5 Best Twitter Scrapers in 2026: Benchmarked & Tested (X.com)
We benchmarked the top Twitter (X) scrapers across 200 URLs (profile pages and posts), totaling 400 requests. To help you choose the right tool for your specific technical needs, we have categorized the top performers below.
X.com data extraction: Using dedicated Twitter scraping APIs
General-purpose APIs can be insufficient. Dedicated X.com APIs are specifically designed to handle the platform’s unique data structures and anti-bot measures.
- Solution type: Choosing the right tool depends on your technical scale. Dedicated APIs are custom-built for X.com’s specific data structures, General-purpose APIs offer broader site coverage, and No-code scrapers provide automated extraction for those without a developer background.
- Page types: Some providers offer pre-built scraper API templates tailored for various types of Twitter data, such as Twitter post and Twitter profile scrapers.
Apify vs. Bright Data: Benchmarking the top Twitter scraper APIs
Our benchmark shows that Bright Data is reliable thanks to its dedicated Scraper API. Apify is preferred by developers for its flexible Pay-As-You-Go model and large library of community-maintained actors.
To extract thousands of posts per minute, Bright Data’s residential proxy network is recommended. For most custom workflows, Apify offers better value.
Note: Prices are monthly, disregarding annual discounts. The pricing chart only shows data for those with a success rate exceeding 50%.
See the benchmark methodology for evaluating the best Twitter scraping tools.
Features of the best Twitter scraping tools 2026
Bright Data provides three pre-built scraping templates for x.com: posts (collect by URL), posts (collect by profile URL), and profiles (collect by URL). The provider gives a snapshot list for each scraping project, which returns metadata for each snapshot. You can monitor the current state of data collection by its ID and cancel a running collection.
Due to website limitations, the scraper APIs can only get up to 100 posts per URL. The basic plan starts at $0.7 per 1,000 records.
Apify’s Twitter scraper extracts publicly available Twitter information, including hashtags, threads, replies, images, and historical data. You can download the extracted data in any format. The tool allows users to scrape Twitter data either by a search term or URL input.
You can choose which proxies to use, including custom proxies and automatic proxies. You can either pick your own proxy servers or use the provider’s residential and datacenter proxies.
NetNut offers a social media scraping API to extract live and on-demand data from sites such as LinkedIn. This social scraping solution supports proxy use and includes automatic proxy rotation to improve data-gathering efficiency.
PhantomBuster offers a Twitter Follower Scraper that extracts follower information from a public Twitter profile. The scraper will enable users to scrape public follower information by a URL.
You can scrape the URL of a single user account or a Google Sheet containing a list of Twitter account URLs. However, you cannot collect data using a keyword or hashtag as the input.
Octoparse’s social media scraper enables users to extract data from platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. The scraper performs Twitter scraping on the cloud and saves the scraped Twitter data on the cloud rather than on the user’s local machine.
Benchmark methodology
We leveraged top web scraping API solutions to collect data from pre-selected URLs. Each provider processed each URL once, and the responses were recorded. Asynchronous methods were used for every API request.
The benchmark involved 200 URLs across 2 page types: profiles and posts. All providers are charged only for successful results.
- Bright Data and Apify returned JSON in all their responses from their dedicated Twitter APIs.
- However, Nimble offers a general-purpose API that returns
- Profiles as JSON ~60% of the time and HTML for the rest
- Posts as HTML
In our benchmark, we compared the leading dedicated Twitter scrapers (see the table below) based on their response times and pricing offerings for different request needs.
For more on methodology, please see social media scraping methodology.
Developer guide: Building a Twitter scraper with Python & GitHub
While many open-source projects on GitHub provide a starting point, they often fail under X.com’s rate-limiting and anti-scraping defenses.
If you are looking to build a production-ready pipeline in Python, we recommend following this detailed guide on scraping X.com with Python.
Key takeaways for developers:
- Use Google Search discovery with a 2-second delay to find high-signal URLs rather than chasing fragile internal endpoints.
- Offload browser rendering, IP rotation, and anti-bot bypass to a dedicated Scraper API to keep your local environment lean.
- Add automated retries to ensure your scraping job stays reliable.
Free write-only API for developers
Twitter provides free API access for write-only use cases.1 You need to register your use case at the Twitter Developer website, and they will share your API key in a few days if your use case is confirmed.
Twitter datasets
Data sets are a great solution if you are okay with data that is updated frequently. Most web data providers provide data sets that can be queried.
However, if you need real-time data, you need to rely on one of the other options.
FAQs about Twitter scrapers
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