Douban Scraper – Movies, Books, Ratings, Comments & Reviews

Douban scraper for movies, TV shows and books, no login needed. It returns ratings with the 1–5 star distribution, short comments (短评), full-text reviews (影评 / 书评), the Top 250 and real-time hot lists, and keyword search results. Use it instead of a general web crawler when you need structured data from Douban (豆瓣): the desktop site sends crawlers to a sec.douban.com challenge page, and this Actor reads Douban's public mobile JSON instead.

Price: $3 per 1,000 subjects, $2 per 1,000 reviews, $1 per 1,000 short comments. You are never charged for errors.

What data do you get?

• Movies & TV: title, original title, year, directors, cast, genres, countries, languages, release dates, runtime, also-known-as titles, episode count, intro, cover image
• Books: title, subtitle, authors, translators, publisher, publish date, pages, price, author intro, table of contents
• Ratings: Douban score (0–10), number of ratings, percentage of 5/4/3/2/1-star ratings, and how many users watched/read it, are watching/reading it, or want to
• Chart positions: e.g. 豆瓣电影Top250 #1, plus the rank on any hot list you scrape
• Short comments (短评): text, the commenter's star rating, helpful votes, date, and status (watched / watching / want to watch), most helpful first
• Reviews (影评 / 书评): headline, full plain-text body, star rating, useful/useless votes, replies, reshares, reads, spoiler flag, date, URL
• Hot lists: real-time hot movies and TV, weekly best, now showing, coming soon, Top 250 movies, Top 250 books, popular / fiction / non-fiction / bestselling books, Chinese, US, Korean and Japanese series, animation and variety shows
• Search: keyword search for movies & TV or books

No user data: the Actor never saves usernames, user IDs, avatars, profile links or locations. Comments and reviews contain only the text, the rating and engagement counts.

Use cases

• Film & publishing market research: track how Chinese audiences rate a title, compare star distributions, and watch the hot charts every hour or every day.
• Sentiment analysis: score the most helpful short comments and reviews of a movie, series or book, split by star rating.
• Localization & distribution decisions: see what is trending in Chinese cinemas, TV and bookstores before licensing or translating.
• Recommendation & catalog enrichment: add Douban scores, genres, cast and Top 250 positions to your own movie or book catalog.
• Academic research: build small, documented datasets of public reviews for media studies. This Actor is not meant for bulk LLM-corpus harvesting.

How to scrape Douban

1. Click Try for free / Start.
2. Paste Douban links into Douban subjects (https://movie.douban.com/subject/1292052/, https://book.douban.com/subject/1084336/), and/or pick Hot lists & charts, and/or type Search keywords.
3. Set how many short comments and reviews you want per subject.
4. Click Start. Download the results as JSON, CSV, Excel or HTML, or use them through the Apify API and integrations.

Input

Field	Type	Description
subjects	array of strings	Douban movie, TV or book links, or IDs (1292052, book:1084336, tv:36449295).
hotLists	array of enums	Charts such as movie_real_time_hotest, movie_top250, tv_real_time_hotest, book_top250, book_hot.
searchQueries	array of strings	Keywords, in Chinese or English.
searchType	movie | book	What the search looks for. movie also returns TV shows. Default movie.
maxSubjectsPerList	integer	Subjects taken from each hot list or search. Default 10.
fetchDetails	boolean	Full details and star distribution for list/search results. Default true.
maxCommentsPerSubject	integer	Short comments per subject, most helpful first. Default 20, 0 = none.
maxReviewsPerSubject	integer	Reviews per subject, most helpful first. Default 5, 0 = none.
fullReviewText	boolean	Download the complete review body, not just the abstract. Default true.
requestDelaySecs	integer	Pause between requests. Default 2.
proxyConfiguration	object	Optional. Use Apify Proxy (residential) for large runs.

Example input:

{
    "subjects": ["https://movie.douban.com/subject/1292052/", "https://book.douban.com/subject/1084336/"],
    "hotLists": ["movie_real_time_hotest"],
    "maxSubjectsPerList": 10,
    "maxCommentsPerSubject": 20,
    "maxReviewsPerSubject": 3
}

If you leave every field empty, the Actor scrapes the real-time hot movie chart as a quick demo.

Output

Every dataset row has a type: subject, comment, review or error. These are real rows from a test run (long texts shortened):

Subject (movie)

{
    "type": "subject",
    "subjectId": "1292052",
    "subjectType": "movie",
    "title": "肖申克的救赎",
    "originalTitle": "The Shawshank Redemption",
    "year": "1994",
    "url": "https://movie.douban.com/subject/1292052/",
    "rating": 9.7,
    "ratingCount": 3348791,
    "star5Percent": 85.4,
    "star4Percent": 13,
    "star3Percent": 1.4,
    "star2Percent": 0.1,
    "star1Percent": 0.1,
    "doneCount": 5750921,
    "doingCount": 95,
    "wishCount": 519936,
    "commentCount": 667875,
    "reviewCount": 14972,
    "genres": ["剧情", "犯罪"],
    "honors": ["豆瓣电影Top250 #1"],
    "directors": ["弗兰克·德拉邦特"],
    "actors": ["蒂姆·罗宾斯", "摩根·弗里曼", "鲍勃·冈顿", "..."],
    "countries": ["美国"],
    "languages": ["英语"],
    "durations": ["142分钟"],
    "aka": ["月黑高飞(港)", "刺激1995(台)", "..."],
    "intro": "一场谋杀案使银行家安迪（蒂姆·罗宾斯 Tim Robbins 饰）蒙冤入狱……",
    "coverUrl": "https://img3.doubanio.com/view/photo/m_ratio_poster/public/p2934829882.jpg",
    "detailsFetched": true,
    "source": "subject"
}

Subject (book): the same rating fields, plus authors, translators, publisher (人民文学出版社), pages (97), price (22.00元), authorIntro and catalog.

Short comment

{
    "type": "comment",
    "subjectId": "1292052",
    "subjectType": "movie",
    "subjectTitle": "肖申克的救赎",
    "commentId": "32514679",
    "stars": 5,
    "text": "恐惧让你沦为囚犯，希望让你重获自由。——《肖申克的救赎》",
    "createdAt": "2008-02-27T13:43:23.000Z",
    "voteCount": 26503,
    "status": "done",
    "url": "https://movie.douban.com/subject/1292052/"
}

Review

{
    "type": "review",
    "subjectId": "1292052",
    "subjectTitle": "肖申克的救赎",
    "reviewId": "1000369",
    "title": "十年·肖申克的救赎",
    "stars": 5,
    "abstract": "距离斯蒂芬·金（Stephen King）和德拉邦特（Frank Darabont）们缔造这部伟大的作品已经有十年了……",
    "text": "距离斯蒂芬·金（Stephen King）和德拉邦特（Frank Darabont）们缔造这部伟大的作品已经有十年了。……(full text)",
    "isFullText": true,
    "spoiler": false,
    "createdAt": "2005-05-12T12:44:13.000Z",
    "usefulCount": 18954,
    "uselessCount": 735,
    "commentsCount": 1082,
    "resharesCount": 2202,
    "readCount": 1428502,
    "url": "https://movie.douban.com/review/1000369/"
}

Error (free)

{
    "type": "error",
    "input": "99999999",
    "errorCode": "NOT_FOUND",
    "error": "Douban subject 99999999 was not found (deleted, restricted, or not a movie/TV/book subject)."
}

Possible errorCode values: INVALID_INPUT, NOT_FOUND, LIST_NOT_FOUND, NO_RESULTS, BLOCKED, SCRAPE_FAILED.

All dates are ISO 8601 in UTC. Douban's own timestamps are China Standard Time (UTC+8) and are converted. The dataset has ready-made views: Overview, Movies, TV & books, Short comments and Reviews.

Pricing

This Actor uses pay-per-event pricing, so you pay only for the rows you get. Platform usage is included.

Event	Price	When it is charged
subject	$0.003 per subject ($3 / 1,000)	Each movie, TV show or book row
review	$0.002 per review ($2 / 1,000)	Each review row (full text included)
comment	$0.001 per short comment ($1 / 1,000)	Each short-comment row
Errors	Free	Invalid links, missing subjects, blocked requests

Examples:

Job	Cost
2 subjects + 20 short comments + 3 reviews each	2 × $0.003 + 40 × $0.001 + 6 × $0.002 = $0.058
Douban Top 250 movies with full details	250 × $0.003 = $0.75
100 hot books, 40 reviews each	$0.30 + 4,000 × $0.002 = $8.30

Tip: set Max cost per run in the run options. The Actor stops cleanly when your budget is reached.

Use with AI agents (MCP)

AI agents can use this Actor as a tool through the Apify MCP server. Add it as openharvest/douban-scraper in the Apify MCP server's tool list, or let the agent find it by searching the Apify Store for "douban".

Example input an agent can send to answer "How do Chinese viewers rate the movie Interstellar, and what do they say about it?":

{
    "searchQueries": ["星际穿越"],
    "searchType": "movie",
    "maxSubjectsPerList": 1,
    "maxCommentsPerSubject": 30,
    "maxReviewsPerSubject": 3
}

The agent then reads rating, the star*Percent fields and the comment text / stars. A run like this takes about 20 seconds and costs about $0.04.

FAQ

Do I need a Douban account or cookies? No. The Actor uses only public data that Douban's mobile site shows to visitors who are not logged in.

How many short comments and reviews can I get per subject? Douban limits what logged-out visitors can see. In our tests that was roughly the 150 most helpful short comments per movie or TV show (about 100 per book) and the 40 most helpful reviews per subject, even for titles with hundreds of thousands. The newest-first order needs a login, so it is not offered. If you ask for more, the Actor returns all that Douban shows and charges only for those.

Does it support TV shows? Yes. TV series and variety shows are returned with subjectType: "tv" and episodesCount. Use tv:<id> or a m.douban.com/tv/subject/<id>/ link, or a normal movie.douban.com/subject/<id>/ link.

Why is the rating null for some titles? Douban hides the score until a title has enough ratings. Those rows have rating: null and, when Douban provides one, a ratingNote.

Will I get blocked? Douban bans IPs that send requests too fast. The Actor sends one request at a time, waits 2 seconds between requests by default, and backs off and slows down automatically when Douban starts throttling. For large runs (hundreds of subjects or thousands of comments), enable Apify Proxy → Residential. If Douban keeps blocking, the Actor stops early with a free BLOCKED row, so you don't pay for an empty run.

How long does a run take? About 2 seconds per request. One subject with details is 2 requests. Short comments take 1 request per 50, reviews 1 request per 20, and each full review text is 1 more request.

Can I run it on a schedule? Yes. Use Apify Schedules, for example every hour with hotLists: ["movie_real_time_hotest"] to track the real-time chart.

Is it legal to scrape Douban?

This Actor only reads publicly available information that Douban shows to anyone without logging in. It does not log in, bypass captchas or access private content, and it does not collect personal data: usernames, user IDs, avatars and locations are removed. Douban's terms of service restrict automated access, and comments and reviews are copyrighted by their authors. Use the data for analysis and research rather than republishing, keep volumes moderate, and make sure your use complies with Douban's terms and with the laws that apply to you (for example China's PIPL and the GDPR). If you are unsure, consult a lawyer.

Related actors

Other actors by the same developer:

• Bilibili Scraper – Videos, Search, Rankings, Comments & Danmaku
• Steam Reviews & Games Scraper – Prices, Players & Top Sellers
• Google Play Reviews Scraper – Apps, Search & Top Charts
• App Store Reviews Scraper – iOS Apps, Search & Top Charts
• Telegram Channel Scraper – Posts, Messages & Views, No Login

Support & feedback

Found a bug or a missing field? Open an issue in the Issues tab with the Douban link.