YouTube Comments Scraper

Extract comments and replies from YouTube videos. Fast, lightweight, no browser needed.

What does YouTube Comments Scraper do?

Extract public comments from any YouTube video via pure HTTP — no browser, no Playwright, no Puppeteer.

• Extract top-level comments with author, likes, publish time, and reply count
• Optionally fetch replies for each comment
• Support batch processing — scrape multiple videos in one run
• Get basic video metadata alongside comments
• No browser needed — runs in 128MB memory, extremely fast

How to use YouTube comments data

• Sentiment analysis: Understand how audiences react to a video
• Market research: Find pain points and requests from real users
• Lead generation: Find potential customers discussing relevant topics
• Content strategy: Discover what viewers care about most
• Brand monitoring: Track mentions of your brand in comments
• Competitive analysis: See how audiences respond to competitor content

What data can you extract?

Field	Description
💬 Comment text	Full text of the comment
👤 Author	Display name of the commenter
👍 Like count	Number of likes on the comment
💬 Reply count	Number of replies to the comment
🕐 Published time	Relative time (e.g. "2 days ago")
📌 Is pinned	Whether the comment is pinned by the creator
🏆 Is channel owner	Whether commenter is the video creator
↩️ Replies	Full reply threads (if enabled)

How to scrape YouTube comments

1. Create a free Apify account
2. Open YouTube Comments Scraper
3. Paste one or more YouTube video URLs
4. Set max comments and whether to include replies
5. Click Start and download results in JSON, CSV, or Excel

⬇️ Input example

{
    "urls": [
        "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"
    ],
    "maxComments": 100,
    "includeReplies": false
}

⬆️ Output example

{
    "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "videoId": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "title": "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up",
    "channelName": "Rick Astley",
    "commentCount": 100,
    "comments": [
        {
            "commentId": "UgxXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX",
            "text": "This song will never get old.",
            "author": "John Doe",
            "authorChannelId": "UCxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
            "likeCount": 1523,
            "replyCount": 12,
            "publishedTime": "2 years ago",
            "isPinned": false,
            "isLikedByAuthor": false,
            "authorIsChannelOwner": false,
            "replies": []
        }
    ]
}

Integrations — send YouTube comments anywhere

Connect YouTube Comments Scraper to almost any app through the Apify platform. Pipe comments straight into Make, Zapier, n8n, Slack, Google Sheets, Google Drive, or Airbyte for dashboards and sentiment pipelines. Trigger runs and receive results with webhooks, or drive everything from the Apify API. You can also expose this Actor to AI agents through an MCP server so an LLM can pull and analyze a video's comments on demand.

Other YouTube scrapers you might like

Combine this Actor with the rest of the YouTube toolkit:

• 📺 YouTube Channel Scraper — list every video from a channel
• 🎬 YouTube Shorts Scraper — pull every Short from a channel
• 📝 YouTube Transcript Scraper — grab subtitles and captions

Error handling

When a video's comments cannot be scraped, the Actor pushes an item with an error field instead of failing the whole run, so a single bad input never blocks the rest of your batch.

Error	Meaning
Invalid YouTube URL	The input string is not a recognizable video URL
Comments disabled or unavailable	The video exists but has comments turned off
Video unavailable	The video is private, deleted, or region-blocked

❓ FAQ

How many comments can I scrape?

Set maxComments to 0 to scrape all comments. Popular videos may have millions of comments — use a reasonable limit to control cost and run time.

Does it support replies?

Yes. Enable includeReplies to fetch all reply threads. Note this significantly increases run time for videos with many replies.

How much does it cost?

Charged per comment scraped at $0.25 per 1,000 comments — among the lowest in the market. No browser means minimal compute cost.

What if comments are disabled?

The result will include video metadata but comments will be empty and an error field will indicate "Comments disabled or unavailable".

Is scraping YouTube comments legal?

Scraping publicly available data is generally legal. This Actor only accesses public comments that anyone can view without logging in. You are responsible for how you use the data — follow YouTube's Terms of Service and applicable laws such as GDPR when handling author names and other personal data.

Do I need proxies to scrape YouTube comments?

No. The Actor runs over plain HTTP and works out of the box without proxies for typical use. For very large jobs you can optionally attach Apify Proxy to spread requests across IPs.

Can I use YouTube Comments Scraper with the API?

Yes. Every Actor on Apify is fully controllable through the Apify API — start runs, pass input, and fetch results as JSON, CSV, or Excel from your own code, with official clients for Python and JavaScript.

Can I use YouTube Comments Scraper through an MCP server?

Yes. You can expose this Actor to AI agents and LLMs (Claude, ChatGPT, and others) through the Apify MCP server, so an agent can fetch and analyze a video's comments as a tool call.

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