Best YouTube Scrapers: Free & Paid Tools
YouTube is a dynamic platform, and maintaining a scraper that adapts to frequent site changes is essential for reliable data extraction. Below is a list of the top YouTube scraping services:
The best YouTube scrapers in 2025
Provider | Starting price/mo | What you get | Price metric | Free trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
$499 | 200k records ($0.95/k) | Usage-based ($/k records) | $5 credit (3k records) | |
$49 | 36k results | Flat monthly fee* | 7 days (5k results, 10 req/s) | |
$29 | 90k requests | Flat fee covering fixed request bundle | 14-day money-back | |
$39 | Actor runs / proxies | Flat fee + usage beyond credit | $5 credit + 1 GB-h / hour free | |
ScraperAPI | $49 | 100k credits | Flat monthly fee | 7 days (1k credits) |
PhantomBuster | €69 | 10k credits | Flat monthly fee | 14 days |
*: Fixed subscription price you pay every month
YouTube scraper API benchmark
The chart below displays the average response times (in milliseconds) recorded during YouTube scraping tasks over a two-week period.
Compare the performance stability and speed of different API providers:
Bright Data
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.
Oxylabs
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, a 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.
Decodo
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.
Apify
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.
ScraperAPI
ScraperAPI offers a general-purpose web scraper API with country-level targeting capabilities. 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.
Phantombuster
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 that includes five 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.
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)
Tool | Type | Proxy support | Video download | Limitations |
|---|---|---|---|---|
pytube | Python Library | Partial** | ✅ | Breaks often with YouTube updates |
pytubefix | Python Library | ✅ | ✅ | Newer project, same legal risks as pytube |
youtube-dl | CLI Tool (Python)* | ✅ | ✅ | CLI-focused,breaks if YouTube updates frontend |
yt-dlp | CLI Tool (Python) | ✅ | ✅ | Same risks as youtube-dl |
youtube_transcript_api | Python Library | ❌ | ❌ | Only works if captions exist |
Selenium + BeautifulSoup | Automation + Parser | ✅ | ❌ | Resource-heavy |
*: 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:
Request type | Quota cost |
|---|---|
videos.list (get metadata) | 1 unit |
search.list (search videos) | 100 units |
commentThreads.list (comments) | 1 unit |
channels.list | 1 unit |
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:
Feature | API support? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
Proxies | ❌ | API requests are authenticated via API key, not IP address |
IP rotation | ❌ | Doesn’t help with quota limits |
Higher quota | With billing | Only available upon billing setup |
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
Comments 0
Share Your Thoughts
Your email address will not be published. All fields are required.