YouTube Scraper — Unlimited YouTube Data, No API Keys, No Quotas

Scrape YouTube at scale — videos, channels, playlists, comments, and subtitles — without the official YouTube Data API, its keys, or its daily quotas. Search by keyword, crawl entire channels, dump full playlists, or pull deep metadata from individual videos. Export everything to JSON, CSV, or Excel in one click, or pipe it straight into your app via API.

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⚡ Why use this instead of the official YouTube API?

The official YouTube Data API is free-ish — until it isn't. It caps you at 10,000 quota units/day (≈ a few hundred searches), forces you through OAuth, hides comments and transcripts behind extra calls, and bans commercial scraping use cases. This Actor skips all of that.

	This YouTube Scraper	Official YouTube Data API
API key / OAuth setup	❌ Not needed	✅ Required
Daily quotas	✅ None	❌ 10,000 units/day
Subtitles / transcripts	✅ Built in	⚠️ Limited & clunky
Comments	✅ Built in	⚠️ Extra quota cost
Keyword search + filters	✅ Full filters	⚠️ Quota-heavy
Export to CSV / Excel / JSON	✅ One click	❌ Build it yourself
Schedule, monitor, integrate	✅ Built into Apify	❌ DIY

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🚀 What you can do with it

Four modes, one Actor:

• 🔎 Keyword Search — find videos for any query, with filters for upload date, duration, type, and sort order. Perfect for trend-spotting and competitor research.
• 📺 Channel — pull a channel's profile (subscribers, total views, location, join date) plus its latest videos.
• 🎵 Playlist — extract every video in a playlist, in order.
• 🎬 Video URLs — get deep metadata for specific videos, including subtitles/transcripts and top comments.

Built for real work

• 📈 Influencer & competitor research — rank channels and videos in any niche by views, likes, and engagement.
• 🔍 Video SEO & content gaps — analyze titles, descriptions, tags, and thumbnails that win.
• 🛒 Product & brand monitoring — track what reviewers say about your products on YouTube.
• 📝 Transcript mining — pull subtitles to repurpose content, train models, or summarize at scale.
• 🤖 Feed your AI/LLM pipeline — clean, structured JSON ready for embeddings and analysis.

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📊 Data you can extract

Category	Fields
Video	title, URL, video ID, view count, likes, duration, publish date, thumbnail, description, description links, monetization flag
Channel	name, channel ID, URL, description, subscribers, total views, total videos, location, joined date
Engagement	comments count, top comments (author, text, likes, date, pinned/owner)
Transcripts	subtitles/captions per language, auto-generated vs. manual
Search	ranked results with all video fields + the keyword that found them

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💸 Pricing — start free, pay only when you scale

You can run this Actor for free on the Apify Free plan, which includes $5 in free platform usage every month — enough to test it on real data before you spend a cent. No credit card required to start.

When you're ready for production volume, scheduled runs, and API access, an Apify paid plan unlocks:

• ✅ Unlimited results (the free plan caps how much you can pull per run)
• ✅ Run via API & webhooks — integrate into your own product
• ✅ Scheduling — fresh YouTube data on autopilot, daily or hourly
• ✅ More proxies & concurrency — scrape faster, get blocked less
• ✅ Priority support

👉 Try it free now — your first results are on us. Hit "Start" and see real data in under a minute.

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🏃 How to use it

On Apify (no code)

1. Click Try for free / Start on the Actor page.
2. Pick your mode (Search, Channel, Playlist, or Video).
3. Fill in keywords or URLs and any filters.
4. Hit Start, then download results from the Dataset tab as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

Via API

Once on a paid plan, run it programmatically with the Apify API or the JS / Python clients — and wire results into Zapier, Make, Slack, Google Sheets, or your own backend.

Locally

$apify run

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⚙️ Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	string	"search"	"search", "channel", "playlist", or "video"
keywords	array	[]	Search keywords (search mode)
searchMaxResults	integer	20	Max results per keyword (1–200)
searchUploadDate	string	—	"hour", "today", "week", "month", "year"
searchType	string	—	"video", "channel", "playlist", "movie"
searchDuration	string	—	"short" (< 4 min), "medium" (4–20 min), "long" (> 20 min)
searchSortBy	string	—	"relevance", "date", "viewCount", "rating"
channelUrls	array	[]	Channel URLs (channel mode)
channelMaxVideos	integer	50	Max videos per channel (0–500)
playlistUrls	array	[]	Playlist URLs (playlist mode)
playlistMaxItems	integer	200	Max items per playlist (1–1000)
videoUrls	array	[]	Video URLs (video mode)
fetchSubtitles	boolean	true	Fetch subtitles/transcripts (video mode)
fetchComments	boolean	true	Fetch comments (video mode)
maxComments	integer	20	Max comments per video (1–100)
proxyConfiguration	object	no proxy	Proxy settings (recommended at scale to avoid blocks)

Example — keyword search

{
  "mode": "search",
  "keywords": ["trending products", "viral gadgets 2025"],
  "searchMaxResults": 20,
  "searchUploadDate": "month",
  "searchSortBy": "viewCount"
}

Example — channel

{
  "mode": "channel",
  "channelUrls": ["https://www.youtube.com/@MrBeast"],
  "channelMaxVideos": 50
}

Example — video (with transcript & comments)

{
  "mode": "video",
  "videoUrls": ["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"],
  "fetchSubtitles": true,
  "fetchComments": true,
  "maxComments": 20
}

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📦 Output

Every video, channel, or playlist item is pushed as a structured record to your dataset.

{
  "title": "10 Viral Products You NEED in 2025",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abc123xyz",
  "viewCount": 1250000,
  "likes": 45200,
  "channelName": "TrendFinder",
  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxxxx",
  "date": "2026-02-28",
  "duration": "12:34",
  "thumbnailUrl": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/abc123xyz/maxresdefault.jpg",
  "numberOfSubscribers": 980000,
  "commentsCount": 1820
}

Export to JSON, CSV, Excel, HTML, or XML, or fetch it from the Dataset API.

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❓ FAQ

Is scraping YouTube legal? Scraping publicly available data is generally legal in many jurisdictions, and this Actor only collects public information that anyone can see without logging in. You are responsible for complying with YouTube's Terms of Service and applicable laws (e.g., GDPR) and for how you use the data — avoid collecting personal data without a lawful basis.

Do I need a YouTube API key? No. That's the whole point — no API key, no OAuth, no quotas.

Can I try it for free? Yes. The Apify Free plan includes $5/month of free usage and no credit card to start. Run it, see your data, then upgrade only when you need scale, scheduling, or API access.

Will I get blocked? For small runs, usually not. At higher volume, enable Apify Proxy in proxyConfiguration (a paid feature) to rotate IPs and keep success rates high.

Can I schedule it? Yes — use Apify Schedules to run it automatically (paid plans) and keep your YouTube data fresh.

How do I integrate it with my app? Run it via the Apify API, webhooks, or the official SDKs, and connect to Zapier, Make, Slack, or Google Sheets.

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🛟 Support

Found a bug or need a field that isn't here? Open an issue on the Actor's page — we read every message and ship improvements fast.

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🔧 Built with

• Apify SDK — Actor framework, dataset & storage management
• Playwright — headless browser automation for YouTube