Facebook Group Posts & Comments Scraper

Read what a public Facebook group is actually talking about: every post with its text, author, timestamp, reaction count, comment count, share count and media — paginated past the handful Facebook renders by default.

Built for market researchers, product teams and brand managers who want the community's own words rather than a summary of them.

Read this before you buy

Facebook publishes the comment count on a group post to logged-out clients, but not the comment text. Measured 2026-09-20: a group post permalink returns comments.total_count: 29 and comments.edges: [], served by Meta's Unauthenticated comment renderer. Every post this actor returns carries its real commentCount; commentsServed tells you how many comment bodies Facebook actually handed over, which for group posts is currently zero.

The scrapeComments option is there if you want to verify that for yourself, or to pick the bodies up automatically if Meta's gating changes. It is off by default because switching it on costs one request per post and, today, returns nothing.

Everything else on this page is real and tested.

What you get

One row per post:

Field	Example
groupName, groupId, groupPrivacy	React.JS developers -2023, 1873009809663604, OPEN
groupMemberCount, groupMemberCountLabel	117400, 117.4K members
authorName, authorId, authorUrl	Mohamed Hafez, …
text	the post body
createdAtIso	2026-07-09T01:41:29Z
reactionCount, commentCount, shareCount	43, 29, 4
attachmentUrls, attachmentCount	photo/video CDN links
postUrl	permalink

Plus a RUN_SUMMARY row: posts collected, distinct authors, total reactions, total comments, newest and oldest post.

Which groups can be read

Only groups that Facebook serves to a signed-out visitor. A private group, a deleted group and a typo all return the same HTTP 200 with a ~330 KB shell, so this actor checks the payload rather than the status code and gives you a specific error row:

group_unavailable — Facebook served the empty shell (~330 KB). The group is private, does not exist, or is not readable without logging in.

That is deliberately honest: a status-code check would report every private group as a successful empty scrape.

Input example

{
  "groups": [
    "React.JSdevelopers",
    "https://www.facebook.com/groups/1873009809663604"
  ],
  "maxPostsPerGroup": 100,
  "minComments": 5,
  "postedAfter": "2026-01-01",
  "exportFormats": ["csv"]
}

Filters

textContains, minReactions, minComments and postedAfter are applied after fetching, so the run summary still reflects everything that was read. Posts whose reaction count or timestamp Facebook withheld are dropped by a numeric filter rather than admitted on a guess — an unknown number cannot be shown to clear a bar.

Running it on Apify: use a residential proxy for pagination

Facebook serves the rendered first page to any IP, including Apify's. But the first pagination request from a datacenter IP comes back with Rate limit exceeded, so a platform run with no proxy stops at the first batch of posts.

The rate limit is on Facebook's GraphQL endpoint, which every actor in this family uses for its second page onwards. It was measured on 2026-09-20 with the Ad Library actor, three runs of the same search within a minute:

Run	Result
Apify, no proxy	30 results, 1 page — log: Rate limit exceeded
Apify, RESIDENTIAL proxy	60 results, 4 pages
Local machine, no proxy	70 results, 5 pages

So: switch the Apify proxy on and pick the RESIDENTIAL group whenever you want more than the first page. Running from your own machine needs no proxy at all.

The actor logs a warning naming the rate limit when it hits one, so a short run is never silently mistaken for a short result set.

Notes

• authorId is an opaque pfbid… token for newer accounts rather than a number. That is Facebook's own identifier format, not a parsing artefact.
• attachmentUrls are signed CDN links and expire. Download what you need during or shortly after the run.
• Group membership questions and their answers are shown only to admins and are not part of any public surface, so they are not returned.
• Member counts are abbreviated by Facebook (117.4K); the parsed number is approximate and the raw label is kept beside it.