Tools for analyzing your LinkedIn network

First, which job is it

There are four distinct jobs hiding behind "analyse my LinkedIn network", and the right tool depends entirely on which one you have.

• Staying in touch over time. Remembering context, setting reminders, not losing people. This is relationship maintenance and it never ends.
• Answering one question now. Who in here should I contact about the specific thing I am selling this quarter. A one-off triage with an answer at the end.
• Finding people you do not know. Net-new prospecting, where your existing network is irrelevant by definition.
• Searching inside LinkedIn. Better filters over LinkedIn's own data, live, rather than an export.

They rarely overlap. A tool that is excellent at the first is usually useless at the second, and paying monthly for the wrong one is the most common outcome of this search.

Personal CRMs: Dex, Clay, Folk

Best for job one: staying in touch over time. These are the category most people find first, and for continuous relationship management they are genuinely good.

Dex syncs LinkedIn connections continuously and is the most LinkedIn-native of the three, pulling profile updates and job changes automatically rather than from a one-off export. Clay (the personal CRM at clay.earth) positions itself as a private version of LinkedIn with AI enrichment and conversation context. Folk is broader, covering sales, recruiting, fundraising and partnerships in one place, which suits you if relationships are your whole operating model rather than one activity.

Where they are better than us: ongoing sync, reminders, notes, conversation history, and the fact that your network keeps changing after today. We read a static export once and hand you an answer. If the underlying problem is that you lose touch with people, buy one of these, not us.

What they will not do: rank your entire network against a written description of what you sell. A CRM organises what you tell it. It does not read 3,000 job titles and form an opinion about which twenty matter this quarter.

Outbound platforms: Apollo, Clay.com, Instantly

Best for job three: finding people you do not know. These are large databases of contacts plus sequencing tools, and they are very good at what they do.

They are also the wrong shape for this question. Their value is net-new contacts, which is the opposite of the premise that the people worth contacting are ones you already know. If you already have 3,000 relevant connections, buying access to twenty million strangers is not the bottleneck.

Where they are better than us: volume, at a scale no personal network reaches. If you have exhausted your network, or you are selling into a market where you know nobody, this is the category you want and we cannot help.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Best for job four: searching inside LinkedIn. Better filters, live data, saved searches, and visibility into people beyond your first degree.

Worth being clear about one thing, because people expect otherwise: Sales Navigator does not add email addresses to your connections export, and it does not rank your existing network against an offer. It is a much better search box over LinkedIn's data, which is a real thing to want and a different thing.

An AI assistant and a spreadsheet

Best for job two, up to a point, and free. Export the file, paste it into ChatGPT or Claude in batches, and ask for scores against your buyer profile. We have written the whole method out, prompt included, in a separate guide.

For a few hundred connections this is simply the right answer and you should not pay anybody. It stops working somewhere in the low thousands, for four specific reasons: scores drift between batches so the ranking is unreliable, employer names do not normalise themselves, nothing tells the model how big any company is, and forty copy-pastes is an afternoon.

Where we fit

Job two, at a size where doing it yourself stops being reasonable. One export, one description of what you sell, one ranked answer. Not a subscription, not a CRM, no ongoing sync.

The parts that are actually ours: employer normalisation so companies group properly, identifying company size so a buyer profile with a headcount band means something, consistent scoring across the whole network rather than within a batch, a stronger model re-ranking the top slice so the ordering can be trusted, and a web check on the handful of people worth checking. That is the tedious half of the manual method rather than a different idea.

Do not buy from us if

• You have fewer than about 500 connections. Use the free scan to confirm, then do it yourself. There is not enough there to be worth $39.
• Your problem is staying in touch, not deciding who to contact. Buy Dex, Clay or Folk.
• You need net-new contacts. Buy Apollo or similar. Your network is not the constraint.
• You already know exactly who to call. Then you do not have a research problem, you have a calendar problem, and no tool fixes that one.
• You want contact details attached. We do not append email addresses and will not. The export has almost none, and services that fill that gap are selling data collected elsewhere.

The honest summary

• Under 500 connections: a spreadsheet and an AI assistant. Free.
• Losing touch with people: a personal CRM. Monthly.
• Selling into a market where you know nobody: an outbound platform. Monthly, and expensive.
• One network, one offer, a few thousand rows, decide this week: that is us, once.
• All of the above at different times: entirely normal. These are not substitutes.

If you are still unsure, run the free scan. It reads your network and shows you the counts and your strongest matches without a card, and if the answer is that your network is thin for what you sell, that is worth knowing before you buy anything from anyone.