# YouTube Comments Scraper (`alwaysprimedev/youtube-comments-scraper`) Actor

Extract public YouTube comments and replies from one or multiple videos. Get clean structured data with author info, likes, replies, pinned and hearted status, timestamps, and video metadata for research, audience analysis, lead discovery, and competitor monitoring.

- **URL**: https://apify.com/alwaysprimedev/youtube-comments-scraper.md
- **Developed by:** [Always Prime](https://apify.com/alwaysprimedev) (community)
- **Categories:** Automation, Social media, Open source
- **Stats:** 2 total users, 1 monthly users, 100.0% runs succeeded, 1 bookmarks
- **User rating**: No ratings yet

## Pricing

from $0.50 / 1,000 comments

This Actor is paid per event. You are not charged for the Apify platform usage, but only a fixed price for specific events.

Learn more: https://docs.apify.com/platform/actors/running/actors-in-store#pay-per-event

## What's an Apify Actor?

Actors are a software tools running on the Apify platform, for all kinds of web data extraction and automation use cases.
In Batch mode, an Actor accepts a well-defined JSON input, performs an action which can take anything from a few seconds to a few hours,
and optionally produces a well-defined JSON output, datasets with results, or files in key-value store.
In Standby mode, an Actor provides a web server which can be used as a website, API, or an MCP server.
Actors are written with capital "A".

## How to integrate an Actor?

If asked about integration, you help developers integrate Actors into their projects.
You adapt to their stack and deliver integrations that are safe, well-documented, and production-ready.
The best way to integrate Actors is as follows.

In JavaScript/TypeScript projects, use official [JavaScript/TypeScript client](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js.md):

```bash
npm install apify-client
```

In Python projects, use official [Python client library](https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python.md):

```bash
pip install apify-client
```

In shell scripts, use [Apify CLI](https://docs.apify.com/cli/docs.md):

````bash
# MacOS / Linux
curl -fsSL https://apify.com/install-cli.sh | bash
# Windows
irm https://apify.com/install-cli.ps1 | iex
```bash

In AI frameworks, you might use the [Apify MCP server](https://docs.apify.com/platform/integrations/mcp.md).

If your project is in a different language, use the [REST API](https://docs.apify.com/api/v2.md).

For usage examples, see the [API](#api) section below.

For more details, see Apify documentation as [Markdown index](https://docs.apify.com/llms.txt) and [Markdown full-text](https://docs.apify.com/llms-full.txt).


# README

## 💬 YouTube Comments Scraper

Extract comments from YouTube videos in a clean, ready-to-use format.

This Actor helps you collect public YouTube comments and replies for research, lead generation, content analysis, competitor tracking, audience discovery, moderation workflows, and trend spotting.

### 🚀 Why Use This Actor?

- 🎯 Collect comments from one or multiple YouTube videos
- 🧠 Understand what viewers really think about any video
- 🔍 Find customer pain points, objections, and recurring questions
- ❤️ See which comments got likes, replies, creator hearts, or pinned status
- 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Discover active audience members and potential leads
- 📅 Focus on recent discussions with date filtering
- 📦 Export results for reporting, analysis, or outreach

### 📌 What You Get

Each result can include:

- 👤 Author name
- 💬 Comment text
- 👍 Like count
- ↩️ Reply count
- 📍 Whether the comment is pinned
- ❤️ Whether the creator hearted it
- 🎬 Video info
- 🕒 Published time
- 🔗 Author and video links

### 🛠️ Great For

- 📈 Marketing teams tracking audience sentiment
- 🧪 Researchers studying viewer behavior
- 🎥 Creators analyzing community feedback
- 🏷️ Agencies monitoring competitor videos
- 💡 Product teams collecting feature requests and frustrations
- 🤝 Sales teams looking for warm audience signals

### ✨ Common Use Cases

- Find the most engaged commenters on niche videos
- Compare reactions across several competitor channels
- Collect audience questions for content ideas
- Identify common complaints about a product or service
- Track comment activity on newly published videos
- Build datasets for sentiment or topic analysis

### ⚙️ How To Use

1. Paste one or more YouTube video URLs.
2. Choose how many comments you want.
3. Select the sorting mode you prefer.
4. Optionally limit results to newer comments only.
5. Run the Actor and export the dataset.

### 📂 Output Overview

The Actor returns structured comment data that is easy to browse and export.

You can use it to:

- open results directly in Apify
- filter and review comments faster
- export to JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, or RSS
- plug the data into your internal workflows

### 💼 Why It’s Valuable

YouTube comments are one of the clearest sources of real audience language.

Instead of guessing what people want, you can see:

- what they praise
- what they dislike
- what confuses them
- what they ask for
- which opinions get engagement

That makes this Actor useful for content strategy, product research, outreach, and market validation.

### ❓FAQ

**Does it work with multiple videos?**  
Yes. You can provide more than one YouTube video URL in a single run.

**Can it collect replies too?**  
Yes. Replies are included when available.

**Can I sort by newest or top comments?**  
Yes. You can choose the comment order before running.

**Can I limit results by date?**  
Yes. You can focus on newer comments only.

**What kind of videos can I use?**  
Public YouTube video pages.

### 🎯 Best Fit If You Want To

- turn YouTube discussions into actionable insights
- monitor audience feedback at scale
- save hours of manual copying
- build comment datasets for business decisions

Run it on any public YouTube video and get the conversation in a usable format.

# Actor input Schema

## `startUrls` (type: `array`):

Enter one or more YouTube video URLs.
## `maxComments` (type: `integer`):

Limit the number of comments to scrape per video.
## `commentsSortBy` (type: `string`):

Select YouTube sorting parameter for comments.
## `oldestCommentDate` (type: `string`):

Only comments published after or on this date will be scraped. You can use a date like 2025-01-01 or a relative value like 7 days.
## `maxConcurrency` (type: `integer`):

Maximum number of pages processed in parallel.
## `proxyConfig` (type: `object`):

Proxy settings used for requests to YouTube.

## Actor input object example

```json
{
  "startUrls": [
    {
      "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"
    }
  ],
  "maxComments": 1,
  "commentsSortBy": "1",
  "maxConcurrency": 5,
  "proxyConfig": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": [
      "RESIDENTIAL"
    ]
  }
}
````

# Actor output Schema

## `results` (type: `string`):

No description

# API

You can run this Actor programmatically using our API. Below are code examples in JavaScript, Python, and CLI, as well as the OpenAPI specification and MCP server setup.

## JavaScript example

```javascript
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

// Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
// Replace the '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token
const client = new ApifyClient({
    token: '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>',
});

// Prepare Actor input
const input = {
    "startUrls": [
        {
            "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"
        }
    ]
};

// Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
const run = await client.actor("alwaysprimedev/youtube-comments-scraper").call(input);

// Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if any)
console.log('Results from dataset');
console.log(`💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/${run.defaultDatasetId}`);
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
items.forEach((item) => {
    console.dir(item);
});

// 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/js/docs

```

## Python example

```python
from apify_client import ApifyClient

# Initialize the ApifyClient with your Apify API token
# Replace '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' with your token.
client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")

# Prepare the Actor input
run_input = { "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ" }] }

# Run the Actor and wait for it to finish
run = client.actor("alwaysprimedev/youtube-comments-scraper").call(run_input=run_input)

# Fetch and print Actor results from the run's dataset (if there are any)
print("💾 Check your data here: https://console.apify.com/storage/datasets/" + run["defaultDatasetId"])
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item)

# 📚 Want to learn more 📖? Go to → https://docs.apify.com/api/client/python/docs/quick-start

```

## CLI example

```bash
echo '{
  "startUrls": [
    {
      "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"
    }
  ]
}' |
apify call alwaysprimedev/youtube-comments-scraper --silent --output-dataset

```

## MCP server setup

```json
{
    "mcpServers": {
        "apify": {
            "command": "npx",
            "args": [
                "mcp-remote",
                "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=alwaysprimedev/youtube-comments-scraper",
                "--header",
                "Authorization: Bearer <YOUR_API_TOKEN>"
            ]
        }
    }
}

```

## OpenAPI specification

```json
{
    "openapi": "3.0.1",
    "info": {
        "title": "YouTube Comments Scraper",
        "description": "Extract public YouTube comments and replies from one or multiple videos. Get clean structured data with author info, likes, replies, pinned and hearted status, timestamps, and video metadata for research, audience analysis, lead discovery, and competitor monitoring.",
        "version": "0.0",
        "x-build-id": "8qe4dCxY09tx9ZLpu"
    },
    "servers": [
        {
            "url": "https://api.apify.com/v2"
        }
    ],
    "paths": {
        "/acts/alwaysprimedev~youtube-comments-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items": {
            "post": {
                "operationId": "run-sync-get-dataset-items-alwaysprimedev-youtube-comments-scraper",
                "x-openai-isConsequential": false,
                "summary": "Executes an Actor, waits for its completion, and returns Actor's dataset items in response.",
                "tags": [
                    "Run Actor"
                ],
                "requestBody": {
                    "required": true,
                    "content": {
                        "application/json": {
                            "schema": {
                                "$ref": "#/components/schemas/inputSchema"
                            }
                        }
                    }
                },
                "parameters": [
                    {
                        "name": "token",
                        "in": "query",
                        "required": true,
                        "schema": {
                            "type": "string"
                        },
                        "description": "Enter your Apify token here"
                    }
                ],
                "responses": {
                    "200": {
                        "description": "OK"
                    }
                }
            }
        },
        "/acts/alwaysprimedev~youtube-comments-scraper/runs": {
            "post": {
                "operationId": "runs-sync-alwaysprimedev-youtube-comments-scraper",
                "x-openai-isConsequential": false,
                "summary": "Executes an Actor and returns information about the initiated run in response.",
                "tags": [
                    "Run Actor"
                ],
                "requestBody": {
                    "required": true,
                    "content": {
                        "application/json": {
                            "schema": {
                                "$ref": "#/components/schemas/inputSchema"
                            }
                        }
                    }
                },
                "parameters": [
                    {
                        "name": "token",
                        "in": "query",
                        "required": true,
                        "schema": {
                            "type": "string"
                        },
                        "description": "Enter your Apify token here"
                    }
                ],
                "responses": {
                    "200": {
                        "description": "OK",
                        "content": {
                            "application/json": {
                                "schema": {
                                    "$ref": "#/components/schemas/runsResponseSchema"
                                }
                            }
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
        },
        "/acts/alwaysprimedev~youtube-comments-scraper/run-sync": {
            "post": {
                "operationId": "run-sync-alwaysprimedev-youtube-comments-scraper",
                "x-openai-isConsequential": false,
                "summary": "Executes an Actor, waits for completion, and returns the OUTPUT from Key-value store in response.",
                "tags": [
                    "Run Actor"
                ],
                "requestBody": {
                    "required": true,
                    "content": {
                        "application/json": {
                            "schema": {
                                "$ref": "#/components/schemas/inputSchema"
                            }
                        }
                    }
                },
                "parameters": [
                    {
                        "name": "token",
                        "in": "query",
                        "required": true,
                        "schema": {
                            "type": "string"
                        },
                        "description": "Enter your Apify token here"
                    }
                ],
                "responses": {
                    "200": {
                        "description": "OK"
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    },
    "components": {
        "schemas": {
            "inputSchema": {
                "type": "object",
                "required": [
                    "startUrls"
                ],
                "properties": {
                    "startUrls": {
                        "title": "Direct video URLs",
                        "type": "array",
                        "description": "Enter one or more YouTube video URLs.",
                        "default": [],
                        "items": {
                            "type": "object",
                            "required": [
                                "url"
                            ],
                            "properties": {
                                "url": {
                                    "type": "string",
                                    "title": "URL of a web page",
                                    "format": "uri"
                                }
                            }
                        }
                    },
                    "maxComments": {
                        "title": "Maximum comments",
                        "minimum": 1,
                        "type": "integer",
                        "description": "Limit the number of comments to scrape per video.",
                        "default": 1
                    },
                    "commentsSortBy": {
                        "title": "Sorting order",
                        "enum": [
                            "0",
                            "1"
                        ],
                        "type": "string",
                        "description": "Select YouTube sorting parameter for comments.",
                        "default": "1"
                    },
                    "oldestCommentDate": {
                        "title": "Scrape comments published after [date]",
                        "type": "string",
                        "description": "Only comments published after or on this date will be scraped. You can use a date like 2025-01-01 or a relative value like 7 days."
                    },
                    "maxConcurrency": {
                        "title": "Max concurrency",
                        "minimum": 1,
                        "type": "integer",
                        "description": "Maximum number of pages processed in parallel.",
                        "default": 5
                    },
                    "proxyConfig": {
                        "title": "Proxy configuration",
                        "type": "object",
                        "description": "Proxy settings used for requests to YouTube.",
                        "default": {
                            "useApifyProxy": true,
                            "apifyProxyGroups": [
                                "RESIDENTIAL"
                            ]
                        }
                    }
                }
            },
            "runsResponseSchema": {
                "type": "object",
                "properties": {
                    "data": {
                        "type": "object",
                        "properties": {
                            "id": {
                                "type": "string"
                            },
                            "actId": {
                                "type": "string"
                            },
                            "userId": {
                                "type": "string"
                            },
                            "startedAt": {
                                "type": "string",
                                "format": "date-time",
                                "example": "2025-01-08T00:00:00.000Z"
                            },
                            "finishedAt": {
                                "type": "string",
                                "format": "date-time",
                                "example": "2025-01-08T00:00:00.000Z"
                            },
                            "status": {
                                "type": "string",
                                "example": "READY"
                            },
                            "meta": {
                                "type": "object",
                                "properties": {
                                    "origin": {
                                        "type": "string",
                                        "example": "API"
                                    },
                                    "userAgent": {
                                        "type": "string"
                                    }
                                }
                            },
                            "stats": {
                                "type": "object",
                                "properties": {
                                    "inputBodyLen": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 2000
                                    },
                                    "rebootCount": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 0
                                    },
                                    "restartCount": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 0
                                    },
                                    "resurrectCount": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 0
                                    },
                                    "computeUnits": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 0
                                    }
                                }
                            },
                            "options": {
                                "type": "object",
                                "properties": {
                                    "build": {
                                        "type": "string",
                                        "example": "latest"
                                    },
                                    "timeoutSecs": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 300
                                    },
                                    "memoryMbytes": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 1024
                                    },
                                    "diskMbytes": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 2048
                                    }
                                }
                            },
                            "buildId": {
                                "type": "string"
                            },
                            "defaultKeyValueStoreId": {
                                "type": "string"
                            },
                            "defaultDatasetId": {
                                "type": "string"
                            },
                            "defaultRequestQueueId": {
                                "type": "string"
                            },
                            "buildNumber": {
                                "type": "string",
                                "example": "1.0.0"
                            },
                            "containerUrl": {
                                "type": "string"
                            },
                            "usage": {
                                "type": "object",
                                "properties": {
                                    "ACTOR_COMPUTE_UNITS": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 0
                                    },
                                    "DATASET_READS": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 0
                                    },
                                    "DATASET_WRITES": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 0
                                    },
                                    "KEY_VALUE_STORE_READS": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 0
                                    },
                                    "KEY_VALUE_STORE_WRITES": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 1
                                    },
                                    "KEY_VALUE_STORE_LISTS": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 0
                                    },
                                    "REQUEST_QUEUE_READS": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 0
                                    },
                                    "REQUEST_QUEUE_WRITES": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 0
                                    },
                                    "DATA_TRANSFER_INTERNAL_GBYTES": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 0
                                    },
                                    "DATA_TRANSFER_EXTERNAL_GBYTES": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 0
                                    },
                                    "PROXY_RESIDENTIAL_TRANSFER_GBYTES": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 0
                                    },
                                    "PROXY_SERPS": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 0
                                    }
                                }
                            },
                            "usageTotalUsd": {
                                "type": "number",
                                "example": 0.00005
                            },
                            "usageUsd": {
                                "type": "object",
                                "properties": {
                                    "ACTOR_COMPUTE_UNITS": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 0
                                    },
                                    "DATASET_READS": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 0
                                    },
                                    "DATASET_WRITES": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 0
                                    },
                                    "KEY_VALUE_STORE_READS": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 0
                                    },
                                    "KEY_VALUE_STORE_WRITES": {
                                        "type": "number",
                                        "example": 0.00005
                                    },
                                    "KEY_VALUE_STORE_LISTS": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 0
                                    },
                                    "REQUEST_QUEUE_READS": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 0
                                    },
                                    "REQUEST_QUEUE_WRITES": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 0
                                    },
                                    "DATA_TRANSFER_INTERNAL_GBYTES": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 0
                                    },
                                    "DATA_TRANSFER_EXTERNAL_GBYTES": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 0
                                    },
                                    "PROXY_RESIDENTIAL_TRANSFER_GBYTES": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 0
                                    },
                                    "PROXY_SERPS": {
                                        "type": "integer",
                                        "example": 0
                                    }
                                }
                            }
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
}
```