YouTube Comments Scraper

Point it at video URLs. Get back every comment those videos will give up — author, text, likes, reply counts, pinned status — as flat rows you can sort, filter and chart immediately.

No channel crawl, no account, no cookies. Paste URLs, run.

What a row looks like

{
  "recordType": "comment",
  "videoId": "aircAruvnKk",
  "videoUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk",
  "commentId": "UgxKREWxIgDrB0zhOwZ4AaABAg",
  "isReply": false,
  "parentCommentId": null,
  "authorName": "@SomeViewer",
  "authorChannelId": "UCabc123...",
  "authorIsChannelOwner": false,
  "text": "The animation at 4:12 finally made this click for me.",
  "likeCount": 1284,
  "replyCount": 17,
  "publishedTimeText": "2 years ago",
  "isPinned": false,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-08-26T04:07:52.104Z"
}

Replies come back as rows too, tagged isReply and linked by parentCommentId, so a thread reassembles with one group-by.

Input

Field	Meaning
videoUrls	Watch, Shorts, youtu.be, embed links — or bare 11-character video IDs
maxCommentsPerVideo	Ceiling per video (see the limit below)
includeCommentReplies	Pull reply threads as well as top-level comments
maxRepliesPerComment	Replies taken from any one comment (default 10, 0 = no cap)
commentSortBy	TOP_COMMENTS or NEWEST_FIRST
proxyConfiguration	Apify residential proxy by default. YouTube blocks some datacenter IPs with 403; a blocked video is retried on a fresh IP and, if it still fails, counted in the run summary instead of silently returning nothing

{
  "videoUrls": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk",
    "kYfNvmF0Bqw"
  ],
  "maxCommentsPerVideo": 200,
  "includeCommentReplies": true,
  "maxRepliesPerComment": 10,
  "commentSortBy": "TOP_COMMENTS"
}

The one limit worth knowing before you buy

YouTube stops handing out comment pages long before a thread is exhausted. This is a ceiling in YouTube's own pagination, not something an actor can code around. Measured on a video whose header reports 79 comments:

first page  = 20 comments, more available
next page   = +9 comments  → 29 total, no more offered

So maxCommentsPerVideo is an upper bound, not a promise. Busy videos return far more than quiet ones, and turning on includeCommentReplies roughly doubles the rows you get back. If you need volume, spread the request across more videos rather than expecting one video to fill a large quota.

We would rather you knew that here than discovered it after paying.

Why replies are capped per comment

A viral comment can carry a thousand replies. Without a cap it consumes the whole maxCommentsPerVideo budget on its own — a 120-row request came back as one comment and 119 of its replies, which tells you nothing about the video.

maxRepliesPerComment defaults to 10, so the same 120 rows come back as 13 different comments with their replies attached — a cross-section rather than a single thread. Set it to 0 when you deliberately want one argument in full.

Good for

• Reading the room on a launch, a review, a controversy
• Feeding sentiment or topic models with real audience language
• Ranking comment likes to see what the audience actually agreed with
• Finding your most-engaged commenters by like count
• Watching how the tone of replies shifts under pinned comments

Notes

• A video that fails is logged and skipped; the rest of the batch still runs.
• Every row carries scrapedAt, so repeat runs stay comparable.
• Results land in the default dataset — export as JSON, CSV, Excel, or pull them from the API.

More actors from this author

• YouTube Channel Search — type a topic, get matching channels with subscriber counts. $1 per 1,000 channels
• YouTube Search Scraper — keyword search to videos with exact views, likes and publish dates
• YouTube Channel Scraper — one channel to profile, every video and the comments
• YouTube Video Scraper — every video on a channel with tags, chapters and captions

Questions and problems

Open an issue on the Issues tab of this actor, with the run ID.