Best YouTube Scrapers: Tools for Shorts, Comments & Emails (Free & Paid)
YouTube is a highly dynamic platform that presents significant challenges for data extraction. Features like infinite scroll layouts (especially common on YouTube Shorts) and aggressive anti-bot protections mean that standard web scrapers often fail to extract data reliably without getting blocked.
To overcome these hurdles, specialized services are essential. Below is a list of top YouTube scraping providers:
Top YouTube scrapers comparison table
*: Fixed subscription price you pay every month
Best YouTube scrapers: Detailed reviews & pros/cons
Bright Data offers ready-made scraping templates with keyword-based search and URL-driven scraping. You can run these templates either through their UI or entirely via API calls. Rather than scraping in real time, Bright Data maintains up-to-date “snapshots” of YouTube data that you can filter.
Features:
- YouTube shorts support: Specialized collectors that can handle the “infinite scroll” architecture of YouTube Shorts feeds without crashing.
- Historical datasets: If you don’t want to scrape in real-time, you can buy pre-collected datasets of YouTube metadata (channels, comments, trends) updated daily.
- No-Code templates: A drag-and-drop builder for non-developers to extract video titles, views, and descriptions.
Oxylabs offers a dedicated scraper API for extracting data from YouTube. The YouTube scraper allows you to select your endpoint (Search, Transcript, or Metadata) and enter a keyword to view live results.
Additionally, their web unblocker proxy API includes location settings down to the coordinate level. You can send POST requests to YouTube, and the tool supports both JavaScript rendering and parsing.
Features:
- AI-Powered parsing: Automatically identifies and extracts video metadata, comment threads, and related video suggestions even when YouTube changes its HTML layout.
- Global geo-targeting: Scrape YouTube trends as they appear in 195 different countries (crucial for tracking global viral trends).
Decodo provides two general-purpose Scraping API playgrounds, the Core API and the Advanced Scraper, the latter of which includes dedicated YouTube endpoints.
Its Transcript origin setting lets you choose between YouTube’s Auto-Generated captions (machine-created ASR subtitles) and Uploader-Provided captions (human-curated SRT/VTT files).
By toggling the transcript_origin parameter in your API call, you decide whether to retrieve the raw, automatically generated text or the more accurate, creator-supplied transcripts.
Features:
- Cost-effective: Their “Lite” scraper tier is significantly cheaper than Bright Data for simple metadata tasks.
- Subtitle/transcript parsing: Dedicated parameters to extract transcripts in SRT/JSON format instantly.
Apify’s YouTube video scraper enables users to extract and download data, including YouTube channel names, likes, view counts, and subscriber numbers. The YouTube API operates as a template with a user-friendly, point-and-click interface.
It can scrape up to 20,000 YouTube video data points per URL, though the maximum results may vary based on the complexity of the input.
Features:
- YouTube shorts actor: Specifically designed to scroll through Shorts feeds and extract music usage and hashtags.
- Comment scraper: Extracts nested replies, user details, and timestamps.
ScraperAPI offers a general-purpose web scraping API with country-level targeting. By default, the service provides geo-targeting for the US and EU, with the option to target 12 additional countries for an extra fee.
JavaScript rendering is also available at an additional cost. Compared with platforms such as Decodo and Oxylabs, ScraperAPI is purpose-built for developers.
Features:
- Render JS: Built-in capability to render JavaScript for dynamic YouTube pages (costs extra credits).
- Geotargeting: Target 50 countries to see how YouTube search results vary by region.
PhantomBuster is an automation-first platform tailored for market and growth teams, with over 100 ready-made “Phantoms”. There is no ready-made’ YouTube Search’ Phantom in the catalog to scrape YouTube search results or extract username links from YouTube comments and comments by commentators.
The three dedicated YouTube Phantoms are Video Scraper, Channel Scraper, and Channel Video Extractor.
The provider offers a 14-day free trial with 5 Phantom slots and 1,000 AI credits. You can scrape YouTube videos, including public data points such as the video title, channel name, subscriber count, video views, and video description.
- YouTube channel scraper: Extracts subscriber counts, social media links (Instagram/Twitter), and About page details.
- Cross-platform: Can link YouTube channels to their Instagram or LinkedIn profiles.
How to scrape YouTube for free using Python
YouTube scraping can be performed using open-source Python libraries, which offer more control and flexibility than the official API. Below is a comparison of popular proxy-friendly tools you can use without an API key.
You can also see our companion guide: Scraping YouTube with Python (full tutorial)
*: You can run CLI (Command Line Interface) in the terminal/command prompt.
**: Only some features may use proxies.
How about the official YouTube data API?
Creating an API key and using the YouTube Data API v3 is free within quota limits. You get 10,000 units per day per project at no cost.
Quota cost per request:
So with 10,000 units/day:
- 10,000 video metadata requests
- 100 search queries
- 10,000 comment fetches
API limitations: What you can’t do
Even if you accept the free trial or pay for a quota:
Recommendation
You can use the official YouTube Data API if you:
- Don’t plan to scrape millions of videos
- Want to stay compliant and avoid ToS risks
FAQs about YouTube scrapers
Reference Links
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