How to Scrape X.com (Twitter) in 2025 Without Writing Code

Twitter is one of the most difficult websites to scrape. Based on your goals, we recommend using:

• Web scraping APIs to scrape less than a few million pages/month.
• Proxies to crawl tens of millions of pages/month or send tweets or likes automatically.
• Web unblockers if you need data points that are not returned by web scraping APIs.
• X.com’s own API if you need to post or like tweets and don’t have the technical capabilities to achieve this via proxies.
• X.com data sets if you don’t need real-time data.

See the best methods and tools to scrape Twitter data. We identified the criteria for Twitter web scraping and analyzed leading twitter scrapers using these criteria:

How to choose the right tool for scraping Twitter data?

1. Web scraping APIs

Web scraping APIs minimize the technological effort on the client side by delivering structured data, making them a more cost-effective option than developing custom solutions.

Custom scrapers take significant resources to manage proxy rotation, avoid CAPTCHA, and scale properly. If you’re building your own web scraper to retrieve raw HTML, your technical team will need familiarity with proxy management to get beyond anti-scraping methods and HTML parsing. However, this strategy introduces the continual difficulty of regularly updating and re-parsing web pages as page designs change.

Third-party scraping APIs, on the other hand, return responses that vary in depth of detail. Before picking a provider, make sure to get sample API results for each type of page you want to scrape. By doing so, you can ensure that the API collects the necessary data from your target pages.

Begin by making a list of the page types you need to gather, such as profile pages, posts, or search results, and ensure that the API solution meets those requirements. Some web scraping service providers offer ready-to-use templates for popular websites (such as X.com), which you can alter as needed.

Top web scraping tools for Twitter scraping

In summary:

• Building a Twitter scraper in-house has its own challenges mostly related to cost and maintenance. For example, if you intend to scrape well-protected websites or extract data on a large scale, you should take precautions such as integrating a proxy server solution into your scraping bot to avoid IP blocking.
• If your web scraping needs will scale over time to tens of millions of pages per month, building an in-house tool may be less costly than paying an external tool since external tool costs increase based on the volume of data you need.

Recommendation: Our recommendation is to start with either free trials or a low tier of external web scraping services to test the ROI of your Twitter use case, and determine your long-term solution based on how much value Twitter data brings to your business.

2. Proxies

Proxies can be cost-effective at high scale for Twitter scraping.

This is because the constant effort to keep your custom parser up-to-date gets distributed over many changes at high scale. For example, if you scrape more than ten million pages per month, it can be cost-effective to choose proxies and invest part of the savings in managing your custom Twitter parser.

To promote its own API, Twitter relies on anti-scraping features. Therefore, you should rely on rotating residential proxies and your team’s constant effort on proxy configuration to help you bypass restrictions and collect data.

Recommendation: Leverage residential, mobile, or ISP proxies, which leverage IP addresses from real devices, making the requests seem more authentic.

3. Web Unblockers

Unblockers return all of the data on the website in unstructured form. Therefore, if you need data fields that web scraping APIs do not provide, you can rely on unblockers.

Some websites, such as X.com, are difficult to crawl because they deploy a variety of anti-scraping techniques. In these circumstances, web unblockers are required to consistently collect data with high success rates.

Unblockers often achieve high success rates by utilizing complex technologies such as browser fingerprinting, JavaScript rendering, and scraping capabilities, all of which assist in bypassing limitations and accessing restricted websites.

What is Twitter data?

When we think of Twitter, we can all imagine a feed full of tweets back to back, with numbers of likes and specific owners of the tweets. However, there are more details you can pull from Twitter.

1. Keywords / hashtags: You can pull a certain number of tweets that contains a specific keyword or hashtag or combinations of them. You can curate your search by limiting the tweets to a certain number of likes or a date in order to narrow down your data to a particular event or power of influence.
2. Tweets: You can pull all the tweets of specified profiles, again with ability to filter your data into certain tweets of these individuals such as tweets that contained a URL or tweets that got retweeted.
3. Profiles: You can collect all the information about a Twitter user’s public account. Anything you see on their page, such as their bio, number of followers or tweets would be reported on a structured format along with the profile owner.

Is it legal to scrape Twitter?

Though this is not legal advice, in most jurisdictions, it is legal and allowed to scrape publicly available data (e.g. anything that you can see without logging into the website) from Twitter.

For example, if a user’s profile is private, even if you personally follow this person and can access their profile, you can’t scrape, share or use this data for any purposes. That being said, being scraped in general is not desired by websites like Twitter because it brings excess traffic on their website and reduces the scarcity of their data. Therefore, they try to block web scrapers.

To learn how to circumvent anti-scraping obstacles for efficient data extraction, check out top 7 web scraping best practices.

Is web scraping better than Twitter API?

Paid API to retrieve tweets

This API is more expensive (i.e. Pro level with read access starts at $5k/month) than other options.¹

The biggest advantage of the API is that, since it is supported by Twitter, there is no risk of being blocked as long as you pull the data by following their API guidelines. However, API has certain limitations in terms of how back in the past you can pull data and how many tweets you can pull in a minute. These rules can change year by year and should be double checked directly from Twitter’s most up to date guidelines.

Free write-only API for developers

Twitter provides free API access for write-only use cases.² You need to register your use case at Twitter Developer website and they will share your API key in a few days if your use case is confirmed.

You need to register your use case at Twitter Developer website and they will share your API key in a few days if your use case is confirmed.

X.com data sets

If you are OK with data that is updated on a frequent basis, data sets are a great solution. 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.

Top 3 Business Use Cases of Twitter Data

We collected the most up to date business use cases in 2023 directly from Twitter’s website with real life examples. However, there are more web scraping use cases that you can get inspiration from other web data, such as Instagram, LinkedIn or other social media sites, and transform them for your business using Twitter data.

1. Brand Monitoring

Brands need to monitor their online presence in case of a copyright violation, fraud or misinformation about them which may harm their reputation. Monitoring the mentions about your brand as a keyword and also relevant hashtags on Twitter will help you detect and take action for such cases before they are spread. To learn more statistics and methods about brand protection, read our article on web scrapers & proxies to protect your brand.

For an example case, read how Brandwatch used Twitter data for monitoring keywords on Twitter for building a live feed into their crisis management process.

2. Financial Insights

Twitter is not only a place to track a specific keyword, but also find out what is trending. Financial institutions invest in collecting web data more over the years as a valuable source of insights to detect emerging startups, fluctations in market and political climate in different regions.

Insights that can redirect venture capitals and investment banks also come from news and search engine data, but social media is an organic way to keep track of how people’s opinions change about a certain financial trend, such as investment in a cryptocoin or follow key figures’ decisions which can influence a certain industry and market, such as political leaders’ decisions about economy.

For an example case, read how Likefolio integrated Twitter data into their financial investment decision making process.

3. Consumer research

Marketing Science Institute defined web scraping as the gold field of consumer research. This is because social media data enables companies to build a data source for voice of customer and social listening studies which constantly gets updated.

For an example case, read how Audiense used Twitter data for social listening and personalization engagement. One thing to keep in mind when using any social media site for consumer research is who their audience is. For example, in 2021, majority of Twitter’s worldwide users were below 35 years old, which may not be the target audience for some businesses.

External Links

• 1. About the X API - X.
• 2. Twitter API Documentation | Docs | Twitter Developer Platform .