What is the Instagram Comment Scraper?
The InsightSocial Instagram comment scraper is a free Chrome extension that exports the comment section of any post or Reel to CSV, Excel, or JSON — comment text, the commenter's handle and user id, likes on each comment, reply counts, timestamps, and the parent_comment_id that links a reply back to the comment it answers. There is no Meta developer app to register, no access token, and no Graph API quota to budget against.
The reason a browser extension makes sense here is that Instagram's own API was never built for this. The Graph API only returns comments on media owned by an account you manage, which rules out competitor posts, campaign hashtags, and anything you do not administer. Cloud scrapers get around that by charging per result. This extension takes the third route: it reads the comment pages that instagram.com already loads for your own session, so a competitor's viral Reel is as accessible as your own post.
It also keeps the post attached to its comments. Every exported row carries the parent post's URL, caption, author, like count, and timestamp, so a file with 400 comments from four different posts stays analysable instead of becoming an anonymous pile of text.
Who is it for?
- Brand and social teams reading objections and questions under campaign posts before they turn into support tickets
- Agencies running giveaway draws that need an auditable entry list rather than a screenshot
- Product researchers mining the comments under competitor launches for the complaints their own roadmap should answer
- Creators working out which posts produced real conversation instead of drive-by likes
- Community managers finding the handful of accounts that comment on everything, who are usually worth a DM
- Researchers and analysts building comment datasets for sentiment or discourse work without an API application
Key Benefits
- Replies stay connected to their parents — turn on Include replies and every reply row carries
is_replyandparent_comment_id, so threads survive the trip into a spreadsheet - Engagement per comment — likes and reply count on each row let you sort straight to the comments that actually landed
- Post context on every row — caption, author, like count, and post timestamp travel with the comments
- GIF comments are not silently dropped — an animated reply exports with its media URL instead of an empty cell
- No API, no per-result billing — nothing to register, nothing metered, no Meta app review to wait on
- Comments-off posts are reported, not guessed — if the owner disabled comments you are told, so an empty file never looks like a bug
How to Use the Instagram Comment Scraper
Step 1: Install the Extension
Add InsightSocial from the Chrome Web Store and pin the icon to your toolbar. The extension works inside the Instagram session you are already logged into; it never asks for your Instagram password.
Step 2: Open the Post or Reel
Navigate to the post itself — an instagram.com/p/... or instagram.com/reel/... URL. Opening a post as a modal over a profile grid works, and so does a Reel from the Reels tab. What matters is that a single piece of media is on screen rather than a feed.
Step 3: Open the Sidebar
Click the InsightSocial icon. The sidebar recognises that you are on a single post and offers the Comments scrape type.
Step 4: Choose a Count, and Decide About Replies
Pick 50, 100, or 500 comments, or type your own number. Then decide on Include replies, which is off by default. Left off, you get top-level comments only and the run is quick. Turned on, the scraper visits each thread and pulls the replies underneath, which takes noticeably longer but is the only way to capture a conversation where the interesting part is people answering each other.
For a giveaway, leave it off — replies are not entries. For sentiment or support triage, turn it on, because that is where the follow-up detail lives.
Step 5: Start Scraping
Click "Start Scraping". Comments stream into the live preview as they are captured, each one already showing its author, text, and whether it is a reply. The scraper pages through the comment section at a human pace and stops when it reaches your target or when Instagram has no more to give.
Step 6: Export
Click "Export" and choose CSV for spreadsheet work, .xlsx for Excel, or JSON for a script. The session also syncs to your private InsightSocial portal, so you can reopen and re-export it later without scraping the post again.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I scrape comments from several posts in one run?
Not in a single session — one post is one session, because comment sections are paged per post. The practical pattern is two passes: use the Instagram Hashtag Scraper to export the posts on a hashtag or keyword search, sort that file by comment count, and then run the comment scraper on the outliers. Working from engagement beats working through a profile grid chronologically.
What order do the comments come back in?
Instagram's own order, which is ranked rather than strictly chronological — the same sequence you would see scrolling the post yourself. There is no sort picker, and that is deliberate: Instagram does not expose alternative orderings on this surface, so a picker would only be able to re-sort what was already fetched. Sort the exported file by Comment Timestamp or Comment Likes instead, which gets you the same result with no ambiguity about what was captured.
Why do some rows have empty comment text?
Those are GIF comments. Instagram stores them as media rather than words, so the text field is genuinely empty and the GIF URL column holds the animation. Filter them out before running text analysis, or count them separately — under giveaway and reaction posts they can be a real share of the thread.
How do I find my most-engaged commenters?
Build a pivot on Commenter Username with a count of rows and a sum of Comment Likes. Accounts appearing across several of your posts are your actual community rather than passing traffic. Because each row also carries the Commenter User ID, that grouping survives a handle change, which a username-only export cannot promise.
Can I run sentiment analysis on the export?
Yes, with two Instagram-specific caveats. Emoji carry a lot of the sentiment here and most classifiers either ignore or mis-score them, so check how your tool handles a comment that is three fire emoji and nothing else. And filter GIF rows first, since empty strings score as neutral and will flatten your averages. Beyond that, one comment per row with full text needs no preprocessing — the CSV goes straight into a notebook or an LLM prompt. Our walkthrough on scraping Instagram comments covers the export-to-Excel side in more detail.
How many posts can I export per month?
One post's comment section is one session, and a session captures as many comments as you asked for. Scraping and viewing are free — credits are spent only on the rows you export, one each:
- Free plan: 500 export credits per month
- Pro Monthly: 10,000 export credits per month for $9.99/mo
- Pro Yearly: 10,000 export credits per month for $95.88/year ($7.99/mo)
Comparing comment-export tools? See the best ExportComments alternatives for comment export without per-link pricing.