YouTube Comments Scraper: Likes, Dates and Filters

Export the comments of one or hundreds of YouTube videos and Shorts, text, likes, reply count, publish date and video title, as JSON, CSV or Excel, just by pasting the video links.

Runs usually take 1 to 5 minutes. Comments are collected through a processing queue, so even a one video run is not instant: typically about 1 to 2 minutes in fast mode and up to ~5 minutes in economy mode (used automatically for runs of 1,000+ comments). When the queue is busy it can take longer: the Actor waits up to 20 minutes (fast) or 40 minutes (economy) for a batch before stopping with a clear message.

One example row from a real run, shortened:

{
  "id": "bc8ba623a3076ba9",
  "input": "https://youtu.be/vQXvyV0zIP4",
  "videoId": "vQXvyV0zIP4",
  "videoUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQXvyV0zIP4",
  "videoTitle": "The first-ever BMW M5 CS.",
  "videoCommentsCount": 4958,
  "position": 4,
  "text": "And after 2 years, this is still my favorite car commercial",
  "likesCount": 1500,
  "replyCount": 10,
  "publishedAt": "2023-09-26T13:15:09.000Z",
  "publishedTimeText": "3 years ago",
  "authorName": "@Chaos7554",
  "authorHandle": "@Chaos7554",
  "authorChannelId": null,
  "authorChannelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/@Chaos7554",
  "authorAvatarUrl": "https://yt3.ggpht.com/fPkVn5a60cUVN9e62d_L-nj26nnGVa6MgB9G_UmDZyuEMsJ6ajFwaWxemjbOO9PF-3kswUAB=s88-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj",
  "country": "US",
  "language": "en",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-29T09:12:41.508Z"
}

One row per top level comment:

* Only when Include commenter details (personal data) is on.

You pay per event, through your Apify account. Main price: $0.35 per 1,000 comments on the Apify Free plan and $0.21 on Gold. Every event and plan:

Every run is one HTTP request to the Apify API with your Apify token; the input below is the actor's own example. The synchronous endpoint returns the rows in the response for runs up to 300 seconds; for longer runs start a run and fetch its dataset.

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/cheapapi~youtube-comments-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $APIFY_TOKEN" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"videos":["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"],"maxCommentsPerVideo":100}'

With the JavaScript client:

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: process.env.APIFY_TOKEN });
const run = await client.actor('cheapapi/youtube-comments-scraper').call({
  "videos": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"
  ],
  "maxCommentsPerVideo": 100
});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();

Typical run: 50 videos × 100 comments = 5,000 comments, all Actor fees included (start and per query fees too). For this Actor, Apify platform usage is billed separately by Apify on top of the prices shown ("+ usage"; at the default 256 MB usually a few tenths of a cent to a few cents per run).

Prices from public Apify Store listings, checked September 2026 (per video fees counted once per video; with replies switched on, the alternatives that offer them charge for the extra reply rows or threads too). On the most used Actor the Platinum and Diamond prices are lower than its Gold price; our Platinum and Diamond price equals our Gold price ($1.05 here), still below both.

• Reply text is not available here (see the note at the top). The data source returns top level comments with a reply count only and has no option to fetch reply threads. At least four of the alternatives above offer replies (as an option or by default); the most used one lists a reply count and a creator heart flag but no option to collect replies, choose one of them if replies matter to you. The Actor with reply threads at ~185 users costs the same as this one on Free ($1.75) and a little more on Gold ($1.20 vs. $1.05).
• One alternative is cheaper for plain exports: $1.25 vs. $1.75 on the Free plan and $1.00 vs. $1.05 on Gold (plus our platform usage). What you get here in addition: likes and reply counts as real numbers (that Actor's sample output has text like "5.3K"), filters that you only pay for when a comment passes, an "only new since last run" mode, a stable comment id, and commenter data off by default. A few very new listings with only a handful of users advertise even lower prices.

• Audience research: read what viewers ask, praise and complain about on your own or competitors' videos.
• Sentiment analysis & AI pipelines: feed clean comment text with likes and dates into an LLM or classifier.
• Product & brand feedback: collect reactions to launches, reviews and unboxing videos, e.g. only the last 30 days.
• Influencer vetting: check engagement quality (likes, replies, spam) across a creator's recent videos before a sponsorship.
• Content ideas: find the most liked questions to turn into new videos or FAQ pages.
• Giveaways & contests: export all entries with commenter handles (opt in personal data).

• Reply text, only replyCount (see above).
• More than 700 comments per video, or the full comment history of very busy videos. Filters, sorting and "only new" work on the top comments collected.
• Playlist and channel links, paste the video links. To collect video links for a topic or channel name, use YouTube Search Scraper.
• Video statistics (views, duration, channel) beyond the title and comment count, YouTube Search Scraper returns those for search results.
• Transcripts / subtitles, use YouTube Transcript Scraper.
• Sentiment scores or translations, export the text and run your own model; the output is ready for it.

• Up to 700 top level comments per video per run, in YouTube's "Top comments" order; reply texts are not collected (only their count).
• Playlist and channel links are not expanded; paste video links.
• Publish dates, and therefore date filters, are approximate (derived from YouTube's relative dates).
• Sorting and filters apply to the collected comments, not to all comments of the video.
• Private, deleted, age restricted or comment disabled videos return no comments (no comment charges; one page-checked for the page that was checked).
• "Only new comments" compares with the comments delivered before, within the top comments collected per run.
• Commenter channel IDs are only present when YouTube links to the channel by ID; most links use the @handle.