As AIMultiple’s CTO, I lead our social media data collection to analyze how businesses engage with their audiences. We benchmarked every TikTok scraper API on 300 pages (e.g., posts, profiles, search) to select top scrapers. Follow the links to visit their websites:
| TikTok scraping API | Focus | |
|---|---|---|
1. | Enterprises: Dedicated API with lowest cost | |
2. | Developers: Hashtag scraping but at a higher cost | |
3. |  Nimble |
General-purpose scraper with rotating residential IPs & unblocker services |
4. |  Smartproxy |
Getting TikTok comments & search results from the country of your choice |
5. |  Octoparse |
No-code scraper API for a low-scale scraping |
Scrapers provide public TikTok data. If you want to login as a user and collect private data, see how to build a custom Python scraper.
Benchmarking the best TikTok Scraper APIs
Bright Data
API
Apify
API
Nimble
API
Smartproxy
API
Octoparse
No-code
| Vendors | UI | Scraper | Geo | Supports | Formats | Prices | Free trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| API | Dedicated | ❌ | Comments | CSV | $500 | ✅ (7 days) |
| API | Dedicated 1 | ❌ | Hashtag | CSV | $49 | ✅ (unlimited)* |
| API | General-purpose | ❌ | No preset page templates exist | JSON | $150 | ✅ |
| API | Dedicated 2 | ✅ | Hashtag | Excel | $50 | ✅ (7 days) |
| No-code | Dedicated | ❌ | Comment | CSV | $89 | ✅ (7 days) |
* Apify provides a $5 monthly credit for platform usage, which is automatically renewed as part of the free trial.
UI: User interface
Scraper:
- Dedicated: Provides a dedicated TikTok scraper API solution specifically designed for collecting data from TikTok. See the scrapers we benchmarked.
- General-Purpose: This offers a scraper that is not specifically designed for TikTok but can be adapted for TikTok web scraping purposes.
Supports: Pages where the scraper returns structured data.
Geo: Allows selecting the country of the IP to be used in scraping. For example, the country of the IP viewing a post changes the ranking of comments (e.g., comments from that country get ranked higher)
Prices: Starting price/month
Monthly pricing
Comparison summary
- Bright Data: It offers the ability to scrape by both keyword and URL and is suitable for large-scale operations. Use the coupon API25 to receive 25% off Bright Data’s LinkedIn Scraper API.
- Apify: Enables search with URL, keyword, and hashtag options. Apify’s TikTok scraper API is a developer-focused solution; users can tailor the scraping parameters to focus on specific users, hashtags, or content types.
- Smartproxy: Provides geo parameters for localized content. It only supports scraping by keyword, and there is no URL search option.
- Nimble: It does not offer dedicated APIs for social media scraping, but it is easy to use.
- Octoparse: It supports scraping by keyword and URL and has preset templates for TikTok scraping. It is not suitable for large-scale scraping, but it is helpful for smaller tasks.
Step-by-Step Guide to Scraping TikTok with Python
Scraping TikTok is no longer be possible with proxy services because TikTok has implemented strong protections, such as JavaScript puzzles and browser checks, to block bots.
We tested TikTok scraping with different methods and found that only unblockers can reliably pull the HTML, especially the important <script id= SIGI_STATE> block that includes videos and user information.
❌ What Didn’t Work
| Method | What Happened | Why It Failed |
|---|---|---|
| requests | Returns HTML which misses script with id “SIGI_STATE” | Detected as a bot; can’t handle JavaScript |
| urllib | Returns placeholder HTML with the title TikTok – Make Your Day | Blocked by TikTok’s anti-bot system |
| Residential Proxy + requests | Got challenge pages or redirects, no real data | TikTok still spotted it as bot traffic |
| Playwright | Showed JavaScript puzzle | TikTok caught the headless browser automation |
| Selenium + Proxy | Page didn’t load right, no useful data | Puzzle scripts stopped the page from loading |
✅ The Only Working Tool: Unblocker
We used Bright Data Unblocker, to bypasses all of TikTok’s anti-bot layers. Unblockers
- Mimick real browser behavior
- Solve or bypass JavaScript puzzles
- Handle redirect chains and token validation
- Return clean, usable HTML, including the SIGI_STATE block with the JSON data enclosed within it.
Example Output Comparison
| Method | Has | Got Real Data? |
|---|---|---|
| requests | ❌ | ❌ |
| urllib + Proxy | ❌ | ❌ |
| Playwright | ❌ (puzzle challenge) | ❌ |
| Bright Data Unblocker | ✅ | ✅ |
What is TikTok scraping?
TikTok scraping is extracting publicly available data from TikTok (Figure 1). While TikTok data scraping can involve manual and automated activities, it is most commonly called automated processes. These practices are carried out by a web crawler or custom scripts that interact with TikTok's APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).
The data can include various types of information, such as user profiles, video metadata, TikTok comments, likes, and search hashtags. Here are some examples of TikTok data:
- User profiles: Include information about TikTok users, such as their profile name, bio, and follower count.
- Demographics: Data related to the characteristics of TikTok users, such as age, gender, location, and interests.
- Videos: TikTok users' short-form videos, including captions, likes, comments, shares, and views.
- Hashtags: Keywords or phrases used to categorize TikTok content. Comments: Text responses to TikTok videos submitted by users, including the text, timestamp, and number of likes.
- Engagement metrics: Information about how users interact with TikTok content, such as likes, comments, shares, and views.
- Trends: Information about popular topics, themes, or styles on TikTok.
Figure 1: Shows output of a publicly available profile scraped from TikTok.
Source: Bright Data
Is it legal to scrape TikTok?
Scraping publicly available data on the web, including TikTok, is legal if it complies with applicable laws and regulations, such as data protection and privacy laws. However, the legality of scraping data also depends on factors such as:
- The purpose for data collection
- Including personally identifiable information (PII)
See our guide on the legality of web scraping and web scraping ethics for more information.
Best practices for legal and ethical TikTok scraping
Here are some best practices for legal and ethical TikTok data scraping:
- Respect website terms of service: Before scraping any data from TikTok, reviewing the platform's terms of service is critical.
- Respect the 'robots.txt' file: Besides commercial terms of use, websites have a robots.txt file containing information about the scraped website's permissions. Enter https://www.example.com/robots.txt to view a website's instructions for web crawlers (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: TikTok's robots.txt file
- Monitor scraping activity: Scrape only the data you need and ensure it does not exceed reasonable limits.
- Comply with data protection laws: Do not collect personally identifiable information. Comply with data protection regulations around PII, the major ones being GDPR in the EU and CCPA in California.
Technical challenges and limitations of TikTok scraping
- TikTok's rate limit on API Requests: TikTok's API restricts the number of requests that can be made within a given period and slows down the scraping process. The rate limits are intended to prevent excessive or abusive API use and keep the service responsive for all users.
If your API requests exceed the TikTok API rate limit, you may be temporarily or permanently banned from accessing the API. Therefore, monitoring your API usage is important to avoid being blocked by the platform.
Solution: Backoff strategies such as throttling, caching, and prioritizing requests can be used to manage data collection and avoid exceeding API rate limits.
- Anti-scraping technologies: Websites, including social media platforms, employ anti-scraping measures such as CAPTCHAs, IP blacklist check, and user agent blocking to prevent automated web scraping activities. Here are some common strategies for handling anti-scraping techniques:
Solution:
- Rotating proxies/IP rotation: Rotating proxies enable users to change their IP addresses constantly. For example, when you frequently make a connection request to the same website, your current IP address will be automatically rotated for each request. Residential proxy servers are one type of rotating proxy server.
If your primary concern is security, you can utilize a residential proxy server. Residential proxies offer a greater level of anonymity since their IP address is provided by the ISP (Internet Service Provider).
We ranked the top 10 residential proxy providers by their features and performance to help you choose the right service.
- CAPTCHA-solving services: Anti-CAPTCHA services analyze CAPTCHA challenges and solve them automatically using machine learning algorithms. There are many paid and free third-party services that can handle CAPTCHAs. It is essential to ensure that the CAPTCHA-solving service you use is by TikTok's terms of service.
- Headless browsers: Headless browsers can imitate human behavior by navigating websites and executing JavaScript while avoiding detection by user agent blocking or JavaScript detection.
- Changes to the API: TikTok may change its API, including API endpoint changes or API response changes, which can affect the code used for scraping.
Solution: To keep up with API changes, it's important to monitor API documentation and update scraping scripts as needed.
TikTok scrapers used in benchmark
We tested providers' dedicated scraper API solutions with TikTok URL destinations for posts and profiles. For more on methodology, see the web scraping APIs benchmark methodology.
| Page type | Apify | Bright Data | Oxylabs | Smartproxy | Zyte |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TikTok post | clockworks/free-tiktok | TikTok - Posts -collect by URL | ❌ | Social Media Scraping API -tiktok_post | ❌ |
| TikTok profile | clockworks/free-tiktok | TikTok - Posts -collect by URL | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
See which leading web scraping providers offer dedicated scraping APIs for TikTok pages:
| Provider | TikTok post | TikTok profile | TikTok search |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bright Data | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Apify | ❌* | ✅ | ❌* |
| Smartproxy | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ |
| NetNut | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Oxylabs | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Zyte | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
* These scrapers exist, but their success rate was below our threshold (>90%).
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