Reddit Scraper — posts, comments, subreddits & users (no API key)

Reddit Scraper extracts posts, full comment threads (up to 25,000 comments per post), subreddits and users into flat JSON/CSV rows — no Reddit API key, no login. Search, sort and date filters let you go beyond Reddit's ~1,000-item listing cap. From $1.20 per 1,000 results.

What does the Reddit Scraper do?

Give it subreddit names, search keywords, or post/subreddit/user URLs and it returns structured Reddit data for market research, brand monitoring, sentiment analysis, lead discovery, dataset building for AI/LLMs and academic research.

Features

• Scrape Reddit posts and comments by subreddit, keyword search or URL; full comment trees with depth, scores and authors.
• Subreddit and user data (subscribers, descriptions, user profiles).
• Date range filters (postedAfter, postedBefore) and sort / time options; history past the 1,000-item cap via an archive source.
• NSFW toggle, maxItems cost cap, maxCommentsPerPost.
• Niche research helpers: discoverRelatedSubreddits and classify (pain-signal and advice-request flags).
• Every record tagged with its source (live or archive) and typed fields.

How to scrape Reddit

1. Add subreddits, searches or start URLs.
2. Choose whether to include comments and set maxItems.
3. Run and export JSON, CSV or Excel.

Example output (real run)

{
  "dataType": "post",
  "id": "1wur4n5",
  "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1wur4n5/vite_asset_bundling/",
  "title": "Vite Asset Bundling",
  "body": "Specifically, I'm grabbing JSON for a trading card game gallery from an endpoint, then dyn…",
  "postType": "self",
  "author": "KaedenCraft",
  "authorId": "t2_71etbnhy",
  "authorPremium": false,
  "subreddit": "webdev",
  "subredditId": "t5_2qs0q",
  "subredditSubscribers": 3315160,
  "subredditType": "public",
  "score": 2,
  "upvoteRatio": 1,
  "numComments": 4,
  "createdAt": "2026-10-01T05:27:16+00:00",
  "flair": "Question",
  "domain": "self.webdev",
  "contentUrl": "https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1wur4n5/vite_asset_bundling/",
  "thumbnail": "self",
  "isNsfw": false,
  "isSpoiler": false,
  "isLocked": false,
  "isStickied": false,
  "isOriginalContent": false,
  "isCrosspostable": false,
  "contestMode": false,
  "awards": 0,
  "gilded": 0,
  "crossposts": 0,
  "source": "live",
  "scoreSettled": true
}

Pricing

Pay per event: $1.20 per 1,000 results ($0.0012 each). Empty sources and errors are free.

Limitations

Live Reddit through the unblocker can take 30–90 seconds per request; archive-backed runs are fast but scores can lag ~36 h on fresh posts. Deleted/removed content and private subreddits are not returned.

Use cases

Brand and competitor monitoring · customer pain-point and idea research · sentiment analysis · AI training datasets · community and trend tracking.

FAQ

Do I need a Reddit API key? No. Is it fast? Archive-backed runs are fast; live Reddit through the unblocker can take 30–90 seconds per request (see technical notes below). Can I get comments? Yes — set includeComments; up to 25,000 per post.

Bulk Reddit comments scraper

Extract Reddit posts and comments at scale — a comments scraper with nested replies, advanced filtering across communities and subreddits, bulk URL input, and scrape-and-export to JSON, CSV or Excel without login.

Is it legal? No login, no cookies

This Actor only reads publicly available pages. It never asks for a cookie, password or account and does not access private data. You are responsible for using the data in line with the source site's terms and applicable law (GDPR/CCPA for personal data).

Related scrapers by the same author

YouTube Email Scraper · YouTube Transcript Scraper · Reddit Scraper · Airbnb Scraper · Amazon Product Scraper · LinkedIn Jobs Scraper

Technical notes (original README, kept)

Reddit Scraper Elite — posts, complete comment trees & history past Reddit's 1,000-item cap

Scrapes Reddit posts, subreddits, users and full comment trees (up to 25,000 comments per post) into flat, typed records. Every record carries a source field (live or archive) and a scoreSettled flag, so you always know where a number came from and whether it can be trusted.

Two sources, one output shape

	Live Reddit	Archive (Arctic Shift)
Freshness	real-time	comments ~minutes, posts ~30–60 min behind
Scores / comment counts	current	read 0–1 for ~36 h after posting (scoreSettled: false), exact afterwards
Depth of listing	Reddit's ~1,000-item cap	no cap — page back by date
Global keyword search	✅	❌ needs Search inside subreddit
Comment trees	tree + "more" expansion	one call (≤25,000), paged fallback for huge threads
Availability	needs an IP Reddit accepts	works from Apify datacenter IPs

source: auto (default) uses live Reddit when it is reachable and falls back to the archive. live fails cleanly (no charge) if Reddit is unreachable. archive skips live entirely.

Live Reddit — working (2026-09-22, build 0.2.20)

Reddit 403s Apify's datacenter and residential proxy pools outright (verified directly with real, working residential IPs — the block is on the proxy network's ASN, not IP quality). The one pool that actually gets through is UNBLOCKER (proxies through a real unblocking backend) — verified end-to-end: live posts with real scores/timestamps, live comment trees with correct nesting, live subreddit metadata.

This is now the default when source is auto or live and no proxyConfiguration/Reddit OAuth credentials are given -- no setup needed, live data works the same way it does on every other Reddit actor. An explicit proxyConfiguration (even {"useApifyProxy": false}) always overrides this.

The honest tradeoff: it's slow. 30-90 seconds per request (real headless-browser-backed unblocking, not a quick IP swap) and uses Apify's UNBLOCKER unit quota. A 5-post fetch takes ~60-80s; comments add one request per post. Budget maxItems/maxCommentsPerPost accordingly, or use source: archive for fast, cheap, unlimited-history results when live freshness doesn't matter for the task.

Input (essentials)

• startUrls — post, subreddit or user URLs · subreddits — names · searches (+ searchInSubreddit)
• includeComments, maxCommentsPerPost (≤25,000) · maxPostsPerSource · maxItems (hard cap on billed results)
• postedAfter / postedBefore (ISO dates) — on the archive these reach past the 1,000-item cap
• sort / time (live only; the archive is newest-first) · includeNsfw

Output records (dataType: post | comment | subreddit | user)

Posts (41 fields): id, url, title, body, postType, author/authorId/authorFlairText/authorPremium, subreddit/subredditId/subredditType, score, upvoteRatio, numComments, createdAt, editedAt, flair, domain, contentUrl, thumbnail, postHint, previewImages, galleryImages (full-res URLs, in order — verified against a real 8-image gallery post), isNsfw/isSpoiler/isLocked/isStickied/isOriginalContent/isCrosspostable/contestMode, distinguished, suggestedSort, awards, gilded, crossposts, removedBy, source, scoreSettled. Comments (27 fields): id, postId, parentId, depth, body, author/authorId/authorFlairText/authorPremium, subreddit/subredditId, score, controversiality, createdAt, editedAt, isSubmitter, isStickied, isCollapsed/collapsedReason, distinguished, awards, gilded, isDeleted (removed/deleted bodies are kept and flagged), source, scoreSettled.

Niche/idea-discovery mode (added 2026-09-22, from real market-research workflows)

Two videos describing Reddit-based startup-idea research (subreddit-graph tools like "Ena", GummySearch) named specific needs. Here's what's real and what isn't:

• discoverRelatedSubreddits: samples recent posters in a seed subreddit, finds what else they post in, ranks by how many distinct posters overlap (not just raw post count, so one prolific poster can't skew it). Surfaces subreddits you wouldn't have searched for directly. Combine with relatedMinSubscribers/relatedMaxSubscribers for the "10k-100k sweet spot, growing-but-not-huge" screening pattern from GummySearch. One archive call per sampled author (relatedSampleAuthors, default 20) — slower than a normal run, budget for it.
• classify: true: adds hasPainSignal/isAdviceRequest/mentionsSolution/mentionsMoney to posts/comments — cheap keyword heuristics, not AI. This is deliberately not a GummySearch/gigabrain-style LLM summarizer: the actor's job is complete, well-labeled raw data; feed it to Claude/ChatGPT yourself for pattern-finding and summarization, which is cheaper and more flexible than a fixed prompt baked into the actor.
• NOT buildable from any data source available to this actor: subreddit subscriber growth-over-time (no historical snapshots exist in the archive or its metadata — verified by inspecting the raw subreddit object). Global keyword-to-subreddit discovery, i.e. "search all of Reddit for X, see which subreddits talk about it" without picking a subreddit first (the archive's query param requires subreddit or author — confirmed by testing; this is the same live-Reddit blocker described above, since live Reddit's /search.json supports it natively).
• Out of scope, not Reddit data: Amazon Books/product reviews, Google Trends, Glimpse, Meta Ads Library, Exa, Perplexity/Gemini market-sizing, YouTube comments. Separate tools/actors, not this one.

Each run also writes a SUMMARY record: items stored per source, skipped targets with reasons (skips are never charged), warnings, nsfwFiltered and duplicatesSkipped counts.

Pricing

Not yet configured. The code emits one result charge event per stored post/comment/subreddit/user (skips are never charged), but the pay-per-event price must still be set on the actor in Apify Console — until then the platform ignores the events (WARN ... does not use the pay-per-event pricing) and maxItems is the only cost cap.

Not included (deliberately)

AI sentiment/intent labels, MCP connectors and 75-field parity — other Reddit actors do these; this one focuses on completeness and provenance.

Performance note

auto/live mode skips the live-reachability check entirely for runs that have no live-capable target (e.g. discoverRelatedSubreddits-only) -- no point spending 30-90s proving live works when nothing in the run would use it.

Robustness

• A post with gallery_data explicitly null (not missing) no longer crashes the run -- fixed and stress-tested against 796 real posts, build 0.2.22. No single malformed record, one bad comment tree, an unreachable seed subreddit, or an invalid proxy config can crash the whole run -- each is isolated to the smallest scope it affects (one post, one target, one seed) and counted/explained in SUMMARY rather than silently dropped or misreported. SUMMARY fields: skipped (with reasons), warnings, nsfwFiltered, duplicatesSkipped, malformedRecords, commentFetchErrors/commentFetchErrorSamples.

Known limits

• An invalid postedAfter/postedBefore (not a valid ISO date) is dropped with a warning, not a crash.
• On the live source, postedAfter/postedBefore are applied client-side, so a narrow window on a busy subreddit can return fewer posts than maxPostsPerSource. (Live path unverified.)
• Subreddit names are cleaned of r/ prefixes, slashes and full URLs (r/foo, r/foo/, foo, a reddit.com link all resolve the same way); a target that genuinely doesn't exist appears in SUMMARY.skipped with not_found, never a silent zero.
• NSFW-excluded (includeNsfw: false, the default) and duplicate posts are dropped from the stored count but still consume the source's per-target fetch budget — so a target with NSFW/duplicate posts in it can return fewer than maxPostsPerSource even inside the window. SUMMARY.nsfwFiltered/duplicatesSkipped say how many and why; the run does not auto-fetch replacements.
• The archive is a free community service with no uptime guarantee; huge threads occasionally time out server-side (handled by a windowed fallback, but slower).
• Archive comment counts include removed comments, so they can exceed Reddit's displayed count.
• Respect Reddit's terms and applicable law when using collected data; do not collect data for purposes you are not entitled to.

Verified results (Apify platform, 256 MB, build 0.2.20, 2026-09-22)

Test	Result
r/programming, June-2026 window, 250 items	249 posts + subreddit record, 12 s, 0 duplicates
Post with 161 reported comments	169 comments (8 more than Reddit's displayed count — the archive retains removed/deleted comments; 1 flagged isDeleted), max depth 13, 10 s
r/AskReddit thread, 15,264 reported comments	15,264 unique comments, max depth 16, 0 orphans, every parent present, 861 s (~14 min)
Archive keyword search in a subreddit	30/30 posts matched the keyword
Global search / live-only without a usable live path	skipped or failed cleanly, nothing charged
Live Reddit path, real posts	working — 5 live posts via UNBLOCKER, real scores (197/26/107/0) and same-day timestamps, 82 s
Live Reddit path, comments	working — 1 post + 30 live comments, correct depth nesting, 130 s
Live path, plain default (no config at all)	working automatically — auto mode with zero explicit proxy config now gets live data by default

---

Pricing & cost estimator

Pay-per-event: $1.50 per 1,000 records. You are charged only for rows that contain data; empty or failed targets are free. A 100-item run costs about 10–60 seconds of platform time on the default memory and typically under $0.50 in total. Set maxItems / the per-link cap to control spend.

Example output (real run)

{
  "dataType": "post",
  "id": "1wur4n5",
  "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1wur4n5/vite_asset_bundling/",
  "title": "Vite Asset Bundling",
  "body": "Specifically, I'm grabbing JSON for a trading card game gallery from an endpoint, then dyn…",
  "postType": "self",
  "author": "KaedenCraft",
  "authorId": "t2_71etbnhy",
  "authorPremium": false,
  "subreddit": "webdev",
  "subredditId": "t5_2qs0q",
  "subredditSubscribers": 3315160,
  "subredditType": "public",
  "score": 2,
  "upvoteRatio": 1,
  "numComments": 4,
  "createdAt": "2026-10-01T05:27:16+00:00",
  "flair": "Question",
  "domain": "self.webdev",
  "contentUrl": "https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1wur4n5/vite_asset_bundling/",
  "thumbnail": "self",
  "isNsfw": false,
  "isSpoiler": false,
  "isLocked": false,
  "isStickied": false,
  "isOriginalContent": false,
  "isCrosspostable": false,
  "contestMode": false,
  "awards": 0,
  "gilded": 0,
  "crossposts": 0,
  "source": "live",
  "scoreSettled": true
}

Limitations

Deleted/removed content and private or quarantined subreddits are not returned. Very deep comment trees can be capped by maxCommentsPerPost. Reddit can rate-limit; the actor retries and reports skipped sources in the run summary.

No login, no cookies

This actor only reads public Reddit pages and the public JSON endpoints. It never asks for a cookie, password or account, and it does not access private data. Make sure your use of the scraped data complies with the source site's terms and applicable law (GDPR/CCPA for personal data).