LinkedIn Sales Navigator Pricing: Complete Guide to Plans, Costs, and Smarter Alternatives

What Is LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is LinkedIn's premium sales intelligence tool designed for B2B professionals who need advanced prospecting capabilities beyond what the free LinkedIn platform offers. It provides unlimited searches, advanced filters, lead recommendations, and InMail credits to help sales teams identify and connect with potential buyers.

Before we dive into the pricing breakdown, here's what makes Sales Navigator different from a standard LinkedIn account: you get access to lead and account lists, real-time alerts when prospects change jobs or engage with content, and AI-powered features like Account IQ that help you research companies faster.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Pricing Plans

LinkedIn offers three main Sales Navigator tiers, each designed for different use cases and team sizes. Here's the current pricing structure:

Sales Navigator Core

The Core plan is LinkedIn's entry-level offering for individual sales professionals. Pricing breaks down as follows:

• Monthly: $99.99/month
• Annual: $79.99/month (billed as $959.88/year)

Paying annually saves you roughly 20% compared to monthly billing. The Core plan includes advanced lead and company search with Boolean operators, lead recommendations, custom lead lists, real-time alerts on saved leads, and 50 InMail messages per month.

This plan works best for solo prospectors, freelancers, consultants, or sales professionals who don't need team collaboration features.

Sales Navigator Advanced

The Advanced plan (formerly called Team) is built for sales teams that need collaboration and shared resources:

• Monthly: $179.99/month
• Annual: $139.99/month (billed as $1,679.88/year)

Beyond everything in Core, Advanced adds TeamLink (which surfaces warm introductions through your colleagues' networks), Smart Links for tracking content engagement, shared lead lists, Buyer Intent signals, and CSV upload for account list creation. There's also a 30-day free trial available.

Sales Navigator Advanced Plus (Enterprise)

The Enterprise tier doesn't have fixed public pricing—you'll need to contact LinkedIn directly for a custom quote. Based on industry reports, pricing typically starts around $1,600 per seat annually, though actual costs depend on your organization's size and needs.

Advanced Plus includes everything in the Advanced plan plus deep CRM integration with Salesforce, HubSpot, and Microsoft Dynamics 365. You get automatic CRM sync, lead/contact creation directly from Sales Navigator, custom ROI reporting, and embedded LinkedIn profiles within your CRM interface.

Is Sales Navigator Worth the Cost?

Here's the honest assessment: Sales Navigator's value depends entirely on how central LinkedIn is to your prospecting strategy.

Where Sales Navigator excels:

• Unlimited searches (standard LinkedIn caps you after a certain number)
• Advanced Boolean filters to find highly specific prospects
• Real-time alerts when leads change jobs, share content, or appear in the news
• AI features like Account IQ for faster company research
• InMail credits for reaching prospects outside your network

Where Sales Navigator falls short:

• No email addresses or phone numbers included—you still need separate tools for contact data
• No native export functionality—you can't easily move lead lists into your CRM or outreach tools
• Limited automation—prospecting remains largely manual
• The interface can feel clunky, especially for bulk operations

A Forrester study commissioned by LinkedIn reported that Sales Navigator delivered 312% ROI over three years. However, that assumes you're using it consistently and have processes in place to convert leads into conversations.

Hidden Costs to Consider

The subscription price is just the starting point. To actually run effective outbound campaigns, most Sales Navigator users end up paying for additional tools:

• Email finding tools: $50-200/month to get contact information for your leads
• Export tools: $30-100/month to extract lead lists from Sales Navigator
• Email verification: $20-50/month to validate emails before outreach
• Outreach automation: $50-150/month for sequencing tools

When you add these up, a "$100/month" Sales Navigator subscription can quickly become $300-500/month in total prospecting costs.

Free and Budget-Friendly Alternatives

If you're not ready to commit $1,000+ annually to Sales Navigator, several alternatives can help you achieve similar results—sometimes for free.

Free LinkedIn Prospecting (Without Sales Navigator)

Before paying for anything, maximize what free LinkedIn offers:

• Use LinkedIn's standard search with keyword combinations
• Join relevant groups to expand your visible network
• Set up Google Alerts for target companies
• Follow prospect companies to see their updates

The main limitation is search caps—LinkedIn restricts how many searches free users can perform monthly. But for low-volume prospecting, this might be enough.

AI-Powered Targeting Tools

One increasingly popular approach is using AI to identify your ideal customer profile before you start searching LinkedIn at all. Our B2B Targeting Generator uses AI to analyze your product or service and generate detailed target market profiles—including company types, job titles, industries, and even objection-handling strategies.

The advantage? Instead of manually experimenting with filters in Sales Navigator, you get a clear picture of who to target before spending hours (or dollars) on prospecting tools.

Contact Finding Tools

If your main need is finding email addresses and phone numbers—something Sales Navigator doesn't provide anyway—consider dedicated contact tools:

• Apollo.io: Free plan available with paid plans starting at $39/month. Includes email finding, sequencing, and a solid contact database.
• Lusha: Free tier with 25 searches monthly, paid plans from $49/month. Strong for verified contact data.
• RocketReach: Access to over 700 million professional profiles with email and phone lookup capabilities.

Many sales professionals pair a contact finding tool with free LinkedIn—getting the best of both worlds without the Sales Navigator premium.

Using Galadon's Free Tools for Prospecting

We built Galadon specifically for sales professionals who need powerful tools without enterprise pricing. Here's how our free tools can replace parts of the Sales Navigator workflow:

• Email Finder: Find professional email addresses from a name and company or LinkedIn URL—the contact data Sales Navigator doesn't provide
• Email Verifier: Validate emails before sending to protect your sender reputation and improve deliverability
• Mobile Number Finder: Get cell phone numbers for direct outreach when email doesn't cut it

The workflow: Use free LinkedIn or the B2B Targeting Generator to identify prospects, then use our Email Finder and verifier to get contact information, then reach out. No $1,200/year subscription required.

How to Decide: Sales Navigator vs. Alternatives

Here's a practical framework for choosing the right approach:

Choose Sales Navigator Core ($960/year) if:

• LinkedIn is your primary prospecting channel
• You need to search for very specific prospect criteria (Boolean searches)
• InMail is central to your outreach strategy
• You prospect at high volume daily

Choose Sales Navigator Advanced ($1,680/year) if:

• You have a sales team of 5+ people
• You need TeamLink to leverage your team's combined network
• Buyer Intent signals are valuable for your sales process
• You want Smart Links to track content engagement

Skip Sales Navigator entirely if:

• You're a solo operator with budget constraints
• You only need contact information (email/phone), not advanced LinkedIn search
• Your prospecting volume is low (under 50 prospects per month)
• You can identify target companies through other means (industry lists, events, etc.)

Maximizing ROI If You Do Subscribe

If you decide Sales Navigator makes sense for your situation, here's how to get maximum value:

1. Start with the free trial. Both Core and Advanced offer 30-day trials. Use this time to test whether the advanced filters actually help you find better prospects than free LinkedIn.

2. Build saved searches immediately. Create searches for your ideal customer profile and set up alerts. The real-time notifications when new prospects match your criteria are one of Sales Navigator's best features.

3. Use Account IQ for research. The AI-powered account summaries can significantly speed up pre-call research. Instead of spending 20 minutes researching a company, you get key insights in seconds.

4. Pair with outreach tools. Consider tools like Smartlead or Instantly for automated email sequences, or Expandi for LinkedIn automation to turn your leads into actual conversations.

5. Track your metrics. Calculate your cost per qualified lead and compare it monthly. If Sales Navigator isn't delivering a clear ROI after 90 days, the alternatives we discussed might serve you better.

The Bottom Line

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a powerful tool, but it's not the only path to effective B2B prospecting. At roughly $1,000-1,700 per year depending on your plan, it represents a significant investment—especially when you factor in the additional tools needed to get contact information and automate outreach.

For many sales professionals, a combination of free LinkedIn, AI-powered targeting tools like our B2B Targeting Generator, and dedicated contact finding tools delivers comparable results at a fraction of the cost.

The key is matching your tools to your actual workflow. If you live in LinkedIn and prospect at high volume, Sales Navigator probably pays for itself. If you just need to find the right people and get their contact information, there are smarter ways to spend that budget.