To provide a thorough overview of selecting the best YouTube scraper API, we tested and compared the leading solutions in our review. You can explore the reasoning behind our recommendations by clicking on the product names.
Bright Data for data collection infrastructure & compliance
Smartproxy for affordable YouTube scraper API & ease of use
Apify for no-code YouTube video scraper
Crawlbase for general usage & crawling
ScraperAPI for developers
PhantomBuster for individual & small business use
The best YouTube scraping tools
Provider | Starting price/mo | Free trial | PAYG |
---|---|---|---|
Bright Data | $500 | 7 days | $1 |
Oxylabs | $49 | 7 days | ❌ |
Smartproxy | $50 | 7 days | ❌ |
Apify | $5.00 / 1,000 videos | $5 credits | ❌ |
Crawlbase | N/A | 1,000 requests | ❌ |
ScraperAPI | $49 | 1,000 API credits | ❌ |
PhantomBuster | $76 | 14 days | ❌ |
Ranking is in ascending order based on the lowest price level, with the exception of the products of the article’s sponsors which are linked to their websites.
YouTube scraper APIs comparison: Key features & highlights
Provider | Supported page types | Scrape based on | Output format |
---|---|---|---|
Bright Data | Profile | URL | CSV |
Smartproxy | General-purpose API | URL | HTML |
Oxylabs | General-purpose API | URL | HTML |
Apify | Video post | URL | JSON |
Crawlbase | General-purpose scraper | URL | HTML |
ScraperAPI | General-purpose scraper | URL | HTML |
PhantomBuster | Video post | URL | CSV |
1. Bright Data
Bright Data provides a dedicated YouTube Scraper API with city and country-level targeting. Their API includes various unblocking tools such as the Web Unblocker, pre-scraped YouTube datasets, and a Web Scraping IDE.
With an experienced tech team specializing in web scraping, Bright Data allows users to either purchase pre-made YouTube datasets or customize their own. If familiar with proxy tools, you can use proxy servers to scrape YouTube data.
The Web Unblocker, acting as a proxy server, is ideal for social media scraping. Additionally, Bright Data offers several YouTube-specific Web Scraper APIs, including tools for scraping YouTube profiles and video comments.

Features:
Targeting: City and country level
Supports batch processing: Allows for handling over 20 URL inputs at once
Residential proxy support: Offers built-in residential proxy server support
Pricing:
Starting price (mo): $500 ($0.85 /1K requests)
Free trial: Offers 7-day free trial including 20 free API calls for registered companies
2. Oxylabs
Oxylabs provides a dedicated scraper API suitable for extracting data from YouTube. 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.

Features:
Targeting: Country level
Custom parser: A free Scraper API feature that allows users to customize their own parsing
Scheduler: Automates recurring scraping requests for different tasks.
Pricing:
Starting price (mo): $49 for 17,500 results
Free trial: Provides 5,000 free results for a duration of seven days.
3. Smartproxy
Smartroxy provides a Web Scraping API and Site Unblocker designed for extracting data from YouTube. Unlike Bright Data, their Web Scraping API is a general-purpose web scraping API that incorporates a proxy solution with built-in automatic IP rotation.

Features:
Targeting: Country level
Various device support: Offers desktop (Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari), mobile (Android, iOS), and tablet (Android, iOS) options
Browser fingerprint integration: Enables users to integrate browser fingerprinting into web scraping API
Pricing:
Starting price (mo): $50 for 25K requests
Free trial: Provides 1,000 free requests for a duration of seven days.
4. Apify
Apify’s YouTube video scraper enables users to extract and download data such as 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 per URL, though the maximum results may vary based on the complexity of the input.

Features:
Targeting: Country level
Scraping subtitles: Enables users to scrape and download subtitles
Built-in datacenter proxies: Each plan includes 30 shared datacenter IPs
Pricing:
Starting price (mo): $5.00 for 1,000 YouTube videos
Free trial: Offers free plan with $5 credits
5. Crawlbase
Crawlbase provides Crawling API and Smart Proxy scrapers for extracting data from YouTube. Similar to the Crawling API, the Smart Proxy is an HTTP/S-based API designed to crawl and scrape data from various websites, including YouTube. The API has a rate limit of up to 20 requests per second.

Features:
Targeting: Country level
Rotating proxy: Changes IP address when sending requests to YouTube
JS rendering: Crawling API supports JavaScript rendering, but it requires additional cost for JavaScript rendering.
Pricing:
Starting price (mo): Not publicly shared
Free trial: Offers 1,000 free requests
6. ScraperAPI
ScraperAPI provides various web scraping options, including proxy mode, an API, and asynchronous methods. It is compatible with programming languages such as Python, PHP, NodeJS, Ruby, and Java. By default, the service offers 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.

Features:
Targeting: Country level (US and EU)
Automatic proxy rotation: Offers rotating datacenter and residential proxy pools
7. PhantomBuster
PhantomBuster is essentially an automation platform for LinkedIn that provides templates to gather limited data points from various social media platforms, including YouTube, X.com, and Instagram.
However, Phantom’s YouTube scraper does not offer a feature to scrape YouTube search results or scrape YouTube comments and commentator username links from YouTube videos. The tool does allow users to scrape YouTube videos including public data points the video title, channel name, subscriber count, video views, and video description.

Features:
Targeting: Unknown
Firefox and Chrome extension: The YouTube scraper is available as an extension.
Cloud-based: Runs on the remote servers, allowing users to extract data without using local resources.
Pricing:
Starting price (mo): $76 for 10k credits
Free trial: 14 days
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