LinkedIn plans - which one is right for you?

In our second newsletter, I want to take a detailed look at a subject that we know many people on LinkedIn are struggling with.

Namely, which plan should I be on? There's a lot of choice ranging from free to paid, and when it comes to paid, there are multiple plans.

Picking the wrong one won't be the end of the world but it might mean you are either under-powered and missing out on some valuable features that you get from a paid plan, or you could be signed up to a premium plan, which is overengineered for your needs, and therefore isn''t good value.

LinkedIn doesn't make it easy!

If you want to compare the features and pricing of LinkedIn’s different Premium plans, then in all honesty, LinkedIn could do a better easier. It might be hard to believe, but LinkedIn doesn't have a single resource comparing the different plans and their features/costs (not that I could find!).

This makes it hard to decide which plan is the right one.

Do you go for Premium Business or Sales Navigator? Premium Career, Recruiter Lite or Recruiter?

We've done the hard work and created a useful guide to LinkedIn’s Premium plans, covering the features, and pricing.

Before we dive into the plans, don't forget whether you’re using LinkedIn on its own, or with automation tools like Dux-Soup to scale your activity and save time, you can try Dux-Soup for free with our 14-day trial. Just hit the button below to get started.

After that plug, it's time to delve into the detail of which LinkedIn plan is right for you.

7 core LinkedIn plans

LinkedIn offers 7 different plans in total, including a free plan. There are a couplr of variations which takes the total up to 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, so you can speak to LinkedIn directly to find out more.

The 7 plans covered below are designed with different user types in mind depending on whether you’re a recruiter, a sales professional, business owner, or someone that is looking to take the next step on the career ladder.

Of the 7 plans, one is free. The other 6 are paid or “Premium subscriptions” to use LinkedIn's terminology.

Free Premium Trial

To get people to understand what's on offer, there is a handy 1 month LinkedIn Premium subscription trial. Note: at the end of the trial, 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 on a monthly subscription.

However, I would stress that if you are 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.

Over time, LinkedIn is adding more and more restrictions to its free plan, making it harder to drive the outcomes you are looking for at the scale that most people need/want.

On a free plan, you’ll quickly see messages like 'You’ve reached your limit for this month' and it's not that hard to hit these limits if you are putting the effort into job hunting, networking or lead generation.

Now, these limits were clearly introduced to encourage users to upgrade to a Premium plan, which increases the revenue that LinkedIn gets. But, as you'll see, there are some very logical reasons to upgrading.

Comparing different LinkedIn plans

Here are the different LinkedIn plans and associated cost:

1. Free LinkedIn account - $0
2. LinkedIn Premium Career - $29.99/month
3. LinkedIn Premium Business - $59.99/month
4. Sales Navigator Core - $99.99/month
5. Sales Navigator Advanced - $149.99/month
6. Sales Navigator Advanced Plus - POA
7. LinkedIn Recruiter Learnings - $19.99/month
8. LinkedIn Recruiter Lite - $170/month
9. 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 youi get in the free plan.

Free LinkedIn Plan $0

61% of people on LinkedIn have a free plan. 39% of users have a paid LinkedIn subscription. With more than 1 billion users, that means a massive 390 million people are paying to have a LinkedIn account.

A free plan is a great starting point for most people. particularly if all you want to do is showcase your resume, work experience or company page.

With a free LinkedIn plan, these are the key features you can tap into:

• Publish content
• Create (or claim) 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

However, it can be a challenge to do everything that you want to before hitting LinkedIn's ceiling.

Free LinkedIn Plan limitations

Let's look at some of these limitations:

• LinkedIn has reduced the number of personalized messages you can send each month to just 5. After you have sent 5 personalized invitations, you are then limited to 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. 200 characters is not much to play with when you think about what information is pertinent to the message you want to get across.
• 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 - instead, you can usually see 5 selected names and you have to upgrade to unlock the remainder.
• You can’t send any messages or InMails to anyone other than 1st degree connections

With these limits, it's no surprise that people start looking at the costs and benefits of upgrading to a paid plan.

LinkedIn Premium Plans?

LinkedIn Premium will instantly give you access to more features and fewer restrictions on your LinkedIn activity. A new feature added to Premium plans, is their AI offering, which can automatically enhance your profile, create outreach messages and provide takeaways on topics of your choice, learned from your behavior on LinkedIn. This can be incredibly valuable if you are pushed for time or find it hard to write about yourself creatively.

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. This has proved to be incredibly valuable to people looking to upskill in different areas.
• 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 to take the next step up on their career, LinkedIn makes the bold claim that a Premium Career plan will make you 2.6x more likely to get hired on LinkedIn than if you have their free plan.

The additional Career tools that help you hone in on your perfect career aim to get you there faster, offering up jobs that meet your skillset, allowing you to tell hiring managers their job is your top choice and improving your profile and message content with AI.?Sounds perfect for the busy job hunter in a competitive market.

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 not

If you’re an individual looking for your next career move, then Premium Career is likely to be a good fit.

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 the following:

• 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 many of the LinkedIn restrictions. If you’re looking to use a LinkedIn automation tool then we advise Premium Business as a minimum. Put simply, it allows you to more easily tap into the benefits on offer from using automated outreach.

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 standout feature of Sales Navigator that makes it attractive to anyone looking to do more with their outreach, is the advanced search filtering and lead management capability.

The ability to create lead and account lists using over 40 search filters, plus its account mapping feature helps to build excellent target audiences for your compaigns. Plus it helps 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 - something that quickly becomes essential when you have multiple people in your team all taking part in some way with outreach.

Each plan has different features and we look at Sales Navigator Core and Advanced in the table below (you will notice that in the screenshot above that you can't directly jump into a trial for Advanced Plus - it's a more complex product which requires you to take a demo from LinkedIn).

Sales Navigator Core $99/month or $958.88/year

For anyone working in lead generation, we always suggest starting off with Sales Navigator. The reason why is easy to see - the advanced search filter capability, allowing you to build highly targeted lead and account lists. The extra cost over LinkedIn Premium Business is fully worth it.?And it works really well alongside LinkedIn automation platforms 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 too:

• 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 which offers you further opportunities to drive growth.
• Account mapping. If your business has an account-based sales strategy, Sales Navigator allows you to map out key accounts with relevant decision makers. Account Based Marketing (ABM) is often used for enterprise sales teams to help communicate with multiple people at the same target account.

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.

Many of the LinkedIn lead generation experts that we talk to say that it's the combination of Sales Navigator with Dux-Soup that has enabled them to elevate their outreach to new levels of success.

Sales Navigator Advanced $149.99/month or $1300/year

Think of Sales Navigator Advanced as being like Sales Navigator Core but for teams.? With Advanced you can start to combine the power of multiple LinkedIn accounts, enabling you to:

• Share account lists, lead lists and account maps with team members
• Share networking via TeamLink, meaning that you can view your team members’ connections and ask for introductions

• See usage reports for all team members including searches performed, profiles viewed and accounts and leads saved
• Gather 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 anyone working in recruitment. Although principally it is used for finding new talent which is invaluable in a compeititive market, we have many recruiters using LinkedIn to also find new clients.

Recruiter Lite is the more basic and therefore cheaper of the two plans. It is suitable for recruiters who hire just a few candidates each year. However, if you’re hiring more regularly, or work in a recruitment agency, then the Recruiter plan is usually 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.

If you are still with us, let’s take a closer look at 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 with the option to cancel at any time. If it is your first time using a Premium Plan, you will be eligible for a free 30-day trial. Note though that 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.

The relatively 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 applicant tracking systems (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) 1BN+ 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. We are seeing more and more people actively using the OpenToWork tag, although we know some individuals are reluctant to use it
• ‘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 performanceJobs 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

I hope you found the detailed overview of the different LinkedIn Premium Plans useful. Drop me a line in the comments and let me know what you think. Feel free to Subscribe to our Newsletter, like and share the content if you found it useful.

If you are ready to take the first step into using a LinkedIn paid plan, the information above should help you decide which plan is right for you.

Regardless of which plan you choose, if you’re looking to save time on your LinkedIn activity, then automation tools such as Dux-Soup can help enormously - although I am biased, we continually hear use cases from our customers that underline how adding automation to LinkedIn outreach can give incredible results, in a relatively short time.

Features such as the ability to automate personalized connection invitations, send multi-stage drip campaigns, tag profiles, integrations with common CRM and ATS systems add significant value as well as reduce your costs and improve your efficiency.?

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.

Good luck whatever you decide!

Will van der Sanden

Founder , Dux-Soup