Where it works
On any subreddit you can open at reddit.com/r/{name}, signed in to Reddit in the same Chrome profile. Pick the sort on Reddit itself, not in the side panel: the run follows the tab you are on, and on Top and Controversial it keeps the time window you chose, from the past day to all time. A plain reddit.com/r/{name} link is Reddit's Hot.
Since November 4, 2026, Reddit refuses its New and Rising lists to browser extensions, signed in or not. If you start on one of those tabs, the side panel tells you instead of returning an empty file. For recent posts, use Top with the time window set to the past day or week.
Private communities you have been approved for and NSFW communities you have opted into work the same way, because the run sees what your account sees.
What you get
Posts gives one row per post: the title, the body of text posts, the author and their flair, score, upvote ratio, comment count, awards, the post's flair and type, the outbound link and its domain for link posts, the NSFW, spoiler, locked and pinned flags, the time it was posted (UTC) and its permalink. Every row also carries the subreddit's name and its member count on the day you ran it.
Posts and Comments takes 25, 50 or 100 posts and puts each one's comments and replies right under it, with the commenter, the comment's score and a flag for replies from the post's author. On very large threads Reddit now holds some replies back; the run reads the thread again in other orders to recover most of them and says when some are still missing.
Getting more than 1,000 posts from one community
Reddit lists 1,000 posts per sort, and the sorts overlap. Export Top with the time window on Year, then Month and Week, add Hot and Controversial if you want them, and remove duplicates by Post ID. A community that posts a few hundred times a month is covered almost completely by Top of the year plus Top of the month.
Posts and comments in one file
With Posts and Comments, each post is followed by its comments in thread order. Row Type says whether a line is a Post, Comment or Reply, Level gives the nesting depth, and Post ID ties every comment back to its post, so a pivot table can count comments per post or per author. For one thread on its own, use the Reddit Comment Scraper.
Subreddit scraper vs other ways to get subreddit posts
Reddit has no export button for a community. These are the routes to a file:
| Method | Which subreddits | Posts per sort | Cost | Setup |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| This extension | Any your Reddit account can open | Up to 1,000, comments optional | Free for 500 exported rows a month, Pro 10,000 for $9.99 | Chrome, a Reddit sign-in and a free InsightSocial account |
| Reddit Data API | Any public one, once approved | About 1,000, the same list | Free within 100 queries a minute per OAuth client; commercial use needs an agreement | Approval, an OAuth app and code |
The .json URL | Any, in your signed-in browser | One page at a time | Free | A script to page through it and flatten it |
| Cloud scraping services | Many at once, on a schedule | About 1,000 | Usually per 1,000 results | An account and a task to set up |
| Copy and paste | Any | As many as you can scroll | Free | Hours of work |
The official API is the route for an app or a funded research project. Reddit now approves API access case by case under its Responsible Builder Policy, and its Data API terms ask for a separate agreement for commercial use. For thousands of posts across many communities on a schedule, a cloud service is the better fit. For the community you want to understand this week, the extension needs no approval and no code, and it can bring the discussions along in the same run. Best Reddit scrapers compares named tools with their prices and limits.
Working with the file
What the community argues about. Sort Top of the year by comment count, then look at the upvote ratio. High comments with a low ratio mark the threads people disagreed on, which is where opinions in a niche are still forming.
What it rewards. Sort the same export by score and read the titles of the top fifty. Those are the questions, formats and takes the community has voted for, a better content brief than a keyword tool.
What kind of posts it gets. A pivot table on the post flair shows the share of questions, showcases, rants and news, and the average score of each.
How it changes. Run the same sort each month and compare: the member count on every row and the post dates make two exports easy to set side by side.
Several communities. Every row names its subreddit, so files from related communities stack into one sheet and a pivot shows which one talks about your topic most.
For a single discussion with every reply and its parent, the guide to exporting Reddit comments covers both the extension and Python.
Using the data responsibly
Posts on Reddit are public, but the people behind usernames did not sign up for a study. Leave usernames out of anything you publish, keep the file only as long as your project needs it, and never use the data to target or harass anyone.
All Reddit scrapers are on the Reddit scraper hub.
Comparing Reddit tools, from the official API to extensions? See the best Reddit scrapers.