Whatsapp Profiles Scraper
No credit card required
Whatsapp Profiles Scraper
No credit card required
Scrape the Whatsapp network and fetch profile info of any user, including: Profile picture, About status, or check if it's a Whatsapp for Business or personal account.
The Whatsapp Profiles Scraper Actor allows to search for profile info on the Whatsapp network and download the data gathered as a HTML, JSON, CSV, Excel, or XML doc.
The actor will accept as input an array of phone numbers, and will return for each:
- The Profile picture of the user (a reachable url).
- Whether the number is registered on whatsapp, or not.
- The user's
Aboutinfo. - When was the last update of the
Aboutinfo. - Type of whatsapp account (if it's a
WA for BusinessorWA regularaccount).
Users can execute the Actor at no cost and obtain up to 10 results for free.
The backend service supporting this Actor is also available on this site operated by inUtil Labs.
With this actor, large batches of data (several million data-points) could be processed, obtaining results from the entire dataset to enrich a database. There's also an API based version of all the features of the Actor.
Why scrape Whasapp Profiles?
WhatsApp is reported to have more than 2 billion monthly active users globally, and is ranked among the most popular mobile messenger apps in the world. With so many active users, you can imagine that there is a lot of useful data on the Network.
So what could you do with that data? Here are some ideas:
- Customize your contact center with up-to-date profile pics of your customers.
- Cyber Security: Monitor and track the profile pictures of WhatsApp users, helping to identify suspicious or fraudulent activities.
- For marketing purposes, such as displaying targeted ads or offers based on users' WhatsApp profile pictures.
- Offer personalized services by incorporating WhatsApp profile pictures of users into their accounts. This could include personalized greeting cards, photo books, or other types of customized products.
- When a prospect register on you site, you might want to know if the phone number provided is a real whatsapp number.
- When integrated with social media platforms, you could allow users to update their social media profile picture with their WhatsApp display picture or vice versa.
- If the whatsapp account is a WA for Business, understand how real businesses are promoting their brand, their opening hours, web-page...
- The whatsapp handle you set is tipically the way you are known among your family and friends... this might be relevant on how you want to approach a customer next time you talk to him/her.
- Collect a constantly updated dataset and gain insights into ongoing changes.
- Carry out market or academic research.
Is it legal to scrape Whatsapp?
The Whatsapp Profile Scraper is ethical and does not extract any private user data, such as email addresses, gender, or location. It only extracts what the users have chosen to share publicly on the Whatsapp network, and therefore we believe that the scraper, when used for ethical purposes by Apify users, is safe. However, you should be aware that your results could contain personal data. Personal data is protected by GDPR in the European Union and by other regulations around the world. You should not scrape personal data unless you have a legitimate reason to do so. If you're unsure whether your reason is legitimate, consult your lawyers. You can also read Apify's blog post on the legality of web scraping. Bear in mind that Whatsapp (Meta) might not be following the same ethical principles: read
Cost of usage
When running the Whatsapp Profile Scraper Actor on the Apify platform, there is one crucial factor to consider:
- Compute units - used for running the scraper.
The usage costs differ depending on how many profiles (phone numbers) you are scraping. According to our tests, running a full scrape of 10 numbers has a minimun cost and you don't need to allocate a significant ammount of RAM to run the actor.
The number of records cost is no longer a factor to consider. Previously, it was possible to process more than 10 profiles by using an execution token. However, due to changes in Apify's Marketplace Terms and Conditions in May 2024, we have had to remove this functionality. Consequently, scraping more than 10 profiles from within Apify is no longer possible. If you need to process more than 10 profiles, please contact us through the contact form on our website.
How to use the scraper video guide
The Whatsapp Profile Scraper is very easy to use as shown on this video.
How was possible to scrape thousands of profiles, using a token.
In this video, we demonstrate the integration we made with Stripe to add a token that extended this Actor's processing capacity to more than 10 records. In May 2024, Apify modified the T&C of its Marketplace, and we have removed this functionality.
We keep this video example solely to demonstrate the ability to code certain integrations that inUtil Labs has.
Input parameters
Numbers: (mandatory field)
The input of this scraper must be an array of phone numbers that have to be checked on the Whatsapp Network. The array can be up to 10 numbers.
The whatsapp number must be written as: countrycode and number; do NOT include any non-number character, spaces, or anything which is not a number. Otherwise the job will not be processed. Examples: of correct numbers are: 34123456789 (for spain) or 491234567890 (for Germany).
Do NOT include '+' before your countrycode. Do NOT include a '-', or any other character or space (anything which is not a number) as part of your phone number. If you do not know if you are using a valid country code check this list of valid codes.
Whatsapp Profile Scraper output format
The actor stores its results in a dataset. Each item is a separate item in the dataset. You can also download Whatsapp Profile Scraper data as a HTML, JSON, CSV, Excel, or XML doc.
Can I consume the Whatsapp Profile Scraper as an API?
Running an actor like this is optimal for batch processing needs. This tool has been specifically designed to streamline the scraping of long lists of numbers, eliminating the need for manual data processing and increasing efficiency.
In the past, before Apify modified its T&C, it was possible to use an execution token valid for 1.000 records that could be consumed on one or many executions of the Actor. This option was removed to adhere to Apify Marketplace T&Cs.
But we understand that some users may require a transactional alternative, or maybe running this code on a self-hosted environment, which is why we offer some other form factors of this code like RESTful APIs, or a self-hosted container, as the one we demostrate on this site. Feel free to connect with us by using the contact form on the site and share your needs and use-case; we'll gladly assist you in bringing your ideas to life through code.
Notes
This scraper is offered as a free Apify Actor; thus you don't need to pay to get up to 10 numbers per month (not per run). Surely there might be other free actors in this marketplace claiming to do something similar. We advise you to try them out and judge if they are light-years away from this one in terms of functionality, performance, and successful executions rates. We are delighted to continue inspiring the Apify Community to improve their Actors and build better software.
inUtil LabsActor Metrics
131 monthly users
-
13 stars
>99% runs succeeded
Created in Nov 2022
Modified 4 months ago
