YouTube Comments Scraper: comments and replies, no API key

Extract comments and replies from any YouTube video or Short. You get the text, author, likes, reply count and the pinned and hearted flags.

There's no Actor fee: you only pay Apify platform usage. In our test that was about $0.006 per 1,000 comments. You also don't need a YouTube API key, and there's no daily quota.

What you get

• 💬 Every top-level comment, sorted by Top or Newest, just like on YouTube
• ↩️ Replies (optional), linked to their parent with parentCommentId
• 👍 Likes and reply counts, plus flags for pinned comments, hearted by the creator and the channel owner's own comments
• 👤 Author name, channel ID and URL, avatar and verified badge
• 🔗 A direct link to each comment (&lc= URL)
• 🎬 Regular videos, Shorts and youtu.be links, or plain video IDs

Tested at scale

In one run we collected 17,936 comments and replies from 10 videos, with 0 failures, 0 duplicates and 0 blocks. It used $0.098 of platform usage.

Use cases

• Sentiment and audience research: export thousands of comments to analyze what viewers love or hate.
• Creator and brand monitoring: track reactions to launches, ads and sponsored videos.
• Lead and community discovery: find active commenters and the channels behind them.
• AI and LLM pipelines: clean JSON ready for classification, summarization or RAG.

Input

{
  "videoUrls": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "https://www.youtube.com/shorts/41UzbuW6wJs"
  ],
  "maxComments": 500,
  "sortBy": "top",
  "includeReplies": true,
  "maxRepliesPerComment": 20
}

Output

{
  "videoId": "41UzbuW6wJs",
  "videoTitle": "Can A Robot Do My Chores?",
  "commentId": "UgzOP-p2wRIlb9NnBaZ4AaABAg",
  "text": "So excited to never do chores again",
  "author": "@MrBeast",
  "authorChannelId": "UCX6OQ3DkcsbYNE6H8uQQuVA",
  "authorIsChannelOwner": true,
  "authorIsVerified": true,
  "likes": 14000,
  "likesText": "14K",
  "replyCount": 899,
  "publishedTimeText": "3 days ago",
  "isEdited": false,
  "isPinned": true,
  "isHeartedByCreator": false,
  "isReply": false,
  "parentCommentId": null,
  "commentUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41UzbuW6wJs&lc=UgzOP-p2wRIlb9NnBaZ4AaABAg"
}

YouTube only shows rounded like counts (for example "14K"). likes is the number parsed from that text, and likesText keeps the original.

Pricing

This Actor has no fee of its own: you pay only Apify platform usage. In our test, 17,936 comments cost $0.098, mostly for dataset storage. The free Apify plan covers hundreds of thousands of comments per month.

More YouTube and trends tools from Criato Labs

• YouTube Channel & Video Scraper: channel profiles, videos, Shorts, lives and keyword search
• YouTube Transcript Scraper: transcripts of videos or whole channels
• Google Trends Batch Scraper: up to 1,000 keywords per run, including YouTube Search trends

FAQ

Do I need a YouTube API key? No. The Actor reads the same public data the YouTube website shows.

Can I get all comments of a video? Yes. Set maxComments to a large number. Very large videos can have millions of comments, so start small to estimate time and cost.

What about videos with comments turned off? They're skipped and counted as disabled in the run summary.

Is it legal? The Actor collects only publicly visible comments. Comments contain personal data such as usernames, so make sure your use complies with GDPR, LGPD and other applicable laws, and with YouTube's terms.