Reddit Scraper — Posts, Comments, Subreddits & User Profiles

Scrape Reddit posts, comments, and user profiles at scale — no API key or Reddit account needed.

Extract posts from any subreddit, search Reddit by keyword, get full comment trees, and track user activity. Outputs clean, structured JSON ready for analysis, monitoring, or integration into your data pipeline.

Unlike other Reddit scrapers that rely on the increasingly restricted official Reddit API (which now costs $0.24 per 1,000 API calls), this scraper uses Reddit's public web interface — so it works without API credentials, OAuth tokens, or rate-limited developer accounts.

What Can This Reddit Scraper Do?

• Search Reddit by keyword across all subreddits or within a specific one
• Browse subreddits — get hot, new, top, or rising posts from any subreddit
• Extract comments — get the full comment tree from any Reddit post URL
• Track users — scrape any Reddit user's post history and activity
• Filter by date — narrow results to a specific date range (ISO format)
• Sort flexibly — sort by new, hot, top, relevance, or rising
• Auto-pagination — fetches multiple pages automatically up to your specified limit
• No API key needed — works without Reddit API credentials, OAuth setup, or developer accounts
• Structured output — every result includes title, score, upvote ratio, comments count, author, flair, permalink, and more

Use Cases

Use Case	How It Works
Brand monitoring	Search for your brand or product name across Reddit. Set up scheduled runs to get alerts on new mentions in real time.
Market research	Discover what real users think about your product, your competitors, or an entire product category. Analyze sentiment at scale.
Content research	Find trending topics, viral posts, and popular opinions in any niche. Use Reddit data to inform your content calendar.
Sentiment analysis	Collect thousands of posts and comments for NLP pipelines. Feed structured Reddit data into your sentiment analysis models.
Lead generation	Find posts where users ask for product recommendations in your category. Identify high-intent prospects discussing their pain points.
Academic research	Gather public Reddit data for social media studies, discourse analysis, and computational social science research.
Competitor intelligence	Monitor competitor mentions, track user feedback, and identify feature requests your competitors are missing.
SEO & content gap analysis	Find Reddit threads that rank on Google for your target keywords. Understand what questions your audience is asking.
Recruitment & talent sourcing	Search technical subreddits for professionals discussing specific technologies, frameworks, or career topics.
Crisis monitoring	Track brand mentions during PR events. Get early warning of negative sentiment spikes before they hit mainstream media.

Input Configuration

Scraping Modes

Mode	Description	Required Fields
search	Search Reddit posts by keyword	query (+ optional subreddit to limit scope)
subreddit	Browse a specific subreddit's feed	subreddit
comments	Extract full comment trees from posts	postUrls
user	Get a user's post history	username

All Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
mode	string	search	Scraping mode: search, subreddit, comments, or user
query	string	—	Keywords to search for (used in search mode)
subreddit	string	—	Subreddit name without r/ (e.g., technology)
username	string	—	Reddit username without u/ (e.g., spez)
postUrls	array	—	List of Reddit post URLs for comment extraction
sort	string	new	Sort order: new, hot, top, relevance, rising
timeFilter	string	all	Time period for top/relevance: all, year, month, week, day, hour
maxResults	integer	100	Maximum posts to scrape (1–1,000)
startDate	string	—	Only posts after this date (ISO format, e.g., 2024-01-01)
endDate	string	—	Only posts before this date (ISO format)

Input Examples

Search for posts about a topic

{
    "mode": "search",
    "query": "artificial intelligence",
    "sort": "top",
    "timeFilter": "month",
    "maxResults": 200
}

Get hot posts from a subreddit

{
    "mode": "subreddit",
    "subreddit": "technology",
    "sort": "hot",
    "maxResults": 50
}

Get comments from specific posts

{
    "mode": "comments",
    "postUrls": [
        "https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/abc123/example_post/",
        "https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/def456/another_post/"
    ]
}

Scrape a user's post history

{
    "mode": "user",
    "username": "spez",
    "sort": "top",
    "maxResults": 100
}

Search within a specific subreddit with date range

{
    "mode": "search",
    "query": "remote work",
    "subreddit": "cscareerquestions",
    "sort": "top",
    "timeFilter": "year",
    "startDate": "2025-01-01",
    "endDate": "2025-12-31",
    "maxResults": 500
}

Output Schema

Each scraped Reddit post returns structured data like this:

{
    "id": "1abc2de",
    "title": "OpenAI just released GPT-5 — here's what's different",
    "subreddit": "technology",
    "author": "techfan42",
    "score": 15234,
    "upvoteRatio": 0.94,
    "numComments": 2847,
    "url": "https://openai.com/gpt-5",
    "permalink": "https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/xyz789/openai_just_released_gpt5/",
    "selftext": "Full post text content here...",
    "createdUtc": 1710504600,
    "createdDate": "2026-03-15T14:30:00+00:00",
    "postHint": "link",
    "isSelf": false,
    "linkFlairText": "AI",
    "thumbnail": "https://b.thumbs.redditmedia.com/...",
    "domain": "openai.com",
    "over18": false
}

Comment Output (comments mode)

{
    "postId": "1abc2de",
    "commentId": "k9f8g7h",
    "author": "insightful_user",
    "body": "This is a really interesting development because...",
    "score": 542,
    "createdUtc": 1710508200,
    "parentId": "t3_1abc2de",
    "depth": 0,
    "isSubmitter": false
}

How to Use Reddit Scraper with the Apify API

Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_API_TOKEN")

# Search Reddit for posts about your topic
run = client.actor("cryptosignals/reddit-scraper").call(run_input={
    "mode": "search",
    "query": "best productivity apps 2026",
    "sort": "top",
    "timeFilter": "week",
    "maxResults": 100,
})

# Process results
dataset = client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"])
for post in dataset.iterate_items():
    print(f"[{post['score']} pts] r/{post['subreddit']} — {post['title']}")
    if post.get("selftext"):
        print(f"  {post['selftext'][:200]}...")

JavaScript / TypeScript

import { ApifyClient } from "apify-client";

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: "YOUR_API_TOKEN" });

const run = await client.actor("cryptosignals/reddit-scraper").call({
    mode: "subreddit",
    subreddit: "startups",
    sort: "top",
    timeFilter: "month",
    maxResults: 200,
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
items.forEach((post) => {
    console.log(`${post.score} upvotes: ${post.title}`);
});

cURL

# Start a scraping run
curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/cryptosignals~reddit-scraper/runs?token=YOUR_API_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"mode": "search", "query": "remote work tools", "maxResults": 50}'

# Get results (use the defaultDatasetId from the run response)
curl "https://api.apify.com/v2/datasets/DATASET_ID/items?token=YOUR_API_TOKEN&format=json"

Integrations

Reddit Scraper works with all Apify integrations including:

• Webhooks — get notified when a scrape finishes
• Google Sheets — export Reddit data directly to a spreadsheet
• Slack — send scraped posts to a Slack channel for monitoring
• Zapier / Make — connect Reddit data to 5,000+ apps
• API — call programmatically from Python, JavaScript, or any language
• Schedule — run automatically on a daily, hourly, or custom schedule

Performance & Rate Limits

The scraper respects Reddit's rate limits with built-in throttling and exponential backoff. Typical performance:

• ~50 posts per minute for search and subreddit modes
• ~30 comment trees per minute in comments mode
• Automatic pagination handles large result sets seamlessly
• Retries on temporary errors (429, 503) with intelligent backoff

Pricing

Try it free — then just $4.99/month after April 3, 2026. No per-result fees. Run it as many times as you need.

You also pay only for Apify platform usage (compute and storage), which typically costs less than $1 for most scraping jobs.

FAQ

Do I need a Reddit API key? No. This scraper works without any Reddit API credentials, OAuth tokens, or developer accounts.

Can I scrape private subreddits? No. This scraper only accesses publicly available content. Private and quarantined subreddits are not accessible.

How fresh is the data? Data is scraped in real-time from Reddit. You get the latest posts and comments at the time of your run.

Is it legal to scrape Reddit? This scraper accesses only publicly available Reddit data through public web endpoints. It does not require authentication, log in to any account, or bypass any access controls. Users are responsible for complying with Reddit's Terms of Service and all applicable laws when using scraped data.

How does this compare to the Reddit API? The official Reddit API now charges $0.24 per 1,000 API calls and requires OAuth setup. This scraper has no such requirements — just configure your input and run. It's faster to set up and often cheaper for large-scale data collection.