The Best Social Media Scrapers for 2024
Social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and Twitter have millions of business and individual users which bring a lot of useful information. This data can be used for sentiment analysis, identifying trends, and monitoring online branding.
This is where social media scrapers jump in. They allow you to extract large amounts of data quickly. So, whether you’re a marketer looking for insight into consumer behavior, or you’re trying to understand social media trends, a web scraper can help you.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the best social media scrapers, compare their features, performance, and price.
The Best Social Media Scrapers – Quick Summary:
- Bright Data – feature-rich social media scrapers.
- Smartproxy – social media scraper for TikTok and Instagram with an HTML parser.
- Zyte – fast social media scraper at a lower price.
- ScraperAPI – scraper with a strong support for many programming languages.
- Apify – multiple pre-made templates for scraping social media.
- Rayobyte – affordable scraper with no monthly commitments.
What Is a Social Media API?
A social media API, or application programming interface, provides third parties access to data from social media platforms, such as user profiles, posts, comments, and media files. Such APIs usually come with authentication requirements to ensure that only authorized users or applications can access the data.
Can You Scrape Data with Official Social Media APIs?
The short answer is yes. Many social media platforms offer official APIs with different endpoints. For example, Twitter has a Search API that allows you to retrieve old tweets.
However, they don’t always work as hoped. There are limitations like the amount and types of data you can get. Platforms monitor the API usage and control the use cases.
Also, official APIs are often expensive, especially if you need to get large amounts of data. For instance, if you want full access to Twitter API, the pricing can range from hundreds to thousands of dollars per month.
Types of Social Media Scraping Tools
There are multiple ways to go about social media scraping: you can choose 1) no-code tools, 2) unofficial web scraping APIs, or 3) custom-built scrapers.
No-code web scraping services usually come with a collection of pre-made templates for the main social media platforms, or in the form of a browser extension. These scrapers are great for beginners and one-off jobs. However, compared to other options, they’re slower, less customizable, and inefficient once you scale.
Unofficial web scraping APIs are remote web scrapers that let you scrape websites by making API calls to the provider’s infrastructure. Such services are financially interested in keeping the infrastructure robust, and they’re bundled with proxies and anti-detection mechanisms. Web scraping APIs are highly customizable but require some programming knowledge.
Custom-built scrapers are usually made using one or several web scraping libraries. They’re very flexible in terms of programming languages – you can build a scraper with Python, NodeJS, or Java, to name a few. Such tools are very customizable, but you’ll have to buy social media proxies, handle bot detection mechanisms, and maintain the scraper yourself.
The Best Social Media Scrapers in 2024
1. Bright Data
Feature-rich social media scrapers.
Bright Data has a three tools for social media: Web Scraping IDE, Web Unlocker, and datasets. The choice depends on your programming skills and the size of your project.
The easiest to use are pre-collected datasets for the most popular social media platforms: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube. You can request a new one if you need to scrape other platforms. The provider lets you buy a dataset as-is, or create a subset with different filters. What’s more, you can receive social media data in JSON, CSV, or Excel files to the storage of your choice (AWS, Google Drive, Google Cloud Storage, etc.).
Bright Data also offers Web Unlocker – an API that integrates as a proxy server. It automatically chooses the right proxies for you, spoofs the browser fingerprint, and retries requests if needed. Moreover, the tool has no concurrency limits, so you can get data in real-time. We’ve tested Web Unlocker on Instagram: it showed a perfect success rate and was very fast, with an average response time of 4.1s.
If you’re looking for a more customizable solution, go with Web Scraping IDE. It’s a cloud-based development environment with ready-made scraping functions and code templates for popular social media platforms. The scraper supports parsing using the Cheerio library. You can schedule scraping runs and download your data via API or Webhook, and other delivery options.
- Web scraping tools: General-purpose web scraper, proxy-based API, datasets.
- Locations: Global with city & country targeting.
- Pricing model: Based on successful requests.
- Data parsing: Yes, with datasets and Web Scraper IDE.
- Pricing: Starts at $500. Web Scraper IDE: $3.08/ 1,000 requests; Web Unlocker: $2.25/1,000 requests or pay as you go $3/1,000 requests; Dataset: $0.001/record. 7 days free trial for business clients.
Read the Bright Data review for more information and performance tests.
2. Smartproxy
Social media scraper for TikTok and Instagram with an HTML parser.
Smartproxy offers a specialized Social Media Scraper for two popular platforms – Instagram and TikTok. The API bundles a robust parser, and you get award-winning customer service.
The scraper integrates as a proxy server or an API. The latter method lets you receive data instantly or based on a callback function without keeping an open connection. The API takes care of proxy rotation, anti-detection techniques, and offers several parameters like geolocation and content language.
You can build and test requests using Smartproxy’s Postman collections, or use GitHub code examples in popular programming languages like Python, PHP, and Node.js. What’s more, the provider has an API playground for live testing.
Social Media Scraping API has no concurrency limits, so you can make unlimited requests. But you won’t be able to get data in batches.
- Web scraping tools: Specialized web scraping API.
- Locations: 195 with country-level targeting.
- Pricing model: based on successful requests.
- Data parsing: Yes.
- Pricing: Starts from $50 for 25,000 requests ($2/1,000).
Read the Smartproxy review for more information and performance tests.
3. Zyte
Fast social media scraper at a lower price.
Zyte offers a general-purpose web scraper that is very fast on social media platforms.
With Zyte’s API, you’ll get all the proxy management features like automatic IP rotation, retries, and ban detection. Zyte will take care of the right type of proxy (datacenter or residential) and location based on your target URL. If you want, you can also manually choose from 19 locations.
The scraper is able to render JavaScript if needed, and it offers its enterprise clients a TypeScript API in the provider’s cloud IDE. You can use it to script browser actions like hovering on elements or taking screenshots.
During our research, Zyte’s API was the fastest scraper when targeting Instagram’s graphQL endpoint – the average response time was just 2.59 s.
Zyte’s pricing depends on factors like the difficulty of a website and the features you choose. You can calculate the cost on the dashboard by entering a target URL. Overall, Zyte API is a cost-efficient scraper unless you need features like JavaScript rendering.
- Web scraping tools: General-purpose web scraper.
- Locations: 19.
- Pricing model: Based on successful requests & optional features
- Data parsing: No.
- Pricing: From $25 with an option to pay as you go. 7 days free trial available.
4. ScraperAPI
Scraper with a strong support for many programming languages.
ScraperAPI is another general-purpose scraper for various social media platforms.
The API is very versatile – it supports many programming languages like Python, PHP, NodeJS, Ruby, and Java. You’ll find well-written documentation on how to use and set up the tool with each language.
All ScraperAPI’s plans come with automatic proxy rotation, retries, and session support. At an extra cost, you can also get functionality like more precise geotargeting (12 countries), JS rendering, and dedicated support.
You can integrate the scraper with any of the four methods: a proxy server, library/SDK, and two APIs (open connection and asynchronous). With asynchronous delivery, you can send requests in batches. However, ScraperAPI doesn’t have a parser, so you won’t be able to get structured results from most platforms.
ScraperAPI has a free plan with 1,000 API credits and a maximum of 5 concurrent connections. If you want to test the tool to its fullest, you can try a 7-day free trial with 5,000 requests.
However, the provider uses a credit-based system, and specific website groups consume different amounts of credits. Rendering JavaScript or using premium proxies costs extra, and you’ll need this functionality for social media. So, expect to pay more than the display price.
- Web scraping tools: General-purpose web scraper.
- Locations: 12.
- Pricing model: Based on successful requests & optional features.
- Data parsing: No.
- Pricing: Starts from $49/100,000 API credits.
5. Apify
Multiple pre-made templates for scraping social media.
Apify offers over 100 no-code scrapers for any social media platform you can think of. They come as templates with a point-and-click interface. Depending on the scraper, you can gather data like followers, comments, likes, URLs, and more.
The templates are very customizable – you can modify their code or request a new one if needed. Additionally, you can create templates using libraries like Requests, Beautiful Soup, Selenium, and more.
Feature-wise, Apify supports many data delivery options such as cloud storage, webhook, Zapier, Make, or API. You can schedule your run, get structured results in JSON, CSV, Excel, or XML, and use webhooks to get notifications when the scraper is done. Depending on your plan, Apify stores your data from 14 to 21 days.
The provider uses a credit-based pricing system meaning it can get pricey to scrape well-protected platforms. For example, most social media can easily detect shared datacenter proxies (Apify uses them by default), so you’ll need to pay extra for residential IPs, which are $13/GB.
- Web scraping tools: No-code scrapers.
- Locations: Unknown.
- Pricing model: Based on usage.
- Data parsing: Yes.
- Pricing: monthly plans starting from $49 with $49 platform credits and 30 shared datacenter proxies. A free plan with $5 platform credits is available.
6. Rayobyte's ScrapingRobot
Affordable scraper with no monthly commitments.
Rayobyte’s service comes with a general-purpose scraper for social media websites – Scraping Robot.
The scraper is very versatile: it allows specifying a device type, creating sessions, passing on cookies, and emulating browser actions like scrolling. You can also send POST or PUT requests with data that the API forwards to the website.
Rayobyte takes care of proxy rotation and offers JS rendering, screenshots, and browser actions. It only integrates as an API open connection. This means you’ll have to wait for a response after sending a request.
Rayobyte allows making 100 requests per minute by default; if you need more, you’ll need to contact the provider’s support team.
Rayobyte’s scraper was very slow on photo-focused social media platform (avg. response time – 23.05 s), but it brought 98.60% of successful requests.
Rayobyte has no monthly plan commitments – you can buy the number of requests you need and use them for unlimited time. The pricing starts from $0.0018/request, or you can get 5,000 free scrapes that include all the paid features. You can find usage stats in Rayobyte’s dashboard.
A big bonus is that the provider keeps its price the same for all features. Unlike other options in the market, with Scraping Robot, you won’t have to pay extra for JavaScript, premium proxies, or the website’s difficulty.
- Web scraping tools: General-purpose web scraper.
- Locations: 130.
- Pricing model: Based on successful requests.
- Data parsing: No.
- Pricing: Pay as you go, starts from $0.0018/request.