CampaignStack vs Dux-Soup: the veteran extension against the platform

Dux-Soup has outlived most of the category it helped create. It has run since 2015, claims 300,000 users, and at $14.99 a month Pro Dux is the cheapest paid way on this list to automate LinkedIn at all. Its default throttles are genuinely conservative: visits pace between 25 and 125 profiles an hour with automatic pauses, its knowledge base tells new accounts to start at 5 to 10 invites a day, and it states it has had zero ban reports from users who stayed inside the recommended settings.

The July 2026 MCP server deserves its own mention. Most tools at this price have no API story; Dux-Soup shipped a remote MCP endpoint that lets Claude or ChatGPT read campaign results, create campaigns and manage prospects, with granular permissions per action. Whatever else differs below, that is a real piece of engineering aimed at the right future.

The Pro and Turbo editions are a Chrome extension riding your own logged-in session. That is the basis of a pitch Dux-Soup makes fairly, no third-party access to your account, and the cost is stated just as plainly in its own knowledge base: the automation stops when your computer is off, asleep or hibernating. Campaigns run at the pace of your working hours on your machine, and a laptop lid ends the day's outreach. Cloud Dux exists to solve exactly this, at $99 a month per user, more than six times the Pro price.

CampaignStack runs every account in a persistent, encrypted browser profile on our servers, at every price. Your machine is never part of the infrastructure, sends pace through business hours in the lead's timezone whether your laptop is open or not, and connecting an account takes a session cookie rather than an extension install per seat.

Dux-Soup's safety documentation is among the more honest in the category: concrete recommended caps per LinkedIn plan, a visible throttling tab, and advice to keep connection requests near 3% of your network size. But they are recommendations. The user configures the sliders, the tool executes what the sliders say, and the knowledge base's own caveat is that staying safe means staying inside the recommended settings. The safety system is you.

CampaignStack enforces its numbers. Every account gets per-action-type daily budgets capped below LinkedIn's practical limits, a warm-up ramp that grows caps with real usage, weekly connection caps, and an automatic risk pause when LinkedIn pushes back. A client cannot ask you to turn it up past safe, because there is no slider that goes there.

Dux-Soup executes the list you feed it. Building that list is manual by design: even the MCP launch post is explicit that the AI cannot reach LinkedIn search, so someone runs the search, exports the results and hands them over. Once running, the AI campaigns write and send in one motion; no critic reads the draft, and no queue holds the doubtful ones for a human. The MCP's approval permissions gate actions like turning a campaign on, which is a different thing from reviewing what a specific prospect is about to receive.

CampaignStack fills that gap with the deciding layer: signals update lead records, ICP scores gate who enters a campaign at all, every AI draft faces a critic before it ships, and the ones that keep failing wait in a review queue where approving releases the send. An agent driving our MCP server gets over 300 tools that cover sourcing, scoring, drafting and review, so the part Dux-Soup leaves manual is the part an agent here can actually run.