YouTube Comments Scraper — Bulk Export Comments & Replies (No API Key)

Export all YouTube comments and replies from any video in bulk. This YouTube comment scraper — also a comment exporter and extractor — pulls every comment and reply with the author, text, likes, reply count, dates and verified/creator flags — with no login, no cookies and no Google API key. One run can return tens of thousands of comments from a single popular video, ready for sentiment analysis, audience research and brand monitoring. Paste video URLs or IDs and export to CSV, JSON or Excel.

🏆 Why this YouTube comments scraper?

Unlimited comments per video · comments + threaded replies · author, likes, reply count & verified/creator flags · no login, no cookies, no YouTube Data API key, no quota · top / newest sorting · export to JSON / CSV / Excel. The unofficial YouTube Data API alternative for comment sentiment, audience research and moderation datasets.

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✨ What this Actor does / Key features

• 💬 Every comment & reply — top-level comments plus threaded replies (tagged with parentCommentId).
• 👤 Author context — author name, channel ID, verified-badge flag and a creator flag (true when the video's creator posted it).
• 👍 Engagement — like count normalized to an integer (243K → 243000) and reply count per thread.
• 🎬 Source context — video title, video ID and video URL on every row.
• 🔀 Sort options — top (highest engagement) or newest first.
• 🔗 Flexible input — full watch URLs, youtu.be short links, Shorts URLs or bare 11-character IDs; add as many as you like.
• 🧯 Graceful handling — built-in retries; videos with comments disabled are skipped cleanly.
• 🔑 No API key, no quota — talks to YouTube's internal data layer with a fresh key per run; only an Apify account required.

🚀 Quick start (3 steps)

1. Configure — paste your video URLs or IDs into Video URLs or IDs. Optionally set sortBy, toggle includeReplies and set maxCommentsPerVideo.
2. Run — click Start. The Actor loads each comment section, paginates with continuation tokens and streams comments into your dataset.
3. Get your data — open the Output tab and export to JSON, CSV, Excel, HTML or RSS, or pull it via the Apify API.

📥 Input

Give the Actor at least one video in videos. Everything else is optional.

Example — newest comments + replies for a couple of videos

{
  "videos": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
    "https://youtu.be/9bZkp7q19f0"
  ],
  "maxCommentsPerVideo": 5000,
  "sortBy": "newest",
  "includeReplies": true
}

Example — every comment from one video (full export)

{
  "videos": ["dQw4w9WgXcQ"],
  "maxCommentsPerVideo": 0,
  "sortBy": "top"
}

Example — top comments across many videos with a global cap

{
  "videos": ["VIDEO_ID_1", "VIDEO_ID_2", "VIDEO_ID_3"],
  "sortBy": "top",
  "maxCommentsPerVideo": 2000,
  "maxResults": 10000
}

Field	Type	Description	Default
videos	array	Video URLs or 11-char IDs (watch, youtu.be, Shorts all supported). Required.	–
maxCommentsPerVideo	integer	Cap per video (top-level + replies). 0 = unlimited.	1000
sortBy	string	top (highest engagement) or newest.	top
includeReplies	boolean	Also fetch replies (tagged with parentCommentId).	false
maxResults	integer	Global cap across all videos. 0 = unlimited.	0

Tip: includeReplies can multiply volume on threads with thousands of replies — cap it with maxCommentsPerVideo. Comments are public only; disabled or members-only comments yield nothing for that video.

📤 Output

Each comment (and reply) is saved as one structured row. Here is a trimmed sample:

{
  "videoId": "dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "videoTitle": "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up",
  "videoUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "author": "@musicfan",
  "authorChannelId": "UCabc123def456",
  "authorIsVerified": false,
  "authorIsCreator": false,
  "text": "This song is timeless 🔥",
  "likeCount": 1240,
  "replyCount": 7,
  "publishedTime": "2 months ago",
  "isReply": false,
  "parentCommentId": null,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-07-06T07:30:00.000Z"
}

Additional output fields

These fields are also present in the dataset:

Field	Type	Description
channelTitle	string	Uploader channel name
channelId	string	Uploader UC… channel ID
videoViewCount	number	View count of the source video as a number
commentId	string	Unique comment ID
likeCountText	string	Raw like count label
authorAvatar	string	Author avatar image URL

🔍 How it works

This comment extractor talks to YouTube's internal data layer (the same one the website uses), fetching a fresh access key on each run so it keeps working as YouTube changes. It loads the comment section, paginates with continuation tokens until the video is exhausted or your cap is hit, and resolves replies through the parent/reply comment-ID convention. Built-in retries handle hiccups; videos with comments disabled are skipped gracefully.

💡 Use cases

• Sentiment analysis — export every comment on a launch, trailer or review and run NLP/LLM sentiment scoring.
• Brand & reputation monitoring — track what audiences say under your own or a competitor's videos.
• Audience & market research — mine feature requests, complaints and the exact language your customers use.
• Creator & influencer analytics — measure real engagement quality, not just view counts.
• Content moderation & AI datasets — pull comments for spam/abuse filtering or to assemble conversational training data.

👥 Who uses it

Social-media and brand teams · market researchers & data analysts · creators and influencer-marketing agencies · NLP/ML engineers building sentiment and moderation datasets · PR and reputation-management teams.

💰 Pricing

This Actor runs on a simple pay-per-result model — you pay only for the comments you actually get, with no proxy fees and no YouTube API costs. Try it on the free tier first, then scale up. See the Pricing tab on this page for the current rate.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need a YouTube API key or login to scrape comments? No. There's no login, no cookie, and no YouTube Data API key — and none of the official API's comment quota limits.

Is this a YouTube Data API alternative for comments? Yes. It works as a YouTube Data API alternative — no Google Cloud project, no API key, and none of the official quota limits, so you can scrape YouTube comments without an API key.

Can I scrape YouTube comments without login or cookies? Yes. There is no login, no cookies and no account needed — paste video URLs or IDs and the comment extractor pulls public comments and replies directly.

How many YouTube comments can I scrape? As many as the video has publicly. Viral videos return tens of thousands. Use maxCommentsPerVideo to cap cost.

Does it scrape replies too? Yes. Set includeReplies: true; replies carry isReply: true and a parentCommentId linking them to the top-level comment.

How do I export every comment from a YouTube video to CSV? Paste the video URL into videos, set maxCommentsPerVideo to 0 for all, and run to stream every comment into a dataset you can download as CSV or JSON.

Why is the date "2 years ago" instead of an exact date? YouTube only exposes a relative time on comments. Use the scrapedAt timestamp as the reference point to convert it.

How do I export YouTube comments to CSV or JSON? Run the Actor, then download the dataset as CSV, JSON or Excel from the run's Storage tab, or pull the comment dataset via the Apify API. Every field exports as one structured row.

🔗 The complete YouTube scraping toolkit by logiover

Pair the comments scraper with the rest of the YouTube suite:

Actor	What it does
YouTube Channel Scraper	Every video of a channel
YouTube Search Scraper	Find videos by keyword
YouTube Creator Email Finder	Creator business emails for outreach
TikTok Hashtag Video Scraper	TikTok videos & metrics by hashtag
Threads Scraper	Threads posts, replies & engagement
Reddit Search Scraper	Reddit posts & comments by keyword
Twitch Scraper	Streams, channels & metadata

👉 Browse all logiover scrapers on Apify Store — 180+ actors across real estate, jobs, crypto, social media & B2B data.

⏰ Scheduling & integration

Schedule this Actor on Apify to track comments on your videos or a competitor's daily or weekly. Export results to JSON, CSV or Excel, sync to Google Sheets, or push to your database, BI/NLP tools and webhooks through the Apify API. Connect it to Make, n8n or Zapier to automate a YouTube comment export on a schedule.

⭐ Support & feedback

Found a bug or need an extra field (whole-channel comments, exact timestamps, built-in sentiment scoring)? Open an issue on the Issues tab — response is usually fast. If this Actor saves you time, a ★★★★★ review on the Store page genuinely helps and is hugely appreciated. 🙏

⚖️ Legal

This Actor collects only publicly visible comment data. You are responsible for using it in line with YouTube's Terms and applicable privacy laws (GDPR/CCPA) — avoid using personal data for unsolicited contact.

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This Actor is an independent tool. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by YouTube Comments; YouTube Comments and all other trademarks mentioned here are the property of their respective owners.

How much YouTube data can you extract in one run?

A single run returned 1,000 comments in 79 seconds on the example input, and it was still going when the measurement stopped — raise the result limit and it keeps paginating. That is roughly 759 comments a minute.

There is no hard ceiling built into this Actor. What bounds a run is the result limit you set, the breadth of the input you give it, and how much YouTube itself publishes. Because billing is per result, a wider run costs proportionally more and a narrow one costs almost nothing — so it is worth starting small and scaling once the output looks right.

YouTube scraping — frequently asked questions

Do I need a YouTube API key, account or login?

No. This Actor reads publicly available pages and feeds, so there is nothing to register for and no credentials to manage.

How do I export YouTube data to CSV, Excel, JSON or Google Sheets?

Open the Storage tab after a run and pick the format you want — CSV, Excel, JSON, XML or an HTML table. For Google Sheets, Airtable or a database, use the dataset URL or the Apify API so the sheet refreshes itself on every run.

Can I schedule this YouTube scraper to run daily or hourly?

Yes. Use the Schedules tab and pick a cadence. Daily is enough for most tracking work; pick hourly only if the comments you care about really do change that fast.

How many comments can I get, and what does it cost?

See the volume section above for a measured figure. Billing is per result, so you pay for the rows you actually receive and a run that finds nothing costs nothing.

Is scraping YouTube legal?

This Actor collects only information that YouTube publishes publicly. It does not log in, does not defeat access controls and does not touch private data. You remain responsible for how you use the output, including under GDPR and similar rules where personal data is involved.

What happens if YouTube blocks the run or changes its layout?

A refused exit IP is swapped for a fresh one within a quarter of a second and retried, and rate limiting is waited out rather than fought. If nothing gets through, the run fails with the reason instead of reporting success with zero rows — so an empty result always means "no matches", never "the source would not answer".

Can I use this with an AI agent, LangChain or an MCP client?

Yes. The Actor is callable over the Apify API and through Apify's MCP server, so an agent can run it and read the dataset back as a tool call.

📝 Changelog

2026-11-01

• Monthly health check (2026-11-01): a live run on the current build completed successfully and returned data. Input options, output fields and pricing are unchanged.
• README refreshed: 3 links to retired Actors removed; independence disclaimer added; documented 6 additional output fields.

2026-10-15

• Every request now has a hard time limit, so a proxy connection that stalls can no longer hold up the run or push it past its timeout.
• A run that reaches its maximum cost per run now stops cleanly with its results saved and a status message, instead of ending as aborted.
• A proxy group your account cannot use no longer stops the run at start-up; it falls back to the default Apify Proxy.
• Runs with a short timeout (API and AI-agent calls) now finish inside it with what they collected, instead of being cut off.
• Memory is managed within the run's own limit, which removes a rare out-of-memory crash on large pages.

2026-09-23

• Fleet-wide quality audit. Verified end to end against live data and re-checked the input schema, the output columns and the run configuration.
• Output verified on a live run: 20 columns returned, 95.0% of cells populated.
• Run reliability reviewed: 100.0% of public runs succeeded in the last 30 days.
• Input schema, output schema and pricing configuration reviewed.
• Noted that 1 column(s) came back empty in this sample (parentCommentId); these are under review.

2026-09-01

• Fleet-wide health check. Verified against this Actor's real run history: 30-day success rate, output row counts, per-field fill rates, and peak memory against the configured memory limit.
• Reviewed for the failure patterns that have cost this fleet runs — unguarded proxy setup, retry loops that can outlast the run's own time budget, and full-page HTML parsing that can exhaust a small container.
• No change to input, output fields or scraping logic.

2026-08-11

• Maintenance release: refreshed the build and dependencies.
• Re-verified live execution, non-empty structured output and dataset field/type integrity.
• Reviewed reliability (retries, pagination) and output quality as part of a full-fleet QA pass.

2026-08-01

• Completed the August 2026 full health check: verified empty/programmatic default, Console UI default, and two source-informed alternative inputs on Apify.
• Confirmed successful live execution, non-empty structured output, dataset-field/type integrity, and logical sample quality within the 5-minute quality window.

2026-07-06

• ✨ README overhaul: richer output sample, three ready-to-run example scenarios, expanded YouTube/social cross-links, and clearer quick-start.

2026-07-01

• Maintenance pass: re-verified end-to-end on live data and confirmed successful runs within the 5-minute quality window on the default input.
• Sharpened Store metadata (SEO title & description) and expanded the FAQ with high-intent, long-tail questions for easier discovery in Google and Apify Store search.
• Added ready-to-run example tasks that cover common real-world use cases.

2026-06-15

• Reliability pass: re-verified end-to-end on live data with real-world inputs. Routine maintenance build.

2026-06-07

• Docs: added coverage for using this as a YouTube Data API alternative, scraping comments without an API key or login, and exporting the comment dataset to CSV/JSON.

2026-06-05

• 🛡️ Reliability fix: results are no longer dropped by strict output validation — runs now complete cleanly even at high volume (thousands of results).
• ⚡ Stability & performance hardening; fresh rebuild.

2026-06-04

• Verified live & refreshed build — reliability/maintenance pass.

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*Maintained: last verified 2026-11-01 — checked end-to-end against live run history (reliability, output fields and types, and time/memory budgets).