Facebook Page Scraper

Scrape public Facebook Pages with this Python-based Apify Actor. It uses Playwright to render JavaScript content and BeautifulSoup to parse posts, extracting page names and post counts. Simply input Facebook Page URLs, set a max posts limit, and export results as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

What does Facebook Page Scraper do?

This Actor visits one or more public Facebook Page URLs, renders the page using a headless browser (to handle Facebook's JavaScript-heavy layout), and extracts basic information such as:

• Page name / title
• Number of posts found on the page
• Source URL

Results are saved to the Actor's dataset, which you can export in JSON, CSV, Excel, or other formats.

Input

Field	Type	Description	Required
startUrls	Array	List of public Facebook Page URLs to scrape	Yes
maxPosts	Integer	Maximum number of posts to extract per page (default: 20)	No

Example input

{
  "startUrls": [
    { "url": "https://www.facebook.com/exampleplace" }
  ],
  "maxPosts": 20
}

Output

Each scraped page produces a dataset item like:

{
  "url": "https://www.facebook.com/exampleplace",
  "pageName": "Example Place",
  "postsFound": 12
}

You can view results in the Dataset tab of your Actor run, or export them via the Apify API.

How it works

1. Reads the list of Page URLs from input.
2. Launches a headless Chromium browser via Playwright.
3. Loads each page and waits for network activity to settle.
4. Parses the rendered HTML with BeautifulSoup.
5. Extracts page name and post elements.
6. Pushes structured data to the dataset.

Limitations & important notes

• Facebook actively limits automated access. Most content — including comments, reactions, and full post text — requires a logged-in session and is not accessible to anonymous scrapers.
• The DOM structure changes frequently. Facebook regularly updates its markup, which can break the CSS selectors used here. This Actor is a starting template, not a production-ready scraper.
• Terms of Service. Scraping Facebook may violate its Terms of Service depending on what data is collected and how it's used. Review Facebook's policies and applicable law (e.g. GDPR, CCPA) before running this at scale.
• Rate limiting / blocking. Running this against many pages in a short time may trigger CAPTCHAs or temporary IP blocks.

Use cases

• Monitoring your own public Facebook Page's basic stats
• Educational/demo purposes for learning Playwright + Apify SDK
• A starting point for a more robust, authenticated scraping solution

Pricing

This Actor uses the Pay per usage pricing model on Apify (or Pay per result if configured by the publisher on the Store listing). You only pay for the Apify platform usage (compute units, storage) your runs consume — there is no separate license fee to run this template.

If you publish this Actor on Apify Store, you can choose from:

• Free — users pay only standard Apify platform usage
• Pay per result — charge a fixed amount per dataset item returned
• Pay per event — charge for specific custom events during a run (e.g. per page scraped)
• Rental — a flat monthly fee to use the Actor

You can set or change the pricing model under the Publication tab of your Actor in the Apify Console.

Getting help

If you run into issues:

• Check the Log tab of your Actor run for errors
• Confirm the input URLs are public Facebook Pages (not profiles or private groups)
• Consider that Facebook may require login for the data you're trying to reach

Disclaimer

This Actor is provided for educational and personal-use purposes. The maintainer is not responsible for misuse or any violation of Facebook's Terms of Service.