Reddit Comments Scraper — Download Every Comment From Any Reddit Post (No API)

Paste a Reddit post URL, get the post plus its entire comment tree — nested replies included, "load more comments" expanded automatically. No API key, no login. From $1.50 per 1,000 results.

What it does • How to use • Input • Output • Use cases • Pricing • FAQ

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What does Reddit Comments Scraper do?

Reddit Comments Scraper is a purpose-built reddit comment scraper: give it one or more post URLs (comment permalinks work too) and it returns the parent post record plus every comment in the thread, including nested replies. Where Reddit's website stops at roughly 500 comments per page, this actor keeps going — it expands every "load more comments" placeholder through Reddit's morechildren API, routinely pulling 5,000–6,000 comments from a single post (configurable up to 10,000 via maxCommentsPerPost).

There is nothing to configure beyond the URLs. No OAuth app, no Reddit account, no cookies — and none of the official API's 600-requests-per-10-minutes ceiling.

Why this actor instead of a general Reddit scraper:

• 💬 Deep threads, fully expanded — nested replies and "load more" branches that page-level scrapers miss
• 🧵 Thread structure preserved — every comment carries parentId, depth, and isSubmitter, so you can rebuild the reply tree
• 🔓 Zero authentication — scrape reddit comments without API keys, logins, or rate limits
• 📤 Export anywhere — JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, HTML · n8n, Zapier, Make, REST API, MCP
• 💰 Pay per result — from $1.50 per 1,000 comments, no monthly fees

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How to scrape Reddit comments

Downloading Reddit comments from a post takes about a minute of setup:

1. Sign up for a free Apify account (or log in)
2. Open Reddit Comments Scraper
3. Paste one or more Reddit post URLs into the Reddit post URLs field
4. Optionally adjust Max comments per post (default 1,000, up to 10,000)
5. Click Start and watch comments stream into the dataset
6. Download the results as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, or HTML

💡 Tip: A comment permalink (a link to a single comment inside a thread) is also accepted — the scraper resolves it to the parent post and collects the thread from there.

Inputs at a glance

Field	What it does
postUrls	One or more Reddit post URLs (or comment permalinks) to collect comments from. Required.
maxCommentsPerPost	Cap per post, nested replies included. Default 1000, maximum 10000.
includeNSFW	Set true to include posts and comments flagged 18+. Default false.

That's the entire schema — see the Input Schema tab for full details.

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Input example

This configuration pulls up to 2,000 comments from each of two posts, skipping NSFW content:

{
  "postUrls": [
    {
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/generativeAI/comments/1l64st7/have_we_reached_a_point_where_aigenerated_video/"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1example/another_post_to_analyze/"
    }
  ],
  "maxCommentsPerPost": 2000,
  "includeNSFW": false
}

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Output example

Each run produces one post item (the parent post) followed by one item per comment. Comment items carry the full thread structure — parentId points to the parent comment or post, depth tells you how deep in the reply tree the comment sits, and isSubmitter flags replies written by the original poster.

Here's a realistic nested-reply comment item (note depth: 1 and a parentId referencing another comment, t1_...):

{
  "dataType": "comment",
  "id": "t1_kx9d2fe",
  "parsedId": "kx9d2fe",
  "body": "Disagree — the uncanny valley is still obvious in any clip longer than ten seconds.",
  "bodyHtml": "<p>Disagree — the uncanny valley is still obvious in any clip longer than ten seconds.</p>",
  "authorId": "t2_8fk3la",
  "parsedAuthorId": "8fk3la",
  "authorName": "vfx_skeptic",
  "authorFullname": "t2_8fk3la",
  "authorFlairText": null,
  "authorPremium": false,
  "communityName": "r/generativeAI",
  "parsedCommunityName": "generativeAI",
  "subredditName": "generativeAI",
  "postId": "t3_1l64st7",
  "parsedPostId": "1l64st7",
  "postTitle": "Have we reached a point where AI-generated video is indistinguishable?",
  "postUrl": "https://www.reddit.com/r/generativeAI/comments/1l64st7/",
  "postUpVotes": 873,
  "postCommentsCount": 412,
  "parentId": "t1_kx9bq1a",
  "parsedParentId": "kx9bq1a",
  "parentKind": "comment",
  "depth": 1,
  "isSubmitter": false,
  "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/generativeAI/comments/1l64st7/comment/kx9d2fe/",
  "score": 156,
  "commentUpVotes": 156,
  "controversiality": 0,
  "totalAwardsReceived": 0,
  "gilded": 0,
  "distinguished": null,
  "stickied": false,
  "scoreHidden": false,
  "collapsed": false,
  "collapsedReason": null,
  "edited": false,
  "editedAt": null,
  "ageHours": 18.4,
  "scorePerHour": 8.48,
  "bodyLength": 84,
  "wordCount": 16,
  "commentCreatedAt": "2025-06-08T11:24:00.000Z",
  "postCreatedAt": "2025-06-08T07:02:00.000Z",
  "crawledAt": "2025-06-09T05:48:00.000Z"
}

Top-level comments have depth: 0 and a parentId equal to the post's t3_ ID with parentKind: "post". The parent post item itself ships with the full post field set — title, body, score, upvoteRatio, commentsCount, flair, flags, media fields, and derived analytics like engagementTotal and commentsPerHour.

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What can you do with scraped Reddit comments?

• 🎯 Sentiment analysis — turn a product launch thread or an AMA into thousands of labeled-ready opinions. Reply depth lets you separate hot takes from the debates underneath them.
• 🤖 AI training data — comment trees are natural conversation data. The parentId/depth structure makes it trivial to reconstruct dialogue pairs for fine-tuning or RAG corpora.
• 📢 Brand monitoring — when your company gets mentioned in a viral thread, pull the entire discussion (not just the visible page) and quantify what people actually said.
• 🎓 Academic research — collect complete, reproducible discussion datasets with timestamps, scores, controversiality, and structural metadata intact for citation and replication.

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AI analysis of Reddit comment threads

A comment thread is where opinions actually live, and reading 3,000 replies by hand is not an option. Switch on aiAnalysis and every comment in the tree comes back with sentimentLabel, sentimentScore, intent, emotion and entities, so you can answer "how did this thread react?" with a pivot table instead of an afternoon. Nested replies are analyzed exactly like top-level comments, and the parent post gets a contentCategory too.

The AI flag checkboxes answer the questions people ask of threads most: is this commenter asking for help (wantsHelp), running a business (isOwner), pushing their own product (isVendor), describing something broken (hasPain), naming a price (mentionsPrice), wishing for a feature (featureRequest), showing a budget (willingToPay), and what the pain or the rival product actually is (painPoint, competitor). Each answer lands typed inside aiFlags on the comment, e.g. aiFlags.isVendor: true, which makes stripping shills out of a review thread a one-column filter. Ticking any box turns aiAnalysis on for the same comments.

Need a question that is specific to your product? customLabels takes up to five plain-language instructions, e.g. {"mentions_refund": "true if the commenter asked for or got a refund"}, and the answers arrive under customLabels on each comment.

{
  "postUrls": [{ "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/comments/abc123/" }],
  "maxCommentsPerPost": 500,
  "aiAnalysis": true,
  "isVendor": true,
  "competitor": true
}

How much does it cost to scrape Reddit comments?

Reddit Comments Scraper is pay-per-result: you're billed per comment stored, starting at $1.50 per 1,000 results, with no monthly subscription and no platform fees. A 5,000-comment megathread costs about $7.50; a quick 200-comment pull costs pennies.

This model fits comment scraping well because thread sizes vary wildly — you pay for the 6,000-comment AMA when you scrape it, and nothing the rest of the month.

💼 Scraping comments continuously at scale? Reddit Scraper Pro offers unlimited results on a flat monthly subscription using the same engine.

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Export Reddit comments to CSV, Excel, or JSON

Once a run finishes, download the dataset in JSON, CSV, Excel (XLSX), XML, or HTML straight from the Apify Console — Reddit comments to CSV is one click. For automated pipelines:

• REST API — POST https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/harshmaur~reddit-comments-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN with the input JSON as the body
• n8n / Zapier / Make — trigger runs and route comment data into sheets, databases, or Slack
• MCP — expose the actor as a tool via the Apify MCP server, so Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, or any MCP client can fetch a thread's comments mid-conversation

See the API tab for ready-made code snippets in Node.js, Python, and curl.

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AI analysis is an optional paid add-on on top of the comment price: $0.50 per 1,000 analyzed comments for the aiAnalysis fields, plus $0.10 per 1,000 comments for each AI flag or custom label you switch on. It requires a paid Apify plan, is off by default, and comments the AI could not process are never charged.

FAQ

Is it legal to scrape Reddit comments?

Comments on public Reddit threads are publicly accessible data, and scraping public data is generally permitted — but you're responsible for using it lawfully. Keep request volumes reasonable, respect Reddit's terms where applicable, handle personal data in line with GDPR/CCPA, and only collect public content. Apify's guide on the enforceability of website terms is a good primer.

Can I scrape Reddit comments without the API?

Yes — that's the whole point of this actor. It reads publicly available thread data directly, so there's no OAuth application, no API key, and no 600-requests-per-10-minutes quota. You don't even need a Reddit account.

How many comments can I scrape from one post?

Up to 10,000 per post (maxCommentsPerPost). Reddit's own interface serves only ~500 comments per page; this actor automatically expands the "load more comments" placeholders via Reddit's morechildren endpoint, so very large threads typically yield 5,000–6,000 comments without you doing anything.

Does it capture nested replies, or just top-level comments?

The full tree. Every reply at every level is collected, and each item records its parentId, parentKind, and depth so you can reconstruct the exact thread hierarchy in your own analysis.

Can I scrape multiple posts in one run?

Yes. Add as many URLs to postUrls as you like — each post is processed with its own maxCommentsPerPost budget, and every output item carries postId and postTitle so mixed datasets stay easy to split.

Do I need a proxy?

No — there is no proxy setting to fill in. Rotating residential IPs are built into the scraper and billed inside the per-result price, so a 10,000-comment pull needs no proxy subscription of your own.

What input does it accept — post URLs only?

Standard post URLs (https://www.reddit.com/r/subreddit/comments/abc123/title/) and comment permalinks. A permalink is resolved to its parent post and the thread is scraped from there. Subreddit pages, user profiles, and search URLs are not accepted — for those, use one of the other Reddit scrapers below.

Can I export the comments to a spreadsheet?

Yes. Every dataset can be downloaded as CSV or Excel (plus JSON, XML, and HTML) directly from the platform, or fetched in any of those formats through the API for automated exports.

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Can it tell me what a comment thread thinks about a product?

Yes. Turn on aiAnalysis and every comment gets a sentiment label and score, an intent such as complaint or praise, and the brands it mentions in entities. Tick the isVendor flag to separate real customers from people promoting their own product, or competitor to see which alternatives the thread keeps bringing up.

More Reddit scrapers

This actor does one thing deeply. If your job is broader, pick the right tool:

Actor	Use it when
Reddit Scraper	You want the all-in-one: posts, comments, subreddits, search, and user profiles in a single configurable actor.
Reddit Search Scraper	You're starting from keywords, not URLs — find posts and discussions across all of Reddit by search term.
Reddit User Scraper	You need a specific user's profile, post history, and comment history rather than a thread.
Subreddit Scraper	You want to pull an entire community's posts in bulk instead of drilling into individual threads.

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