Booost vs Waalaxy: whose machine is talking to LinkedIn?

The short answer

Booost Business runs on your own computer. Your LinkedIn session and the IP LinkedIn sees stay on your machine — and it does both halves of LinkedIn: outreach and content, drafting posts from your own sources, publishing them under your name or as a Company Page, then engaging with them, in one workflow, on top of an intelligence layer that scores your real network against your goals. €99 per managed account per month, €79 on Basic.

Waalaxy is a cloud platform for outreach. You connect your LinkedIn account, close the laptop, and their servers keep working. From €19 per user per month.

The trade, in one line: Waalaxy sends invitations for less money. Booost does a bigger job — outreach and presence — on a machine nobody else can act from. The two are not the same product at two prices; they are two products, and the price only means something once you know what it buys.

Both run around the clock, by the way — that part is usually presented as a cloud-only feature and it is not. See below.

What Booost does that Waalaxy does not

Your session never leaves your machine. Booost signs into LinkedIn the way you do — a browser on your computer, your own connection. We never receive your password, and there is no copy of your session on a server we control. That is not a promise about how carefully we would guard it: there is nothing on our side to guard. Waalaxy's cloud announcement mentions neither IP addresses nor proxies, and neither does its pricing page.

We are deliberate about the wording. "The session stays local" and "the data stays local" are two different promises, and only the first one is ours — your connection graph does travel to our servers, because that is where the network intelligence below is computed. It is written that way in our own documentation rather than glossed over, and you should hold every tool on this page to the same standard of precision.

It maps the network you already have. Booost scores every contact on six axes — thematic fit, seniority, activity, target fit, influence and proximity — each with the evidence behind it, and shows your network as a graph connected by company, school and shared themes. The Strategy tab tracks an affinity score (0–100) for the people you want in your network: it rises with real interactions and cools with silence, and the app can suggest a warm path through a mutual connection and draft the note. All of it is measured against the goals and target audience you set in a two-minute interview, so "is this person worth your time" is answered against your objectives, not a generic lead score. Waalaxy — and the other four — work from lists you import, enrich or buy. Nobody in this comparison maps the network you already have.

It publishes, not just prospects. Booost drafts posts from your own sources, publishes them under your name or as a Company Page, and then reacts, comments and reposts around them — in the same workflow that runs the outreach. Waalaxy automates invitations, sequences and cold email. So do Expandi, HeyReach, Dripify and lemlist: not one of the five publishes content on LinkedIn. Presence and outbound are the same job, and Booost is the only tool in this comparison that treats them that way.

There is no invitation quota. Waalaxy meters what you are allowed to send: 300 invitations a month on the €19 plan, 800 on the plans above it. Booost has no such number on any edition. The only limits are the anti-ban ones — and those exist to keep the account alive, not to move you up a tier. It is a different kind of limit with a different purpose, and it is worth knowing which one you are buying.

The AI is included flat, and it writes posts — not just messages. On Pro, model access is part of the subscription: no key to configure, no credit bundles, no tokens to top up when you run out mid-month. On Basic you bring your own key, across 20 providers. And because Booost publishes, its AI writes the things a presence is made of — posts, comments, replies — in your voice and in any language, not only outreach copy. No tool in this comparison can do that, for a structural reason: none of the five publishes anything. An AI attached to an outreach robot writes outreach.

The account is warmed up, not pushed. Booost's anti-ban system warms an account over weeks, spreads actions across a working day and pulls the brake when LinkedIn's responses change. The goal is not speed.

Built in the EU, GDPR by default, and the desktop app is audited WCAG 2.2 AA.

And Booost Personal is a different product entirely — a browser extension with its own dashboard, for people who want to be present on LinkedIn rather than run campaigns. It reads a post, drafts a comment in your voice in any language, and you publish it. It automates nothing, which is the one compliance claim nobody else in this category can make; it has its own section below. €19–29 per account per month.

"It runs while you sleep" — so does Booost, on your own hardware

Waalaxy's move to the cloud is sold on this, and it is worth answering rather than conceding.

Booost Business runs while the machine it is installed on is running — and that machine does not have to be your laptop. Every release ships a Linux .deb and an AppImage next to the Windows and macOS builds, and the licence says you may install it on "any device of your own". A Debian server costing a few euros a month is a device of your own: install it there, leave it on, and campaigns run around the clock.

So both options run 24/7. The difference is whose machine acts as you: on Waalaxy it is theirs, on Booost it is yours, and only one of those two arrangements requires a third party to hold something that can log in as you.

One honest gap, and it is documentation rather than architecture: we do not yet publish a step-by-step guide for a headless server, where a desktop application needs a virtual display. It works; the guide is not written yet.

Where Waalaxy is stronger

Three things, and they are worth stating precisely rather than loosely:

1. For pure outreach at low volume, it is cheaper. Waalaxy Pro is €19 a month and covers 300 LinkedIn invitations; Booost Business starts at €79. If sending a few hundred invitations is the whole job, Waalaxy does that job for less money, and the yearly discount (−50%) widens the gap further.
2. Nothing to set up beyond a login. No install, no machine to keep running, no server to think about — you open a browser and you are working. Booost asks you to install software and decide where it lives, and for some people that is friction they do not want.
3. Native no-code integrations, and maturity. Make, Zapier and n8n modules from the Advanced plan; Booost has none of those yet. And Waalaxy has been shipping for years, while Booost opens on 1 September 2026.

What that lower price does not buy, at any Waalaxy tier: publishing posts, publishing as a Company Page, AI that writes in your voice, an editorial pipeline, or a session that stays on your own machine. Those are not features Waalaxy charges more for — they are not in the product. The €69 Business plan adds cold email and 800 invitations, not content.

What changed for Waalaxy in July 2026

Comparisons written before this summer — some still online — describe Waalaxy as a Chrome extension that worked in your own browser and stopped when you closed the tab. From Waalaxy's own help centre, updated 1 July 2026:

"The Waalaxy Chrome extension has been removed. Waalaxy works directly in your browser at app.waalaxy.com."

"you don't need to stay on LinkedIn while it works" — "Your campaigns run in the background regardless of what's happening in your browser."

That is the change that makes this page worth reading: the comparison is no longer extension versus desktop, it is someone else's servers versus your own machine.

One line deserves care: we are not saying Waalaxy has no IP strategy — we are saying that, unlike Expandi and HeyReach, they do not publish one. It is a fair question to ask them before buying.

Prices, as each company lists them

Read the right-hand column before the left one — that is where the two products stop being comparable.

Note what the quotas mean on each side. Waalaxy's 300 and 800 invitations are plan limits: they exist to move you to the next tier. Booost has no invitation quota at all — the only limits are the anti-ban ones, which exist to keep the account alive and are the same on both editions.

Waalaxy discounts quarterly (−20%) and yearly (−50%). Booost's founding price gives the Pro edition at the Basic price — €79 per account — locked for as long as the subscription stays active, which is a price that stops moving rather than a discount that expires.

The claim nobody in this category can make — except one

Section 8.2 of LinkedIn's User Agreement prohibits third-party software that automates activity on the platform, and names "bots, browser plug-ins, or browser extensions" explicitly. It does not matter where the software runs. Cloud platforms are covered. Desktop applications are covered. Booost Business is covered, and our Acceptable Use Policy says so in writing rather than in small print — which is more than most of this category will tell you.

So no honest page here can sell you "LinkedIn-approved automation", and nobody — including us — has published data comparing restriction rates between architectures. Argue about the mechanism: whose machine, whose IP, whose session. Those are checkable.

The exception is Booost Personal, and it is the only clean compliance claim anyone in this category can make: it performs no action on LinkedIn at all. It reads a post, drafts a comment in your voice, and a human publishes it. There is no automated activity to prohibit. No cloud tool can say that, and neither can any browser extension — because both of them act.

How to choose

If the account is one of many and it can be replaced, buy on price and on having nothing to install: Waalaxy is cheaper and there is no machine to think about, and this page has told you so plainly.

If the account is the one your pipeline and your reputation live in — and if you want the tool to build your presence and not only send your invitations — then the question of whose machine is talking to LinkedIn stops being academic, and that is the question Booost is built around.

Booost opens on 1 September 2026. Join the waitlist to keep the founding price.

Sources

Checked 12 August 2026.

• Waalaxy is now fully cloud-based — Waalaxy help centre, updated 1 July 2026
• Waalaxy pricing
• LinkedIn User Agreement — section 8.2
• LinkedIn: prohibited software and extensions
• Booost prices: our own terms and pricing