Best YouTube Comment Scrapers and Exporters (2026): Prices and Limits

The free official route is the YouTube Data API v3: one commentThreads call costs 1 quota unit and returns up to 100 comments, out of 10,000 free units a day, but it needs an API key and code. Without code, CommentShark's free exporter downloads up to 1,000 of a video's newest comments (5,000 with a free login), ZocialComment exports the first 100 comments of a video free and sells a $9 three-day pass for videos up to 10,000 comments, Apify's YouTube Comments Scraper costs $0.90 per 1,000 for bulk jobs, and yt-dlp and youtube-comment-downloader are free open-source tools. InsightSocial's Chrome extension exports 100, 250 or 500 comments with their replies from the video you have open, free up to 500 exported rows a month.

Updated November 2026. We make InsightSocial, so we are not neutral. This list starts with YouTube's own API, includes the free and open-source options, and says plainly where other tools are the better choice. We have not benchmarked the other tools: their prices and limits are what their own pricing pages, Apify listings, GitHub READMEs and Chrome Web Store listings said when we checked in November 2026.

Quick comparison

What to check before you pick

• Replies. Some tools return only top-level comments, some cap replies per thread. If you want conversations, check this first.
• Sort order. YouTube shows "Top comments" or "Newest first". A tool that stops early gives you the top or the newest slice, not the whole video.
• Caps per video. Free tiers stop at 50 to 1,000 comments. A video with 50,000 comments needs the API, a cloud tool or a paid pass.
• Pinned and hearted flags. The official API has no field for either. Of the tools below, yt-dlp marks pinned and hearted comments, and youtube-comment-downloader marks hearted ones.
• Dates. YouTube's page shows "3 weeks ago". The API gives exact timestamps; page-reading tools turn the relative text into an approximate date.

How we put this list together

We started with the tools that ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google name for YouTube comment export prompts, then added the most used Apify actors and the most starred GitHub projects. For each we read its own pricing page, listing or README in November 2026. We did not run other vendors' tools, so the list does not rank them by speed or completeness.

1. YouTube Data API v3 (official)

YouTube's own API is the most complete route and costs nothing. The commentThreads.list method returns a video's top-level comments, up to 100 per page (20 by default), sorted by time or relevance, as HTML or plain text. Google's documentation gives each call a quota cost of 1 unit, and new projects get 10,000 units a day for most endpoints. On paper that is 10,000 pages of 100 comments a day.

Two catches:

• Replies. A thread carries only some of its replies. Google's reference says the list is a subset unless its length equals the thread's totalReplyCount; the full set needs one comments.list call per thread with parentId, at 1 unit per page.
• Setup. You need a Google Cloud project, an API key and someone to write the loop. The comment resource has text, author, channel ID, likes and published and updated dates. It has no field for pinned or hearted comments.

Best for: developers and researchers who need every comment on many videos, or a job that runs every day. Our export guide has a short working script that writes a CSV.

2. CommentShark Comment Exporter

CommentShark is mainly a comment moderation and auto-reply service for creators, but it has a free YouTube Comment Exporter: paste a link, fetch the comments, download Excel or CSV. Its page says it exports up to 1,000 of a video's most recent comments without an account and up to 5,000 with a free login, with up to 5 replies per thread. It works on regular videos and Shorts, and the columns include author, text, published and edited dates, likes, replies, the author's channel and avatar, and a link to each comment.

Best for: a free download of a video's newest comments without installing anything.

3. ZocialComment

ZocialComment is a paste-a-link exporter for YouTube and several other platforms, with CSV, Excel or JSON output and replies included. The first 100 comments of a post are free, with 3 free exports a day and no signup. A $9 one-time pass covers 3 days of unlimited exports of posts up to 10,000 comments; the $39 Pro pass raises that to 100,000. There is also pay-as-you-go at $1 per 100 comments with a $3 minimum. Passes include batches of up to 20 links.

Best for: one large video, or a short project, without a subscription.

4. YouTube Comments Downloader

youtubecommentsdownloader.com covers videos, Shorts, live streams, playlists, channels and community posts, exporting to Excel, CSV, JSON, HTML or text with replies linked to their parent comment. It charges 1 credit per comment plus 100 credits to start each download. Prepaid credit packs cost $29 to $69 for 100,000 to 1,000,000 credits, a $79 monthly plan includes 10,000,000 credits and API access, and a $199 desktop licence has no usage limits. New accounts get free credits.

Best for: pulling comments from whole channels or playlists, or heavy users who would rather pay once for the desktop app.

5. Comment Picker

Comment Picker is best known for giveaway draws, and its YouTube Comment Exporter downloads CSV or Excel with an option to add replies. The free tier is small: 50 comments a day, one export a day and three a month. Premium is $9.99 a month for unlimited comments.

Best for: a small video or a giveaway shortlist.

6. Apify YouTube comment actors

Apify runs scrapers ("actors") in the cloud and bills per result. The most used one, YouTube Comments Scraper by streamers, had about 29,000 total users and 4.9 of 5 stars when we checked. It costs $0.90 per 1,000 comments, takes a list of video URLs, a maximum per video, a sort and a date filter, includes replies, and exports JSON, CSV or Excel. A cheaper actor, apidojo's YouTube Comments Scraper, lists $0.50 per 1,000 items, with each reply thread billed as an extra query. Apify's free plan includes $5 of usage a month.

Best for: hundreds of videos, scheduled runs and pipelines that call an API. See our Apify comparison.

7. yt-dlp and youtube-comment-downloader (open source)

• yt-dlp (about 206,000 GitHub stars, public domain) is a video downloader, but --write-comments saves a video's comments into its info JSON file. Extractor options choose top or new sorting and cap comments, replies and depth (all by default). Its comment fields include is_pinned, is_favorited (hearted by the creator), author_is_uploader and author_is_verified, which the official API does not give you.
• youtube-comment-downloader (about 1,300 stars, MIT) is a small Python tool that downloads comments without the API and writes JSON lines, JSON or CSV, with a limit and a popular or recent sort. Each row has the comment ID, text, relative time, author, channel, likes, reply count and a heart flag.

Both read YouTube's own web traffic, so they can break when YouTube changes its pages, and both need a command line.

Best for: developers who want a free, scriptable export and fields such as pinned and hearted.

8. InsightSocial: the video you have open

InsightSocial's YouTube Comments Scraper is a Chrome extension. Open a video, click the InsightSocial icon to open the side panel, pick 100, 250 or 500 comments and press Scrape. It opens reply threads, including "Show more replies", as it goes, and keeps going while you work in another tab. Shorts have their own page, the YouTube Shorts Comments Scraper: it opens the Short's comment panel and pauses the Short while it runs.

Each row is one comment or reply: text, author name, channel ID and avatar, a verified flag, a flag for comments written by the video's own channel, likes, reply count, date, a link that opens the video at that comment, and the video's title, link and channel. Replies carry the ID of the comment they answer. Dates are calculated from YouTube's "3 weeks ago" text, so recent comments are exact to the day and older ones to the month or year. The export does not show which comments the creator hearted or pinned.

In our October 2026 test, a 500-comment run on a video with about 1,800 comments returned 500 rows with the tab in the background, and our demo run on a National Geographic Short took 453 comments and 47 replies in about a minute.

Price: scraping is free; exporting uses one credit per row. Free includes 500 rows a month, Pro $9.99 a month (or $7.99 billed yearly) includes 10,000, Studio $49 includes 150,000. Re-exporting a comment you already exported is free. Export to Excel, CSV, JSON, Google Sheets or a share link.

Limits: one video per run and at most 500 comments per run, replies included. It does not take a list of video URLs, so it is not the tool for every comment on a 50,000-comment video. For code, the InsightSocial API returns a video's comments as JSON with one key and no daily quota, priced per call in credits.

Best for: reading the comments and reply threads of the videos you are researching, in a spreadsheet, with no API key.

9. Other Chrome extensions

The Chrome Web Store has several small YouTube comment exporters. All of the figures below are from their listings in November 2026.

• Comment Exporter for YouTube: about 5,000 users, rated 2.9 of 5 from 25 ratings. Exports text, CSV or JSON from videos and Shorts, with replies; filters, sorting and column choice are paid extras.
• TubeHarvest: free for up to 100 comments per video without an account, then a one-time payment; claims up to 10,000 threaded comments per video, with author names anonymised by default.
• CommentLake: free, CSV or JSON, reply depth from 0 to 5 levels and a batch mode for a list of video URLs.

Best for: a free or one-time-payment button on the watch page. Check the rating and the last update date before you install one.

10. ExportComments

ExportComments has a YouTube comment export in its web app: paste a link, download a file. Its free tier stops at about 100 comments per export. Its pricing page loads by script and we could not re-check the paid plans in November 2026. Our ExportComments alternatives post compares it with the tools above.

Best for: people who already pay for it for other sites.

Which one should you use?

• Every comment on many videos, free: the YouTube Data API, if you can write a loop.
• Bulk without code, scheduled: Apify, or YouTube Comments Downloader for channels and playlists.
• One video, free, no install: CommentShark (up to 1,000 newest) or ZocialComment (first 100).
• One very large video, once: a ZocialComment pass.
• Pinned and hearted flags: yt-dlp.
• The videos you are researching, with full reply threads, no setup: InsightSocial.

FAQ

What is the best free YouTube comment scraper? For developers, the YouTube Data API: it is free, with 10,000 quota units a day and 1 unit per page of up to 100 comments. Without code, CommentShark's free exporter downloads up to 1,000 of a video's newest comments, and InsightSocial's free plan exports 500 rows a month from the video you open. yt-dlp and youtube-comment-downloader are free if you use a command line.

Can I download all comments from a YouTube video? Yes, with the Data API or a cloud tool: page through commentThreads until there is no next page, then fetch the remaining replies of each thread with comments.list. Free web tools and extensions usually cap a run at a few hundred to a few thousand comments.

Is there a YouTube comment downloader that needs no API key? Yes. Web exporters, Chrome extensions such as InsightSocial, Apify actors and yt-dlp all work without your own key. Only the official Data API needs one.

Can I export comments from YouTube Shorts? Yes. A Short has a normal video ID, so the Data API, CommentShark and Apify accept it, and InsightSocial has a Shorts page that opens the comment panel for you.

Do YouTube comment exports include replies? Most do, with limits. The API returns only some replies inside each thread, so you call comments.list for the rest. CommentShark keeps up to 5 per thread. InsightSocial opens every thread it reaches and links each reply to its parent.

Can I see which comments are pinned or hearted? Not through the official API, which has no field for either. yt-dlp marks pinned and hearted comments, and youtube-comment-downloader marks hearted ones. InsightSocial does not export either flag.

Is it legal to scrape YouTube comments? Comments on public videos are public, and collecting them for research or audience analysis is common practice. You are still bound by YouTube's terms and privacy laws such as GDPR, so don't publish commenters' names or use the data to contact people.

Related guides: how to export YouTube comments to CSV or Excel, ExportComments alternatives, YouTube scrapers, YouTube API, free YouTube transcript tool.