Best Twitter (X) Scrapers 2025: Apify & Alternatives

We benchmarked top Twitter scrapers on 200 URLs (profile pages and posts) in December 2024 and January 2025, resulting in 400 requests. See the top 6 scrapers and follow the links to see the rationale behind these choices:

Provider		Focus
1.	Bright Data	Dedicated API for large-scale, low-cost, compliant data
2.	Apify	Generous free trial and high success rate
3.	PhantomBuster	Task automation, like posting tweets and automatically liking tweets

1.

Bright Data

Dedicated API for large-scale, low-cost, compliant data

2.

Apify

Generous free trial and high success rate

3.

PhantomBuster

Task automation, like posting tweets and automatically liking tweets

You can also see best practices for using Twitter (X) scrapers effectively while adhering to X.com’s policies and ethical data scraping practices.

Top Twitter (X) scrapers: Quick comparison

Table features explained:

• Solution type: Detailed in the “methods for scraping Twitter” section.
• Page types: Certain providers offer pre-built scraper API templates tailored for various types of Twitter data, such as Twitter post Scraper API and Twitter profile Scraper API.
• Scrape: Methods for scraping the target Twitter page include using either a query input or a URL input to retrieve Twitter data.

Scraper benchmark results

See which providers from the leading web data companies have scrapers for specific X.com pages:

See the benchmark methodology for evaluating the best Twitter scraping tools.

Pricing for top Twitter scraping tools

Prices are monthly, disregarding annual discounts. The pricing chart only shows data for those with a success rate exceeding 50%. Providers are paid based on successful results.

In our benchmark we compared the leading dedicated twitter scrapers (see the below table) by their response times and pricing offerings for different requests needs.

Best Twitter scrapers for scraping Twitter data

Bright Data

Bright Data is a data collection platform that provides tools and services for web scraping, including proxy servers, APIs, and no-code solutions. Bright Data’s Web Scraper IDE enables individuals and businesses to scrape data from public Twitter profiles, including images, videos and hashtags.

Features:

• Suitable for beginners: Bright Data’s web UI facilitates generating queries and users without coding skills can also test data collection via the scraper API.
• Handle dynamic content: Dynamic websites change their content on the client side, making it harder to scrape the content for a web scraper. Bright Data’s web scraping tool handles dynamic content challenges automatically. 
• Emulate a user in any geo-location: The scraper makes your Twitter scraper appear as it accesses the website from a desired location. 
• Auto-scaling infrastructure: Automatically adjusts the amount of resources that your web scraper uses.  
• Built-in debug tools: Provides built-in debugging tools for developers. It debugs issues in a past crawl to help users watch your scripts as they run. 
• Auto-retry mechanism: When the connection request encounters a failure, the scraper waits for a predetermined time and sends the request again. 

Pricing:

• Starting from: $500/mo
• Free trial: 7 day trial

Apify

Apify’s Twitter scraper extract publicly available Twitter information, including hashtags, threads, replies, images and historical data. You can download the extracted data in any format.

Features:

• API access: Enables users to access and control their Twitter scraping tasks using RESTful API.
• Scheduler: Users can schedule their web scraping tasks at specific times or intervals.
• Scrape tweets by search term or URL: Offers users to scrape Twitter data either by a search term or URL input.
• Set a specific date: You can scrape tweets within a specific data range.
• Proxy configuration: You can choose which proxies to use, including custom proxies and automatic proxies. You can either pick your proxy servers or use the automatic proxy offered by the scraping tool.

Pricing:

• Starting from: $49/ mo
• Free trial: Available (data retention for 7 days)

Nimble

Nimble is a web data platform specialized in data collection, offering a range of scraping APIs designed for different needs like Search Engine Results Pages (SERP), E-commerce, Maps, and a general Web scraping API. These APIs are enhanced with built-in residential proxies, including both static and rotating options, which are ideal for gathering data from social media. Additionally, the Web API provides specific features such as page interaction capabilities and parsing templates.

Features:

• Delivered in: Nimble Web Scraping API provides three methods for delivering data:
  • Real-time: Data is collected and immediately returned to the user.
  • Cloud: Collected data is moved to a cloud storage selected by the user.
  • Push/Pull: Data is stored on Nimble’s servers, and users can retrieve it via a provided URL for download.

• Batch processing: Extracts data from up to 1,000 URLs in one batch operation.
• Automated parsing: Identifies the structure of the data and extracts the relevant pieces of information like product names and prices from e-commerce sites.
• Residential proxies: Each query made through Nimble APIs is handled through a residential proxy.

Pricing:

• Starting price: $150/mo
• Trial: Available

NetNut

NetNut stands out as a reliable figure in the proxy market, offering both residential and datacenter proxies tailored for web scraping applications. They offer a social media scraping API that allows for the extraction of both live and on-demand data from sites such as LinkedIn. This social scraping solution supports proxy use and includes automatic proxy rotation to enhance the efficiency of data gathering.

Features:

• Real-time and scheduled data extraction capabilities: Facilitates both immediate and planned data scraping tasks.
• Automated proxy rotation: Automatically changes IP addresses for each session by default.

Pricing:

• Starting from: Custom offering
• Free trial: 7-day free trial

PhantomBuster

PhantomBuster offers Twitter Follower Scraper that allows users to extract the follower information from a public Twitter profile.

Features:

• Scrape data by a URL input: The scraper allows users to scrape public follower information by a URL input. You can scrape the URL of a single user account or the URL of a Google Sheet containing a list of Twitter account URLs. However, you cannot collect data using a keyword or hashtag as the input.
• Choose the number of profiles: You can select the number of followers you want to scrape.
• Watcher mode: Reprocess the same Twitter profile URL during each launch to search for new followers.
• CSV format: Export the collected data to a CSV file.

Pricing:

• Starting from: $59/mo
• Free trial: 14-day free trial

Octoparse

Octoparse is a web scraping platform that provides different web scraping and automation solutions for extracting data from web sources. They offer a data collection solution for extracting social media data from social media platforms, including Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.

Features:

• Cloud data extraction: Performs Twitter scraping on the cloud, save the scraped Twitter data on the cloud rather than user local machine.
• Automatic IP Rotation: Have built-in IP rotation feature, improving the success rate and reliability of Twitter scraping tasks.
• Handling dynamic pages: Interact with the dynamic elements on the target profile page by clicking buttons, scrolling down the page, and filling out forms.
• Auto-detection: Allow web scrapers to identify and select the desired data without requiring manual selection of data elements.

Pricing:

• Starting from: $89/mo
• Free trial: 14-day

Benchmark methodology

We leveraged top web scraping API solutions to collect data from a set of pre-selected URLs. Each URL was processed once by each provider, and the responses were recorded. Asynchronous methods were used for every API request.

The benchmark involved 200 URLs including on 2 types of pages: Profiles and posts.

All providers only charged 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

For more on methodology, please see social media scraping methodology.

What is a Twitter scraper?

A Twitter scraper is software that is used to extract data from Twitter. Twitter scrapers enable users to collect various types of data associated with Twitter content, such as user profiles, hashtags, and tweets.

Which Twitter data can you scrape?

It is essential to respect Twitter’s Terms of Service and follow their guidelines when collecting their data. That being said, you may be able to extract the following types of data:

• Twitter profiles: Profile description, image, username, and follower/following counts.
• Tweets: Metadata associated with the content of a tweet, including likes, retweets, and replies. 
• Hashtags: You can collect tweets containing specific hashtags.
• Twitter lists: List names, descriptions, and memberships.

Is it legal to scrape Twitter data?

The legality of scraping Twitter data depends on several factors, including the jurisdiction you are in, how you extract the data, and how you use the retrieved data.

If you intend to scrape Twitter data, it is recommended to consult with a legal expert in your area to understand the web scraping ethics before conducting any social media scraping activities.

Most effective way to scrape Twitter

1. Dedicated APIs

Some web scraping services provide specialized API solutions tailored to specific websites, making data extraction more efficient. Platforms like Bright Data and Apify offer dedicated APIs for scraping Twitter, allowing for streamlined and reliable access to Twitter data.

2. General-Purpose APIs

Many web scraper providers offer APIs that can be used across a range of websites. For instance, an eCommerce scraper API might be used to extract data from platforms like Amazon, Walmart, or eBay. Similarly, social media scraper APIs can target multiple platforms, including Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn.

3. No-Code Scraping Tools

Platforms like Octoparse offer no-code scraping solutions, providing a marketplace of pre-built scrapers designed for specific websites like Twitter, TikTok, and Facebook . These tools offer point-and-click interfaces that let you select the data you want to scrape (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Showing how visual data selection works

Source: Octoparse

How to scrape Twitter data: a step-by-step guide

Here is a general breakdown of how a Twitter scraper works:

1. Enter the target URL: Input the URL of the Twitter search result page you intend to scrape. You can collect data using URLs or search queries such as keywords and hashtags.
2. Load entire content: Since Twitter is based on Javascript, you need to wait until the whole page loads before scraping.
3. Select data elements you want to scrape: Locate the items to be extracted, such as the tweet content, username, and timestamp.
4. Configure show more buttons: Since tweets are no longer limited to 280 characters, you may encounter a “show more” limit when scraping the content of tweets. You will need to identify the “show more” element to scrape the expanded tweet content. Ensure that the Twitter scraper you select is capable of handling pagination, infinite scrolling, and other dynamic web elements.

5. Run the scraper: Some Twitter scraping tools allow you to run the scraper at specific times or intervals on your local machine or in the cloud.
6. Export the scraped data: Export the data in various formats such as CSV, Excel or JSON.

External links

• 1. Some Twitter Users Can Post 4,000-Character Tweets Now - CNET. CNET