Reddit Scraper — Posts, Comments & Search (No API Key, JSON/CSV)

Built for lead-gen scrapes, RAG pipelines, and brand-monitoring jobs that the locked-down Reddit API can't handle. No PRAW 1K cap. No Pushshift mod-gate. Pay only for what you extract.

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.

Why this scraper, not PRAW? PRAW caps you at ~1K posts per query and dies on Reddit's anonymous rate limits. Pushshift is mod-only since 2025. This actor walks every comment tree depth-first, expands collapsed more stubs in batched 100-children calls, and uses non-browser HTTP requests that keep you on the generous ~100 req/min tier.

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

Who is this Reddit scraper for?

• SaaS founders monitoring brand mentions — Track every mention of your product, competitors, and target keywords across 20+ subreddits. Replace $50/mo Reddit lead-gen SaaS tools with a one-off scrape costing cents (r/SaaS).
• GTM engineers building lead-gen pipelines — Use as the Reddit data primitive in Clay, n8n, or Make workflows. Bypasses the PRAW rate limits and 1K-post caps that break automated pipelines (r/gtmengineering).
• Researchers blocked by ghosted API applications — Reddit API applications go unanswered for weeks. This actor uses Reddit's public JSON endpoints — no developer app approval, no mod-gate, no Pushshift dependency (r/redditdev).
• RAG / LLM teams needing nested comment trees — Flattened comment lists lose reply context. Every comment output row includes a parentId field (t3_* for top-level, t1_* for replies), preserving thread shape for vector-store ingestion (r/apify).
• Growth marketers and trend miners — Scrape entire subreddits for competitor tracking, AI-tool trend analysis, or dropshipping niche discovery. A 25K-comment scrape costs ~$125; the insight compounds (r/Entrepreneur).

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.

Integrations & Code Examples

bash (curl)

curl -X POST \
  "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/whoareyouanas~reddit-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"startUrls":[{"url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/"}],"maxItems":100}'

Python SDK

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("whoareyouanas/reddit-scraper").call(run_input={
    "startUrls": [{"url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/"}],
    "maxItems": 100,
})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item)

Node.js SDK

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN' });
const run = await client.actor('whoareyouanas/reddit-scraper').call({
    startUrls: [{ url: 'https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/' }],
    maxItems: 100,
});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

n8n / Make.com / Zapier

Use the Apify trigger/module in n8n or Make.com and point to actor whoareyouanas/reddit-scraper. The structured JSON output (posts, comments, users with parentId reply chains) lands directly in your workflow — pipe into Airtable, Google Sheets, Slack, or an AI summarisation step. See Late to the Reddit API party? Here's the backdoor for an n8n workflow example. Full integration docs: Apify integrations.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Do I need a Reddit API key or developer account? No. This actor uses Reddit's public reddit.com/*.json endpoints — the same data your browser reads. No API key, no app approval, no mod-gate.

Will I hit the PRAW 1K post cap? No. The JSON endpoint paginates beyond 1K via after cursors. The actor follows all pages up to your maxItems or maxPostCount limit.

How is this different from Pushshift / PMAW / PullPush? Pushshift is now mod-only and its shards die mid-run. This actor uses Reddit's own live data — what you see on reddit.com is what you get.

How does this avoid 403 blocks? The actor sends non-browser HTTP requests with a non-Chrome User-Agent. Reddit's anonymous JSON endpoints serve this tier at ~100 req/min. Apify residential proxy (default) handles IP rotation for high-volume runs.

Will Reddit ban my account? No account is used. The actor runs completely unauthenticated against public endpoints — there's nothing to ban.

How do I scrape comment threads with reply context? Every comment row includes a parentId field: t3_* means it's a top-level reply to the post; t1_* means it replies to another comment. The depth-first walk preserves the full tree shape.

How much does it cost to scrape 100K results? ~$500 at $0.005/result + Apify compute charges. Compare to $50/mo Reddit lead-gen SaaS tools or Bright Data's $500+/mo enterprise contracts.

Can I integrate with n8n / Zapier / Make? Yes — full webhook + native integrations support. See the Code Examples section above.

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.

Was this scraper useful?

If this scraper saved you time on Reddit research, lead gen, or data collection, please leave a review on the Apify Store. Reviews are the single biggest visibility lever — and they help other buyers find this actor over less capable alternatives.