Reddit Scraper: posts and comments from any subreddit, search or post link

Scrape Reddit without an API key, an app registration or a Reddit account. Read the posts of any public subreddit (new, hot, top or rising), search all of Reddit or one subreddit, or open single posts, and get clean structured data: title, text, score, upvote ratio, comment count, flair, author name, links, image and video URLs and exact timestamps. Turn on Include comments to get the comment tree of every post as separate records, down to depth 10 (deeper branches are skipped), with the depth of each reply and the id of its parent.

Run it on a schedule with Only new items turned on and you get just the posts and comments that appeared since your last run.

Pay per result · No login, no API key · Public data only · LLM-ready JSON for AI agents (MCP)

🛠️ What does Reddit Scraper do?

• 📰 Subreddit posts. New, hot, top (with a time range) or rising, for one subreddit or several at once. Join subreddits with a plus sign (python+learnpython) to read them as one feed.
• 🔎 Search. Search all of Reddit or only inside one subreddit, sorted by relevance, new, top, hot or most comments, with a time range.
• 🔗 Single posts. Paste post links and get the post, and its comments if you want them.
• 💬 Comment trees. Every comment is its own record with postId, parentId and depth, in thread order, down to depth 10 (deeper branches are skipped).
• 🆕 Only new items mode. Schedule it and get just what was not returned before.
• 🔒 No user profile data. Only the public username shown next to a post or comment is saved. Profiles, karma and posting history are never collected.
• 🛡️ Built to get through blocking. Requests go out with a real browser fingerprint through rotating proxies, and a blocked request is retried from a fresh IP. A result that could not be completed is never charged.

What people use it for

• Market and product research. See what people ask, complain about and recommend in the subreddits of your market.
• Brand and keyword monitoring. Schedule a search for your brand or product name with "Only new items" and send new mentions to Slack, Google Sheets or your CRM.
• Trend and topic analysis. Collect top posts of a period and compare score, comment counts and flairs across communities.
• Datasets for AI and NLP. Build text datasets of questions, answers and discussions with timestamps, scores and thread structure.
• Lead and idea discovery. Find posts where people look for a tool, a service or a solution like yours.

📊 What data can you extract?

Every result is one JSON object (one row in CSV or Excel). The type field says whether it is a post or a comment.

Post fields

Field	Meaning
type, id, url	post, Reddit's post id and the link to the post
subreddit, title	The community and the post title
text	The post body as Reddit markdown, null for link and image posts without text. For a crosspost it is the body of the original post
createdAt	When the post was created (UTC)
score, upvoteRatio, numComments	Net score, share of upvotes (0 to 1) and number of comments
flair	The post flair, if it has one
isNsfw, isSpoiler, isStickied, isVideo	Post flags
linkUrl, domain	The outside link of a link post as a full address and its domain (self.<subreddit> for text posts)
thumbnailUrl, imageUrls, videoUrl	Thumbnail, image links (single image or whole gallery) and the Reddit-hosted video link. For a crosspost they come from the original post
isCrosspost, crosspostParentId, crosspostParentSubreddit	Whether the post is a crosspost, and the id and subreddit of the original post
author	The public username of the poster ([deleted] for deleted accounts)
searchQuery	The search that found the post, null for subreddit listings and post links
scrapedAt	When the record was collected (UTC)

Comment fields (with Include comments)

Field	Meaning
type, id, url	comment, Reddit's comment id and the link to the comment
postId, parentId, depth	The post it belongs to, the post or comment it replies to, and its depth (0 for top-level comments)
text	The comment as Reddit markdown
createdAt, score	When it was written (UTC) and its score (null while Reddit hides the score of new comments)
isSubmitter	true when the author of the post wrote it
author, subreddit	The public username and the community
scrapedAt	When the record was collected (UTC)

A field that does not exist for a record is null.

🚀 How to use Reddit Scraper

1. Create a free Apify account and open this Actor.
2. Add subreddits (python, r/AskReddit or a link), search queries, post links, or any mix of the three.
3. For subreddits, pick the sort order (and a time range for Top). For searches, pick the search sort and, if you like, a subreddit to search in.
4. Set max posts per subreddit or search.
5. Turn on Include comments and set max comments per post if you need the discussions.
6. Run it and download the results as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read them through the API.

📥 Input example (JSON)

{
  "subreddits": ["python", "learnpython"],
  "sort": "top",
  "timeFilter": "week",
  "searchQueries": ["web scraping"],
  "searchInSubreddit": "",
  "includeNsfw": false,
  "searchSort": "new",
  "postUrls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/1wu3r86/suggesting_ppl_to_go_from_unmaintainted_library_x/"],
  "includeComments": true,
  "maxCommentsPerPost": 50,
  "maxItemsPerQuery": 100,
  "onlyNew": false
}

📤 Sample output (JSON)

A post:

{
  "type": "post",
  "id": "1ww2uny",
  "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/1ww2uny/tuba_python_cli_pyside6_gui_for_ytdlpffmpeg_video/",
  "subreddit": "Python",
  "title": "Tuba: Python CLI & PySide6 GUI for yt-dlp/FFmpeg video processing",
  "text": "Hi r/Python!\n\nI wanted to share \\*\\*Tuba\\*\\*, an open-source Python tool I built for downloading, trimming, and re-encoding videos from YouTube and Instagram.\n\n👉 \\*\\*GitLab Repository\\*\\*: [https://gitlab.com/bdemircan/tuba](https://gitlab.com/bdemircan/tuba)\n\nThe core motivation was to build a clea...",
  "createdAt": "2026-10-02T19:29:05+00:00",
  "score": 1,
  "upvoteRatio": 0.67,
  "numComments": 2,
  "flair": "News",
  "isNsfw": false,
  "isSpoiler": false,
  "isStickied": false,
  "isVideo": false,
  "linkUrl": null,
  "domain": "self.Python",
  "thumbnailUrl": null,
  "imageUrls": null,
  "videoUrl": null,
  "isCrosspost": false,
  "crosspostParentId": null,
  "crosspostParentSubreddit": null,
  "author": "ozzyburak",
  "searchQuery": null,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-02T20:47:46+00:00"
}

A comment:

{
  "type": "comment",
  "id": "pdh4aww",
  "postId": "1ww2uny",
  "parentId": "1ww2uny",
  "depth": 0,
  "text": "Cool tool, I been messing with yt-dlp scripts lately and the dual interface thing is smart, most of these projects just pick one or the other\n\n  \nThe stream-copy default is nice touch, ffmpeg re-encod...",
  "createdAt": "2026-10-02T19:38:22+00:00",
  "score": 1,
  "isSubmitter": false,
  "author": "Aggravating-Line2390",
  "subreddit": "Python",
  "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/1ww2uny/tuba_python_cli_pyside6_gui_for_ytdlpffmpeg_video/pdh4aww/",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-02T20:47:47+00:00"
}

🤖 Use it with AI agents, MCP and the API

The output is clean JSON with stable field names, ready for LLM pipelines, RAG and agent tools without extra parsing.

• AI agents and MCP (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and others). Add the Apify MCP server with this Actor as a tool: https://mcp.apify.com?tools=akatra/reddit-scraper. The agent can then run it and read the results by itself.
• API. Start a run and get the results in a single call:

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/akatra~reddit-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"subreddits": ["python"], "sort": "new", "maxItemsPerQuery": 50, "includeComments": true, "maxCommentsPerPost": 20}'

• No-code tools and SDKs. Works with Make, n8n, Zapier and LangChain through Apify's integrations, and with the Apify clients for Python and JavaScript. Schedule it and send the results to a webhook, Google Sheets or your own database.

💰 Pricing: pay per result

You pay per result: every post and every comment saved to the dataset is one result. See the price on the Pricing tab. Runs that return nothing cost only a tiny start fee. There is no subscription or rental fee. New to Apify? The free plan includes $5 of platform credit every month, enough for about 3,300 posts or comments with this Actor, and no credit card is needed.

🚦 Run status and error messages

Every run ends with a plain status message, so automated workflows (API, Make, n8n, AI agents) can tell what happened without reading the log:

Situation	What you get
Finished normally	Saved N posts and M comments.
Nothing matched	The run succeeds with No results saved. Check the spelling of the subreddit, try another sort or time range, or turn off 'Only new items'. You pay only the start fee.
Missing or invalid input	The run fails at once with Invalid input: … naming the field to fix, for example a search by username (author:, user:, u/). Nothing is scraped.
Private, quarantined or restricted subreddit	r/name is private or restricted (reason). The other sources are still read.
Subreddit does not exist or is banned	r/name was not found (it may not exist or may be banned).
Post link not available	Post abc123 is not available (it may be deleted, removed or private).
Search inside an 18+ community without the 18+ option	r/name is an 18+ community, so Reddit hides its posts from searches; turn on includeNsfw to search it.
Reddit blocked every request	The run succeeds with Reddit blocked the requests for …, so nothing was saved. You were not charged. Please try again later.
Some pages or comments stayed blocked	Results may be incomplete for: … naming the source. Run again to get the rest.
Comments of some posts could not be loaded	Skipped N posts whose comments could not be loaded (not charged).
Your maximum charge is reached	Stops cleanly with Stopped at your maximum charge limit. Everything saved so far stays in the dataset.

ℹ️ Good to know

• Max posts per subreddit or search applies to each subreddit and each search query. Reddit ends a listing after about 1000 posts for New and Hot, and earlier for Top and for searches (about 500 and 250 in our tests), so higher numbers return what Reddit gives. Comments are limited separately, per post.
• Time range applies to the Top listing and to searches. New, hot and rising ignore it.
• Searches return what Reddit's own search returns for the same words, sort and time range. Reddit matches the words in titles, post texts and communities, so a result does not always have the exact phrase in its title.
• Comments come in thread order, a comment followed by its replies, and Max comments per post counts in that order. Replies nested deeper than 10 levels are skipped. Deleted and removed comments are skipped and not charged. The comment text and the post text are Reddit markdown as the author wrote it.
• A post that several of your sources would return (for example a subreddit and a search) is returned once per run, with its comments.
• With Include comments, a post whose comments cannot be loaded is skipped and not charged; the status message tells you how many.
• Only new items remembers each source (subreddit and sort, search, or post link) between runs. The first run returns everything up to your limits. Later runs return only posts and comments that were not returned before and were created since 15 minutes before the previous run started; older items that were never returned (for example because of your limit) stay out. In a subreddit or search, new posts come with their comments and the comments of posts returned in earlier runs are not fetched again. With a post link you also get the comments written since the last run.
• Searches leave out 18+ posts, as Reddit does by default. Turn on Include 18+ posts (includeNsfw) to get them, and to search inside an 18+ community (without it the run tells you). Subreddit listings and post links return 18+ posts as they are, with isNsfw: true.
• A crosspost keeps its own title, score, comment count, author and link, but its text, outside link, domain, images and video are filled in from the original post.
• Searching by username is not supported: queries with author:, user: or u/ are rejected.
• How it reads Reddit: the Actor does not use Reddit's official API. It reads the public pages Reddit shows to any visitor who is not logged in, with an anonymous visitor session, through residential IPs. Reddit's robots.txt disallows automated access, and Reddit can change or close this way of reading without notice. If that happens the run ends with a status message that Reddit blocked the requests, and you are not charged.
• If you set a maximum charge for a run, the scraper stops as soon as that limit is reached.
• Privacy: only content and the public username shown next to it are collected. User profiles, karma, account age and posting history are never read, and there is no search by username.

📝 Changelog

• 2026-10-02 First release: subreddit listings, search, post links, comment trees and only-new mode.

⚖️ Legal and privacy

This scraper is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Reddit. Reddit and its logo are trademarks of their owner and are used here only to describe which website the tool works with. Reddit's robots.txt disallows automated access and Reddit's terms of use restrict it; the Actor is not an official Reddit tool and does not use Reddit's API. Your use of the data is subject to Reddit's terms and to the laws that apply to you.

The Actor reads only pages that are public without logging in. Posts and comments are written by Reddit users under pseudonyms and can contain personal information their authors chose to publish. How you store and use the data is your responsibility: follow the laws that apply to you, such as GDPR and CCPA.

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💬 Support

Found a bug or need a field that is missing? Open an issue on the Issues tab and we usually reply within a day.