Reddit Comment Scraper

Reddit Comment Scraper — Comments, Replies, Authors and Upvotes

Reddit Comment Scraper extracts the comments and replies of public Reddit posts, pasted as links or found from a subreddit, a search or a keyword. Each comment comes with its author, upvotes, posting time, text, permalink, profile picture and nested replies, plus optional author karma. Every response is structured JSON — ready to pass directly to an LLM, index into a vector store, or feed a social listening pipeline. No Reddit account or cookies needed. Start with one thread, then follow every discussion your market cares about.

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What data can I extract with Reddit Comment Scraper?

Using this Reddit Comments API, you will be able to extract the following Reddit comment data:

💬 Comment text	👤 Author username	👍 Upvotes (score)	🕒 Posting time (UTC)
🔗 Comment permalink	🆔 Comment ID and post ID	🧵 Nested replies (up to your replies-per-comment setting)	🏷️ Type: comment, reply, deleted or removed
↩️ Parent comment or post ID	🖼️ Author profile picture (if available)	🌐 Author profile link	📰 Post title
📎 Post URL	🔎 How the post was found (pasted or discovered)	⭐ Author karma: total, post and comment (optional)	📅 Author account creation date and Reddit Gold status (optional)

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How to use Reddit Comment Scraper

Researchers, brand teams and developers use it to turn any Reddit discussion into clean rows: one run gives you every comment you asked for, in the order Reddit shows them, with the replies kept under each one.

Copy to your AI assistant:

Reddit Comment Scraper (Apify Actor ID: socialdataapi/reddit-comment-scraper, https://apify.com/socialdataapi/reddit-comment-scraper) is an Apify Actor that returns the comments and replies of public Reddit posts as structured JSON: comment text, author, upvotes, posting time, permalink, comment type (comment, reply, deleted or removed), parent ID, author profile picture and link, nested replies, the post URL and title, and optional author karma and account age. Use it whenever someone needs Reddit comments without cookies, a login, or a browser - sentiment analysis on a product launch thread, brand monitoring across a subreddit, or grounding an AI agent in what a community actually says. Inputs: startUrls (string[], Reddit post links, redd.it short links, t3_ ids or bare post ids), maxComments (int, comments per post, 1-10000, default 10), replyLimit (int, replies kept per comment at every depth, 0-100, 0 = all, default 1), sortOrder ("hot"|"new"|"top"|"controversial"|"old", default "hot"; orders the comments and, in discovery, plain subreddit links and keyword searches), sinceDate (string, YYYY-MM-DD or relative like "3 days", only comments on or after it), untilDate (string, same formats, only comments on or before it, the whole day counts), searchUrls (string[], subreddit or Reddit search links whose order and ?t= time range are kept; post links here are scraped as posts; a plain word is searched as a keyword), searchQuery (string, keyword searched across all of Reddit), maxPostsToDiscover (int, posts found in total through discovery, 1-500, default 10), safeSearch (bool, skip NSFW posts found through discovery, default false), enrichAuthorProfile (bool, adds authorProfile with totalKarma, postKarma, commentKarma, accountCreatedUtc, isGold for up to 300 authors per run, default false), proxyConfiguration (object, optional proxy for every request; off by default). One row per comment; every kept reply is its own row and is also nested under its parent. Private, banned and gold-only subreddits and removed posts return no rows and are named in the log and the run's status message.

Reddit Comment Scraper MCP Server: use these Actors from ChatGPT, Claude or Cursor

Connect Apify's MCP server and your AI assistant can read Reddit threads on its own: the server starts with this Actor already loaded as a tool. No glue code, no scraping logic in your prompts.

$claude mcp add --transport http apify "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=socialdataapi/reddit-comment-scraper"

Step by step

1. Create a free Apify account.
2. Open Reddit Comment Scraper in the Apify Store.
3. Paste the Reddit post URL, or add a subreddit link, a Reddit search link or a keyword in the post discovery section.
4. Click Start (or send your API request).
5. Download or stream your results in JSON, CSV or Excel.

How to scale Reddit Comment Scraper to bulk

Paste as many post links as you like into the post URLs list; up to 8 posts are scraped at the same time and each post's comments are saved as soon as that post is done. To cover a whole community, add subreddit or search links and a keyword, and set how many posts to discover in total (up to 500 per run). Posts found twice are scraped once. For ongoing monitoring, schedule the same input daily with "Only comments since" set to 1 day, so each run collects only new comments.

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✨ Features

Reddit Comment Scraper fetches clean, structured comments from Reddit ⚡. It's ideal for Reddit sentiment analysis, brand and product monitoring, community research and feeding AI agents with real discussions. It works as a Reddit comments extractor, a Reddit thread scraper and a Reddit replies scraper in one run.

It extracts, per comment:

• Comment text – the full comment on one line
• Author and profile link – who wrote it, with a link to their Reddit profile
• Upvotes – the comment's score
• Posting time – when it was written, in UTC
• Type – a comment on the post, a reply, or a deleted or removed comment
• Nested replies – the kept replies under each comment, each with the same details
• Author karma and account age – optional, looked up once per author

⚡ No login and no browser: you control cost with comments per post, replies per comment, posts to discover and a date window.

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Use cases 💡

• Brand manager — scrape Reddit comments on launch threads and track complaints by upvotes.
• Market researcher — run Reddit sentiment analysis on comment text by posting time.
• Community manager — use the subreddit comments scraper mode to review a community's top threads weekly.
• Trust and safety analyst — flag low-karma or brand-new accounts from the author details.
• Data analyst — export Reddit comments to CSV and chart reply depth per thread.
• AI engineer — index comment text into a vector store as grounded context for a RAG agent.

Building an AI agent? Connect Reddit Comment Scraper over MCP and let it call the actor on its own.

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Why choose this actor?

• Whole threads, collapsed comments included. A recorded run returned 300 comments from one thread plus 48 from a second post in 8.7 seconds, while naming a missing post and a non-post link in the log.
• The context behind each comment. A recorded reply came back with 1,613 upvotes, its parent comment ID, its nested replies, and its author's 274,200 karma and 2016 account creation date.
• 12 settings, 16 fields. Post links or discovery from subreddits, searches and keywords, five sort orders, a date window, NSFW skipping, replies per comment and optional author details.

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⬇️ Input

The Actor accepts a list of Reddit post links, or a subreddit link, a Reddit search link or a keyword to find posts for you. No field is required on its own, but a run needs at least one post URL, discovery link or keyword.

Parameter	Required	Type	Description	Example value
startUrls	No*	Array	Reddit posts to scrape: www, old, new or mobile reddit.com post links, redd.it short links, t3_ IDs or bare post IDs.	["https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1epeshq/these_are_all_ai/"]
maxComments	No	Integer	Comments saved per post, 1 to 10,000 (default 10), in thread order.	10
replyLimit	No	Integer	Replies kept under each comment at every depth, 0 to 100 (default 1); 0 keeps all replies.	2
sortOrder	No	String	hot (Reddit's default order), new, top, controversial or old (default hot). Also orders plain subreddit links and keyword searches in discovery.	"top"
sinceDate	No	String	Only comments posted on or after this date (YYYY-MM-DD) or relative value (for example 3 days).	"2024-01-01"
untilDate	No	String	Only comments posted on or before this date (the whole day counts) or relative value.	"1 day"
searchUrls	No*	Array	Subreddit or Reddit search links to find posts from; the link's own order and time range are kept. A post link here is scraped as a post; a plain word is searched as a keyword.	["https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/top/?t=week"]
searchQuery	No*	String	Keyword or phrase searched across all of Reddit.	"gpt-5 release"
maxPostsToDiscover	No	Integer	Posts found in total through discovery, 1 to 500 (default 10); a post found twice counts once.	2
safeSearch	No	Boolean	Skip NSFW posts found through discovery (default false); pasted post URLs are always scraped.	true
enrichAuthorProfile	No	Boolean	Add author karma, account creation date and Reddit Gold status to every row, for up to 300 authors per run (default false).	true
proxyConfiguration	No	Object	Optional proxy for every request; off by default, the Actor switches to a proxy by itself when Reddit slows it down.	{"useApifyProxy": false}

* Fill in at least one of the post URLs, the subreddit or search links, or the keyword. A run without any of them stops right away with a clear status message.

Accepted post link formats:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/<subreddit>/comments/<id>/<title>/ (also old., new., np. and m.reddit.com)
• https://redd.it/<id>
• t3_<id> or the bare post ID, for example 1epeshq

Free plan limits

Users on the Apify free plan can fetch up to 20 comments per run (all posts together) and 200 comments per month. When the limit is reached, the run finishes successfully with a status message explaining the limit. Upgrade to any paid Apify plan to remove these limits.

Example input

This input was used for a real test run (3 posts, 30 comments with author details, 7.0 seconds):

{
  "startUrls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1epeshq/these_are_all_ai/"],
  "maxComments": 10,
  "replyLimit": 2,
  "sortOrder": "top",
  "sinceDate": "2024-01-01",
  "untilDate": "1 day",
  "searchUrls": ["https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/top/?t=week"],
  "searchQuery": "gpt-5 release",
  "maxPostsToDiscover": 2,
  "safeSearch": true,
  "enrichAuthorProfile": true,
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": false }
}

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⬆️ Output

Every comment is one typed, normalized JSON item with the same fields on every run, and values Reddit doesn't provide are null. Export it as JSON (default), CSV or Excel; the key-value store also keeps the same comments grouped by post URL in one record.

Example output

A real row from the test run above (the nested reply's own replies are shortened):

{
  "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1epeshq/these_are_all_ai/",
  "comment_id": "lhklt5t",
  "post_id": "t3_1epeshq",
  "author": "y8man",
  "permalink": "https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1epeshq/these_are_all_ai/lhklt5t/",
  "upvotes": 1613,
  "content_type": "reply",
  "parent_id": "lhk4jkv",
  "author_avatar": "https://styles.redditmedia.com/t5_d0q2r/styles/profileIcon_tqviyu6odn9d1.jpeg?width=256&height=256&crop=256:256,smart&s=b8e6e69b4419f6881cc1e43659f115455ccb42d1",
  "userUrl": "https://www.reddit.com/user/y8man/",
  "contentText": "The wild thing is I've seen posts going around where it's a couple of AI pics and then OP will say one of them is actually real (or even all as a gotcha moment).  It's becoming increasingly more difficult to tell at a single glance. And let's be real, a lot of people don't spend time scrutinising each photo they come across in socmed.",
  "created_time": "2024-08-11T11:00:47Z",
  "replies": [
    {
      "comment_id": "lhkpgsm",
      "post_id": "t3_1epeshq",
      "author": "copperwatt",
      "permalink": "https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1epeshq/these_are_all_ai/lhkpgsm/",
      "upvotes": 499,
      "content_type": "reply",
      "parent_id": "lhklt5t",
      "author_avatar": "https://www.redditstatic.com/avatars/defaults/v2/avatar_default_6.png",
      "userUrl": "https://www.reddit.com/user/copperwatt/",
      "contentText": "Agreed.  One question I have... Some of these have a bad case of Sameface. It makes it look like it's a family reunion with brothers and sisters, lol...",
      "created_time": "2024-08-11T11:36:11Z",
      "replies": []
    }
  ],
  "discovered_via": "direct_url",
  "discovered_post_title": "These are all AI",
  "authorProfile": {
    "totalKarma": 274200,
    "postKarma": 64183,
    "commentKarma": 210017,
    "accountCreatedUtc": "2016-04-23T17:18:11Z",
    "isGold": false
  }
}

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How does it work?

The Actor reads the same public comment data any logged-out visitor can see, so you never need a Reddit account, a password or cookies. It uses plain HTTP requests, no browser. For each post it collects the comments in the order you choose, opens the collapsed parts of the thread by itself and keeps the replies under each comment, until your maximum per post is reached. Every request gets up to 3 attempts with growing waits; the Actor starts with a direct connection and switches to a proxy by itself when Reddit slows it down, or sends everything through your own proxy when you set one. Private or removed content is never returned. The output fields stay the same from run to run, so your code and spreadsheets keep working even when Reddit changes its site.

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How do you integrate Reddit Comment Scraper into your stack?

The Actor works with what you already use: the REST API from any language, MCP for AI agents, and no-code tools.

MCP integration for AI agents

Add Apify's MCP server to your agent with one command:

$claude mcp add --transport http apify "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=socialdataapi/reddit-comment-scraper"

This connects your agent to Apify's MCP server with this Actor already loaded as a tool, so it can call it directly, run it on a thread or keyword, and use the comments mid-conversation. It works with Claude Code, Cursor and Windsurf.

No-code tools (n8n, Make, LangChain)

• n8n: add the Apify node, choose "Run an Actor", pick this Actor and pass the input JSON; the node returns the dataset items for the next step.
• Make: use the Apify app's "Run an Actor" module with the same input, then "Get Dataset Items" to pass the comments on to a sheet or a database.
• LangChain: install langchain-apify and wrap the Actor with ApifyActorsTool, using the Actor ID socialdataapi/reddit-comment-scraper, so your chain can fetch Reddit comments on demand.

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Is it legal to scrape Reddit data?

Scraping publicly available Reddit data is generally lawful, though Reddit's User Agreement restricts automated access and you remain responsible for how you use the data. Reddit Comment Scraper returns only publicly available data — what any user sees without logging in — and nothing from private subreddits or behind a login. Usernames, profile pictures and karma can count as personal data under GDPR and CCPA even though Reddit names are pseudonymous: scraping public data is generally permissible, but storing and using it must comply with local data-protection law. Consult legal counsel if your use case involves bulk storage of personal data.

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Frequently asked questions

What fields does Reddit Comment Scraper return?

It returns the comment text, the author, the upvotes, the posting time and the nested replies, plus the permalink, comment type, parent ID, profile picture, post URL and title. See the data fields section for the full list.

Does Reddit Comment Scraper require a Reddit account or login?

No. Only public comment data is extracted, so no Reddit account, password, cookies or developer app is needed.

How fast does Reddit Comment Scraper run?

A recorded run collected 348 comments from two posts in 8.7 seconds, and a run with author details collected 30 comments from three posts in 7.0 seconds. Data is read live from Reddit on every run, not from a cache.

What happens if a comment is private or doesn't exist?

A post that was removed, doesn't exist or sits in a private, banned or gold-only subreddit returns no rows; it is named in the log and in the run's status message, and the other posts carry on. Deleted and removed comments keep their place in the thread with the type set to deleted or removed, so check that type in your code before using the text.

Can I scrape multiple Reddit comments at once?

Yes. Paste many post links in one run, or let discovery find up to 500 posts from subreddit links, search links and a keyword; up to 8 posts are scraped at the same time.

Does Reddit Comment Scraper work with Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI agent tools?

Yes — Reddit Comment Scraper is available as an MCP tool through Apify's MCP server. Register the server in Claude Code, Cursor or Windsurf with claude mcp add --transport http apify "https://mcp.apify.com?tools=socialdataapi/reddit-comment-scraper", and any agent that can call an HTTP endpoint can use the REST API directly.

Does Reddit Comment Scraper return data in a format LLMs can use directly?

Yes. Every comment is typed, normalized JSON with consistent field names, so there is no HTML parsing and no selectors. Pass it straight to an LLM, index it into a vector store, or feed it to an agent tool — no transformation step.

What happens when Reddit changes its layout or updates its anti-bot system?

The Actor is maintained, and when Reddit changes, it is updated so your calls keep returning the same JSON fields with no changes on your end.

Can I use Reddit Comment Scraper without managing proxies or browser infrastructure?

Yes. Retries and the switch to a proxy when Reddit slows the connection run on the Actor's side, and no browser is involved. You send one request and get structured JSON back, with no proxy account to set up.

Which Reddit comment fields work best for AI training data and RAG indexing?

For RAG, use the comment text together with the post title and the permalink as the source link. For training data, use the upvotes, the comment type, the posting time and the author karma. The values are plain strings, integers and booleans, with replies nested as lists of the same shape.

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Your feedback

Found a bug or missing a field? Let us know through the Issues tab on this Actor's page. Every report is read, and fixes ship as Reddit changes.