Reddit Scraper — Posts, Comments, Communities & Users

Scrape Reddit at scale — posts, comments, communities (subreddits), and user profiles. Works by direct URL or keyword search, supports nested comment trees, NSFW + date filters, and global item caps. No Reddit account or API key needed.

What does Reddit Scraper do?

This actor pulls structured data from Reddit's public JSON API. Drop in any Reddit URL — a subreddit, post, user profile, or search results — and it returns clean rows ready for analytics, monitoring, or LLM ingestion. You can also run a keyword search across posts, comments, communities, and users.

It runs on a lightweight HTTP path (no browser), so it's fast and cheap. Comment trees are walked depth-first and more stubs are expanded against /api/morechildren automatically.

Key Features

• Multiple input modes — Start URLs, keyword search, or leaderboard fallback (popular subreddits)
• Mixed inputs in one run — Combine subreddit URLs, post URLs, and user profiles freely
• Full comment trees — Walks nested replies and expands collapsed branches via /api/morechildren
• 4 result categories — Posts (t3), comments (t1), communities (t5), and users (t2)
• Granular limits — Per-category caps (maxPostCount, maxComments, maxCommunitiesCount, maxUserCount) plus a global maxItems ceiling
• Date and NSFW filters — postDateLimit, commentDateLimit, includeNSFW
• Skip toggles — skipComments, skipUserPosts, skipCommunity for narrower runs
• Apify residential proxy — Recommended for production; defaults are pre-wired

Input Modes

The actor picks one of three modes based on what you provide:

1. Start URLs (preferred) — When startUrls is non-empty, every other input mode is ignored.
2. Search — When startUrls is empty but searches has at least one query.
3. Leaderboard — When neither is set, the actor falls back to scraping r/popular's top communities.

Supported URL Shapes

URL pattern	What gets scraped
reddit.com/r/<sub>/	Subreddit posts (sort/time honored), optional community-about, optional comments per post
reddit.com/r/<sub>/comments/<id>/	Single post + its comment tree
reddit.com/user/<name>/	User profile + their submitted posts + their comment history
reddit.com/search?q=...	Keyword search (post / comment / sr / user, depending on flags)
reddit.com/r/<sub>/search?q=...	Search restricted to one subreddit

old.reddit.com and www.reddit.com are both accepted; URLs are normalized internally.

Output Data

Every dataset row carries a dataType discriminator so you can split them downstream.

Post (dataType: "post")

Field	Type	Description
id	string	Reddit fullname (t3_xxx)
parsedId	string	Base-36 id without prefix
url	string	Permalink to the post (or external URL for link posts)
username	string	Author
title	string	Post title
communityName	string	r/<subreddit>
parsedCommunityName	string	Subreddit name without r/ prefix
body	string	Self-text (or external URL for link posts)
html	string	Rendered HTML for self-text
numberOfComments	number	num_comments from Reddit
upVotes	number	Score
authorFlair	string | null	Author flair text
isVideo	boolean	True for video posts
isAd	boolean	True for promoted/ad posts
over18	boolean	NSFW flag
createdAt	string	ISO 8601
scrapedAt	string	ISO 8601

Comment (dataType: "comment")

Field	Type	Description
id	string	t1_xxx
parsedId	string	Base-36 id
url	string	Permalink to the comment
parentId	string	Parent fullname (t3_* for top-level, t1_* for replies)
username	string	Author
authorFlair	string | null	Flair text
category	string	Subreddit name
communityName	string	r/<subreddit>
body	string	Comment text (markdown)
html	string	Rendered HTML
upVotes	number	Score
numberOfReplies	number	Recursive count of t1 replies underneath
createdAt	string	ISO 8601
scrapedAt	string	ISO 8601

Community (dataType: "community")

Field	Type	Description
id	string	t5_xxx
name	string	Display name (no r/ prefix)
title	string	Long-form community title
headerImage	string	Banner / header image URL
description	string	Public description
over18	boolean	NSFW community flag
numberOfMembers	number	Subscribers
url	string	Absolute permalink
createdAt	string	ISO 8601
scrapedAt	string	ISO 8601

User (dataType: "user")

Field	Type	Description
id	string	t2_xxx
url	string	Profile permalink
username	string	Reddit handle
userIcon	string	Avatar URL
postKarma	number	Link karma
commentKarma	number	Comment karma
description	string	Profile description
over18	boolean	NSFW profile flag
createdAt	string	ISO 8601
scrapedAt	string	ISO 8601

Sample Output

{
  "dataType": "post",
  "id": "t3_1t16uqd",
  "parsedId": "1t16uqd",
  "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1t16uqd/...",
  "username": "IIlustriousTea",
  "title": "US birth rates just hit another record low...",
  "communityName": "r/AskReddit",
  "parsedCommunityName": "AskReddit",
  "body": "",
  "html": "",
  "numberOfComments": 8892,
  "upVotes": 7657,
  "authorFlair": null,
  "isVideo": false,
  "isAd": false,
  "over18": false,
  "createdAt": "2026-05-01T21:40:45.000Z",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-05-02T05:53:19.442Z"
}

Input Parameters

Direct URLs

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
startUrls	array	[]	Reddit URLs to scrape. Mix any of: subreddit, post, user, or search URLs.
ignoreStartUrls	boolean	false	Force-bypass the URLs field (helpful for tools like Zapier).

Search

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
searches	string[]	[]	Keywords to search. Used only when startUrls is empty.
searchCommunityName	string	""	Restrict every search to one subreddit.
searchPosts	boolean	true	Include posts in search results.
searchComments	boolean	false	Include comments (best-effort — Reddit's comment search returns parent posts).
searchCommunities	boolean	false	Include matching communities.
searchUsers	boolean	false	Include matching user profiles.
sort	enum	new	relevance / hot / top / new / rising / comments.
time	enum	""	all / hour / day / week / month / year. Most useful with sort=top.

Filters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
includeNSFW	boolean	true	Include adult-rated posts and subreddits.
skipComments	boolean	false	Don't scrape comments when going through posts.
skipUserPosts	boolean	false	Don't scrape a user's submitted posts when going through their profile.
skipCommunity	boolean	false	Don't push community metadata when going through a subreddit.
postDateLimit	ISO date	—	Only keep posts created after this date.
commentDateLimit	ISO date	—	Only keep comments created after this date.

Limits

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
maxItems	integer	10	Hard global cap on dataset rows across all categories.
maxPostCount	integer	10	Per-listing cap on posts.
maxComments	integer	10	Per-post cap on comments (or global cap on comment-search/user-comments).
maxCommunitiesCount	integer	2	Cap on communities returned from search or leaderboard.
maxUserCount	integer	2	Cap on user profiles returned from search.

Advanced

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
proxy	object	Apify Residential	Apify proxy or your own proxy URLs. Residential is strongly recommended.
debugMode	boolean	false	Verbose Crawlee logging.

How It Works

The actor sends authenticated-style HTTP requests to reddit.com/*.json using a descriptive non-browser User-Agent — Reddit's anonymous JSON endpoints reject Chrome-like UAs without browser cookies, so we explicitly disable Crawlee's automatic browser-fingerprint header injection. This keeps unauthenticated rate limits at their generous default (~100 requests/min) instead of falling back to the strict ~10/min anti-bot tier.

Comment trees are walked depth-first up to maxComments. Collapsed more stubs are expanded by POSTing to /api/morechildren.json in batches of 100 children — no extra request per comment.

The crawler aborts as soon as maxItems is hit, so over-runs are not a concern even with deep trees.

Pricing

This actor uses pay-per-event pricing:

Event	Price
Actor start	$0.00005
Result extracted (per dataset row)	$0.005

You only pay for what you scrape. Apify platform compute and proxy usage are billed separately based on your plan.

Limitations

• Comment search returns parent posts only (Reddit's API behavior); the actor enqueues those posts so their comment trees are still scraped. Treat it as best-effort.
• Removed/deleted posts return a 404 envelope; they're logged and skipped without retry.
• Login-walled content (private subreddits, NSFW-locked content for unauth) is not accessible via the JSON API and is silently skipped.