[ The short answer ]
Most teams keep Sales Navigator for searching LinkedIn and add upcell to turn those prospects into worked accounts with contact data. One click on a Sales Navigator prospect puts the contact on its account in Prospector, owned by the rep who clicked and enriched by every data provider you connect. upcell doesn’t replace LinkedIn search, InMail or TeamLink; if you want to swap Sales Navigator for a contact database, Apollo and ZoomInfo are the usual places to look.
Pick
Sales Navigator
if
You mainly need LinkedIn search, InMail and warm intros through TeamLink.
Also consider
Both: Sales Navigator for search, upcell to work the account.
What Sales Navigator does well
Sales Navigator is LinkedIn’s own sales tool, and for finding and messaging people on LinkedIn nothing else works on the same network. LinkedIn calls it “a B2B sales tool trusted by 1.5M+ sellers”.
In LinkedIn’s words, it gives reps:
Search across LinkedIn’s members. Reps can “rapidly sift through 1+ billion members”.
InMail. “Send personalized InMail messages outside your network”.
Alerts. Saved custom filters and “real-time lead alerts”.
Warm intros. TeamLink helps reps get a warm intro into an account.
Plans by need. Sales Navigator comes in three plans: Core, Advanced and Advanced Plus.
upcell doesn’t do any of these. It has no LinkedIn search, no InMail and no TeamLink. If your reps spend their day searching LinkedIn and messaging people there, keep Sales Navigator.
From prospect to worked account
upcell starts where a Sales Navigator search ends. A rep clicks the upcell badge on a prospect, and the contact lands on its account in Prospector with an owner, contact data and a place in a sequence.
One click from a Sales Navigator prospect
The upcell Chrome extension adds a badge to LinkedIn profiles and Sales Navigator prospects. When a rep clicks it:
the contact goes into Prospector and matches to its account;
the rep who clicked becomes the owner;
every data provider you connect enriches the contact;
the contact syncs to your CRM and sequencer.
Reps can also select up to 25 contacts at a time, including from Sales Navigator, and export them into Prospector together. Each rep sets their own hotkeys, so one keystroke can apply their tags and a sequence on the way in.
Suggested contacts on every account
Reps don’t have to start every search on LinkedIn. Prospector’s AI-Sourced contacts suggest people on each account based on your ICP, with an AI summary of why each one is worth reaching out to. Reps who like LinkedIn keep using it; reps who’d rather stay in Prospector can work from the suggestions.
The accounts already in your CRM
Prospector connects to HubSpot and Salesforce, so reps see their CRM accounts in upcell. Sync covers contact data, account owners, the sequence each contact is in, and tags. For Outreach and Salesloft, Prospector syncs your sequence lists, so a rep can drop a contact straight into the right sequence.
Because every contact sits on its account with its owner, sequence and tags, the whole team can see who is already being worked and who is still missing.
Email and phone from every provider
Contact data in upcell comes from the data providers you connect, and every one of them runs on every contact. That includes each prospect a rep sends over from Sales Navigator.
How multi-vendor enrichment works:
Keys from any provider. You buy API keys directly from the providers you choose and plug them into upcell. upcell’s own data is one of the providers you can connect, and its results are always shown first. upcell doesn’t resell keys.
All results, merged. Every email and phone number the providers return is shown. When two or more return the same value, it appears once, with each provider’s icon.
Separate CRM fields. Each provider writes to its own fields in your CRM.
Overlap in view. Because every provider runs on every contact, admins can see where two providers return the same data and drop one without losing coverage.
Read how multi-vendor enrichment works.
upcell vs Sales Navigator at a glance
upcell and Sales Navigator do different jobs. Sales Navigator is LinkedIn’s tool for finding and messaging people; upcell is where reps work those people as contacts on their accounts, with data from every provider you connect.
upcell | Sales Navigator | |
|---|---|---|
What it is | An account-based prospecting platform (the Prospector app) | “A B2B sales tool trusted by 1.5M+ sellers” |
Finding people | AI-Sourced contacts on each account by ICP fit, plus a badge on LinkedIn profiles and Sales Navigator prospects | Search across LinkedIn’s members, with “real-time lead alerts” |
Reaching people | Syncs sequence lists from Outreach and Salesloft | “Send personalized InMail messages outside your network” |
Contact email and phone | From every data provider you connect, merged on one record | LinkedIn profile and InMail |
Getting contacts out | Badge click or up to 25 at a time into Prospector, then synced to your CRM and sequencer | |
CRM sync | HubSpot and Salesforce: contact data, account owners, sequence and tags | On Advanced Plus only: “Integration between Sales Navigator and your CRM is only available for Sales Navigator Advanced Plus users”; covers Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and HubSpot |
Team view | Owner, sequence and tags on every contact, grouped by account | TeamLink, for warm intros |
Pricing model | One Enterprise contract, custom pricing, unlimited users, no meters | Plans: Core, Advanced, Advanced Plus |
Sales Navigator details as of Oct 2026, from LinkedIn’s own pages.
Other Sales Navigator alternatives by use case
If you want to replace Sales Navigator rather than add to it, the choice usually comes down to how you want to find people and get their contact details. These three come up most often.
Apollo: a contact database with outreach built in. Apollo has its own contact database and its own sequencing, so a team can find people and email them in the same product. It suits teams that want one vendor for both data and outreach. See Apollo alternatives.
ZoomInfo: an established database for large organizations. ZoomInfo sells access to its own contact and company database and counts more than half of the Fortune 500 among its customers. It suits organizations that want one data source shared across many teams. See ZoomInfo alternatives.
Seamless.AI: on-demand lookups. Seamless.AI calls itself “a real-time search engine, not a database”, and searches for contact details each time a rep looks someone up. It suits reps who want to look people up as they go rather than browse a network. See Seamless.AI alternatives.
Each of these can also run as one provider among several. If a provider offers API access, you can plug its key into upcell and run it on every contact.
Using Sales Navigator with upcell
Most teams that try upcell keep Sales Navigator. Reps search and message in LinkedIn, and work the people they find in Prospector.
Search in Sales Navigator, work in Prospector. A rep finds a prospect, clicks the badge, and the contact lands on its account, owned by that rep and enriched by every connected provider.
Several prospects at once. Reps can select up to 25 contacts at a time from Sales Navigator and export them into Prospector together.
Contact data from your providers. Emails and phone numbers come from the API keys you connect, not from LinkedIn.
Setup. RevOps plugs in the API keys, and upcell helps with field mapping if needed.
Where accounts come from. Prospector doesn’t import CSVs. It connects to HubSpot and Salesforce, so reps start from the accounts already in your CRM.
Seats. The badge also works on regular LinkedIn profiles, and AI-Sourced contacts work inside Prospector. Whether every rep needs a Sales Navigator seat depends on how much of their day is spent searching LinkedIn.
