LinkedIn APIs we compared, and it is current. Two public OpenAPI 3.1 files cover every documented action, including one added on 28 August 2026, and every page is also served as markdown for coding agents. Limits are documented in depth, from per-plan tables to per-action caps, and a rate-limited call returns Retry-After and the window that tripped. The callback tooling tracks each delivery with a stable reference, a filterable delivery log and replay.

Where it falls short is retry safety and consistency. There is no idempotency key, and live-mode retries are left to your code, so nothing in the docs protects a retried live message from going out twice. Run callbacks are not signed; the only way to authenticate one is a header you add yourself, and the retry schedule is not stated. The actions spec is versioned “dev”, carries no success example on any of its 275 operations and no example values for action inputs, so the reference pages fall back to placeholder values. And the error contract has two envelopes, a LIMIT_REACHED label the error table lists as 429 or 409 while some spec examples return 424, and labels in the guides that appear in neither the table nor the spec.

Swarmhit publishes a current OpenAPI 3.1 file, version 1.7.0, with 133 operations and 107 schemas behind 13 guides. Campaign sends are paced and retried by the platform, and the sends your code triggers, such as inbox replies and direct actions, accept an Idempotency-Key, so a retry replays the first response instead of sending again. A sender-limit 429 tells your code the limit, how much of it is used, the window and, for daily and weekly caps, when it resets. Every webhook delivery is signed, logged and replayable. The full reference is at developer.swarmhit.com.

What are you signing up to build on raw actions?

Who builds the sequencer?

You do, and Edges says so with unusual honesty. Its documentation has no campaign object; what it offers instead is a long guide to building a LinkedIn outreach sequence on top of the actions, complete with a leads table to design, deduplication logic, a lead-lifecycle state machine, business-hours scheduling, identity-failure recovery, and a full orchestrator example. That is a competent engineering spec for the product you thought you were buying. For a company whose actual product is a CRM or an AI agent, it is a quarter of roadmap spent rebuilding what a sequencer platform ships on day one.

Is live mode safe for your users' accounts?

Edges is direct about this: its quotas apply in live mode too, but live calls get no built-in pacing, and its docs warn that unpaced live traffic is the quickest way to get an account restricted. The guidance that follows, minimum delays, jitter, a ramp plan for cold accounts, is the judgment layer you would be signing up to implement. On Swarmhit, campaigns are scheduled and paced by the engine, and per-sender limits are enforced server-side on every action, direct calls included; when your code drives direct actions, our safety guide gives the timing to follow.

What does the price actually buy?

Edges runs two meters, and the credit meter is the wrong one to judge an outreach build by. Data actions bill as credits: $43.99 per 1,000 at the 2,500 minimum, $27.49 at the 10,000 tier, about $275 a month. Outreach bills separately per identity: $8.79 per LinkedIn account a month from 1 to 50, then a volume rate applied to the whole fleet, $7.91 at 100, $7.12 at 200 and $5.76 at 1,000, read on 5 October 2026. 50 senders is $439 a month on that meter before a single profile is enriched. Managed identity mode bills 1.5x standard credits. None of it buys the sequencer, the lead store or the inbox; Swarmhit's per-sender price includes those, plus pacing for every campaign. Pricing is public and tiered per connected sender, $16.90 a month for the first 50 down to $6.90 between 1,501 and 2,500, so the rate improves as the fleet grows rather than staying flat.

Competitor pricing and product facts on this page were checked against the vendor’s own pricing page and documentation, and against the public corporate and court records, on 5 October 2026. Vendors change prices without notice, so treat anything older than a month as indicative.

What does each option cost?

Edges bills usage: data credits from $43.99 per 1,000 at the 2,500-credit minimum, dropping to $27.49 at the 10,000 tier (about $275 a month) and further at scale, plus per-identity pricing for engagement actions: $8.79 per identity from 1 to 50, with volume rates from 100 identities. Managed identity mode bills 1.5x credits. Those prices buy the actions; the sequencer, the storage, the inbox, and live-mode safety judgment still have to be built and run by your team.

Swarmhit’s pricing is public: $16.90 per connected LinkedIn sender a month for the first 50, decreasing band by band down to $6.90 between 1,501 and 2,500 senders, and cold email from $59 a month for 50,000 sends. Each band of senders is priced at its own rate, so adding senders lowers what the next ones cost rather than repricing the fleet you already have. Above 2,500 senders, pricing is set with our team.

Why pay for a platform instead of metered actions? Because the price buys the work itself. Swarmhit absorbs LinkedIn’s weekly algorithm changes behind 250+ monitored safeguards and ships the campaign logic, so you build on a working foundation instead of spending months rediscovering it with your clients’ accounts at risk. We do the sequencing work; you build the rest. See the integration models or book the call.