Facebook Groups Scraper: posts from public groups, no login from you

Paste the URLs of public Facebook groups and get their posts as rows: the text, the author, the exact posting time, the permalink, the photos and videos, and the reaction, comment and share counts. No login from you, and no browser to wait on.

Public groups only, and that is the whole story on access. A private or closed group hides its posts from everyone who has not joined, so it comes back as a free note in your dataset rather than a charge.

Input	Public Facebook group URLs
Output	One row per post
Ceiling	1,000 posts and 20 groups per run
Account needed	None
Price	$0.70 per 1,000 posts, flat on every plan

👥 What Facebook Groups Scraper does

Give it group URLs, pick how the feed should be ordered, say how many posts you want, and press Start. Each post becomes one row with everything the group page publishes about it.

Three orderings, and they are Facebook's own, not a sort applied afterwards: New posts walks the feed by posting time, Newest activity brings up threads that were commented on recently, and Most relevant is Facebook's own ranking. For monitoring, use New posts.

There is a date window too. Give onlyPostsNewerThan a date or something like 7 days and older posts are dropped before they are written, so you are not charged for them.

Both numeric group URLs and the handle form work.

📥 What you give it

{
  "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://www.facebook.com/groups/dogspotting/" }],
  "resultsLimit": 50,
  "viewOption": "CHRONOLOGICAL",
  "onlyPostsNewerThan": "7 days"
}

Field	Starts as	What it is
startUrls	prefilled with an example	Up to 20 public group URLs. Anything past the twentieth is dropped without a row, so keep the list inside that.
resultsLimit	20	Posts across the whole run, up to 1,000. Five groups at resultsLimit: 100 is a hundred posts in total, not five hundred.
viewOption	CHRONOLOGICAL	CHRONOLOGICAL for new posts, RECENT_ACTIVITY for recently commented threads, TOP_POSTS for Facebook's ranking.
onlyPostsNewerThan	empty	2026-01-01, a full ISO timestamp, or 7 days. Older posts are skipped and never charged.
onlyPostsOlderThan	empty	The same formats, the other way round. Use both for a window.
proxyUrls	empty	Leave it empty. It is here for callers who want the traffic to leave through servers they already pay for, as http://user:pass@host:port. There is no bandwidth surcharge on this actor either way.
sessionCookies	empty	Leave it empty too. Runs work signed out. Fill it in only if you want reads to go through your own account, with your own rate limit: c_user=<value>; xs=<value>, one line per account. Treat those values like a password, because anyone holding them can act as that account.

📤 What you get back

A real row from a recent run. The image links are signed and very long, so they are cut short here:

{
  "ok": true,
  "recordType": "post",
  "charged": true,
  "facebookUrl": "https://www.facebook.com/groups/dogspotting/",
  "url": "https://www.facebook.com/groups/dogspotting/permalink/10166203291439467/",
  "id": "10166203291439467",
  "legacyId": null,
  "time": "2026-09-20T23:30:52.000Z",
  "timestamp": 1789947052,
  "text": "His name is Invader and he invaded my heart",
  "user": {
    "id": "pfbid02UQC3terETmAmd24Hgg4ev1Pxye5Bh6SQ9HCYF58dVPrULg7E3tumNTv4Hs2Aoz4tl",
    "name": "Eleanor Valentine",
    "profileUrl": null,
    "profilePic": "https://scontent-lga3-3.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-1/560561781_10164128278012578_..."
  },
  "likesCount": 147,
  "commentsCount": 0,
  "sharesCount": 0,
  "topReactionsCount": [86, 60, 1],
  "attachments": [
    {
      "type": "photo",
      "thumbnail": "https://scontent-lga3-3.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/791453646_10165826125182578_...",
      "url": "https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10165826125842578&set=gm.10166203291439467&idorvanity=10487409466",
      "id": "10165826125842578"
    }
  ],
  "attachmentsCount": 1,
  "isVideo": false,
  "link": null,
  "groupId": "10487409466",
  "groupTitle": "Dogspotting",
  "inputUrl": "https://www.facebook.com/groups/dogspotting/",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-21T01:45:39.314Z"
}

Field	What it is
id, url	The post id and its permalink. id is your dedupe key across runs.
time, timestamp	The real posting time, as ISO and as a unix number. Not "2 hours ago".
likesCount	Every reaction added together, not only thumbs-up. In the row above, 147 is the 86, 60 and 1 in topReactionsCount summed.
topReactionsCount	The counts behind the top reaction types on the post. Numbers with no labels, so you cannot tell which reaction is which.
user	Name and picture. profileUrl is often null and the id is the long pfbid form, which is what Facebook hands out for group authors now.
attachments	One entry per photo or video, with a thumbnail and, on videos, the video link.
link	The preview of an external link shared in the post, null when there is none.
legacyId	Facebook's older numeric id when the page still carries one. Usually null.

Media links expire. Every scontent and fbcdn URL is signed by Facebook and stops working after a while. If you want to keep a photo or a video, download it in the same session, do not store the link and come back next month.

🧾 Reading the output

Three kinds of row, and only posts cost anything.

Row	How to spot it	Charged
A post	recordType: "post"	yes
The sample row	_sample: true, on a run with no usable input	no
A diagnostic	_uncharged: true, and it carries a code	no

The charged field is a row marker, not a receipt. It is what separates a real post from a sample or a diagnostic, and it is stamped as the row is built rather than after the money moves. Your Apify run detail is the authority on what you were actually billed.

Diagnostic rows carry code, not errorCode:

Code	What it means
BAD_INPUT	Not a Facebook group URL.
NO_PUBLIC_POSTS	The group keeps its posts for members. A private or closed group always lands here, and so does a handle that no longer exists.
NO_RESULTS	The feed answered and had nothing matching your date window.
NOT_FOUND	That group is gone.
RATE_LIMITED	Facebook throttled the reads. Any groups still queued are skipped. Try a smaller run later.
BLOCKED	Facebook answered with a wall instead of the feed.
STOPPED_EARLY	The feed stopped giving out posts before your limit was reached. You keep everything collected up to that point.
SCHEMA_DRIFT	The feed came back in a shape this could not read. Worth sending in, it usually means Facebook changed something.
TARGET_ERROR, NETWORK	Facebook errored, or the request did not complete. Re-run it.

▶️ How to run it

1. Open Facebook Groups Scraper and click Try for free.
2. Paste group URLs into Facebook group URLs.
3. Set Number of posts and pick a Sorting order.
4. Add Posts newer than if you only want recent ones, then click Start.
5. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it from the Apify API.

💰 How much does it cost?

$0.70 per 1,000 posts. Flat on every Apify plan, no volume tiers.

One charge per post row. Posts your date window filters out are never charged, and neither are sample or diagnostic rows. A private group, an empty group or a run that finds nothing costs you nothing for results.

💡 What people use it for

• Watching buy-and-sell and local groups for a keyword, and acting on new posts the same day.
• Collecting questions people ask in a niche group, to write content that answers them.
• Tracking how a community reacts to an announcement, by post text and reaction counts.
• Keeping an archive of a group you run, outside Facebook, with permalinks that still work.

🚧 What it does not do

• No private or closed groups. Not a setting, not a workaround. If you cannot read it signed out, neither can this.
• No comment text. You get commentsCount on the post. The comments actor below reads the comments themselves.
• No member lists, no admin lists, no group rules.
• No keyword search inside a group. You pull the feed and filter it yourself.
• No photo or video files, only links, and those links expire.
• No reaction breakdown by type. Numbers, without which reaction each belongs to.
• More than 20 group URLs in one run are dropped, and the dropped ones get no row.
• resultsLimit is the whole run, not per group. Sharing 50 posts across 10 groups is five each if the feeds cooperate.

🧭 Which Facebook scraper do you need?

If you want	Use
Posts from public groups	This one
Posts from a Facebook Page	Facebook Posts Scraper
Comments under a post or reel	Facebook Comments Scraper
Reels from a Page	Facebook Reels Scraper
A Page's website, email, phone and address	Facebook Page Contact Info Scraper

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need a Facebook account? No. The sessionCookies field exists for people who want their own account used, and it is optional.

Will this get my account banned? Nothing of yours is used unless you put cookies in yourself, and Facebook does restrict accounts it thinks are automated, so think twice before you do.

Can it read a private group I am a member of? No. That stays out of reach on purpose.

Why did I get fewer posts than I asked for? Either the group has fewer public posts, your date window excluded the rest, or the feed stopped early. A STOPPED_EARLY or NO_RESULTS row tells you which.

Why is profileUrl empty on the author? Facebook now publishes group authors under an opaque pfbid id, and often no profile link at all. The name and picture are what there is.

Is scraping public Facebook groups legal? These are pages anyone can read without an account. Posts contain personal data, which GDPR and similar laws cover, so have a lawful reason for collecting them. Apify's write-up on scraping and the law is a reasonable starting point, and we are not lawyers.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Send the run ID and the group URL. The code on the diagnostic row usually says what happened on its own.