Best YouTube Scraper on Apify 2026
Quick Answer
The best YouTube scraper on Apify is YouTube Scraper (videos, search, playlists, and channel uploads in one Actor). For a narrower job, pair it with YouTube Comments Scraper, YouTube Channel Scraper, YouTube Shorts Scraper, or YouTube Transcript Scraper: Captions & AI Fallback (Whisper AI fallback, LLM-ready output).
None of these need a YouTube Data API key. That matters because the official API's search.list endpoint is capped at 100 calls/day in its own bucket, separate from the 10,000-unit pool that covers every other endpoint (Google's quota-cost docs, checked 2026-09-09) — a channel-monitoring job that searches more than 100 times a day hits a wall the Data API alone can't fix. Apify Actors scrape the public watch pages and innertube surfaces instead and bill per result. Every rating, user count, and success rate below was pulled from the Apify Store today, 2026-09-09; open each listing for the live figure before you commit budget.
Discover more: YouTube scrapers in the Apify Store · Apify API tutorial if you want to call these Actors from your own code instead of the Console. If YouTube isn't the only platform on your list, the best Apify Actors roundup covers the top picks across every category, not just this one.
Updated 2026-09-09: refreshed every rating, user count, and success rate against live Apify Store data (several had drifted by 0.2–0.8 stars or moved thousands of users since the May pull), corrected the YouTube Video Downloader's billing model — it's pay-per-second now, not a $30/month rental — and fixed the Data API quota math above.
Pricing per 1,000 results
- Open the Pricing tab on the Actor.
- Check the billing model: pay-per-result (the Streamers Actors, priced per 1,000 videos/comments), or pay-per-event by unit (the Transcript Scraper bills per transcript, the Video Downloader per second of output). All six Actors on this page run pay-per-event now — see the pricing plans for how your subscription tier changes the per-unit rate.
- Multiply the unit price by 1,000 for an order-of-magnitude quote, then add residential proxy cost (~$8/GB) if the README calls for it.
Run a 20-item test first and extrapolate. Comment depth (includeReplies), Shorts vs long-form, and search vs URL input all swing cost by 3–5x.
Comparison table
| Actor | Focus | Users | Rating | Success | Price | When to pick it |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| YouTube Scraper | Videos, search, playlists | 113,592 | 4.80 | 99.5% | from $2.40/1k videos | Default for mixed discovery and catalog builds |
| YouTube Comments Scraper | Comments + replies | 23,027 | 4.90 | 98.8% | from $0.90/1k comments | Sentiment, QA mining, creator feedback |
| YouTube Channel Scraper | Channel metadata + uploads | 21,077 | 4.63 | 99.5% | from $0.50/1k results | Competitor lists, about-page fields, subscriber deltas |
| YouTube Shorts Scraper | Shorts-native feed | 60,822 | 4.35 | 99.4% | from $2.40/1k shorts | Vertical-format analytics, trend tracking |
| Transcript Scraper (AI Fallback) | Captions + Whisper | 1,622 | no ratings yet | 98.7% | from $0.70/1k transcripts | RAG, summarization, caption-free videos |
| YouTube Video Downloader | MP4 retrieval | 4,679 | 2.22* | 92.1% | from $0.00015/sec (360p) | Only for licensed or owned media |
* Apify's own sources disagree on this Actor: the Store page shows 2.22/5, its API record shows 4.12/5 across 23 reviews. See the note below the table.
When to use each Actor
YouTube Scraper
The Streamers flagship and the one to default to. Accepts search terms, channel URLs, playlist IDs, and direct watch URLs in the same run, and returns the standard watch-page schema: title, viewCount, likes, duration, uploadDate, channelId, channelName, subscriberCount, descriptionLinks, hashtags, commentsCount. At $2.40/1k videos on pay-per-event, you skip the Data API's search.list bucket entirely instead of budgeting around it. 99.5% success across 113,000+ users means you can skip retry wrappers for anything under 50k items per run. If you'd rather follow a click-by-click walkthrough first, see how to scrape YouTube for the field list and a sample JSON output.
YouTube Comments Scraper
Use this when comments are the deliverable, not a side effect. Fields: text, author, authorChannelId, likeCount, publishedTimeText, replyCount, plus threaded replies[] when includeReplies=true. $0.90/1k comments is the rate on Apify's Business plan; Free pays $2.00, Starter $1.50, and Scale $1.20 per 1,000 (checked on the Actor's Pricing tab, 2026-09-09). A 10k-comment pull on a viral video runs $9–$20 depending on your plan, and it's the highest-rated Actor on this page at 4.90★. The Actor paginates continuations via innertube, so held-for-review and channel-blocked comments never surface; plan for ~85–95% of the visible count.
YouTube Channel Scraper
Channel-grain workflows: batch competitor lists, about-page scraping, subscriber and total-view tracking, uploads feed. At $0.50/1k results it's the cheapest Actor in the set, so schedule it daily on your competitor set instead of cherry-picking videos. Returns channelName, channelDescription, subscriberCount, totalViews, joinedDate, country, links[], and a paginated uploads list. 4.63★ across 40 reviews and 99.5% success — it needs no apology next to the flagship's numbers. Pairs well with our market intelligence patterns if you're tracking competitor channels alongside other sources.
YouTube Shorts Scraper
Pick this when the Shorts shelf is the unit of analysis. It reads the Shorts feed natively rather than forcing vertical clips through the long-form video schema, so you get correct isShort, vertical duration, and Shorts-specific engagement surfaces. Same $2.40/1k pricing as the main video Actor. It rates lower than the flagship at 4.35★ (60,000+ users, 99.4% success) — still solid, but check recent reviews on the listing before you commit a large Shorts run to it.
YouTube Transcript Scraper: Captions & AI Fallback
The transcript pipeline. First pass hits the native caption track (manual or auto-generated): no audio download, sub-second per video, $0.70/1k transcripts. Videos without captions fall back to a bundled Whisper model running on Apify compute, billed by AI-minute; cap it with maxAiMinutes and preview cost via dryRun: true before firing at an unknown playlist. Output fields you'll actually use: transcript_json (timestamped segments for UI playback), transcript_llm (filler-stripped, chunked for RAG, drop straight into LangChain or LlamaIndex), plus transcript_srt / transcript_vtt for subtitle workflows — see data for AI and RAG for how to feed that field into a pipeline. Caveat: no public ratings yet, though the installed base has grown to 1,622 users (411 of them in the last 30 days). 98.7% success is in line with the Streamers Actors, not behind them, so the earlier "keep a retry" warning on this page no longer applies.
YouTube Video Downloader
No monthly fee: this moved to pure pay-per-second billing on 2026-06-04, priced by resolution.
| Resolution | Price per second |
|---|---|
| 360p | $0.00015 |
| 480p | $0.00025 |
| 720p | $0.00045 |
| 1080p | $0.00075 |
| 1440p | $0.001 |
| 2160p (4K) | $0.0012 |
A 10-minute 1080p download costs about $0.45. Only run this on content you own or have explicit licence for — YouTube's ToS prohibits downloading third-party video, and the Actor README calls for residential proxies for reliable resolution. Its reputation is genuinely mixed: the Store page shows 2.22★, while Apify's own API record for the same Actor shows 4.12★ across 23 reviews (both checked 2026-09-09). We can't reconcile the two, so weight the Store-page number more heavily — it's what you'll see when you click through to buy. At 92.1% success, this is also the least reliable Actor on this page; test on your own content before you point it at a production job.
Why Apify instead of the Data API?
- No quota arithmetic.
search.listis capped at 100 calls/day in its own bucket, separate from the 10,000-unit pool that covers every other Data API endpoint. Apify bills per result instead, so you can pull 50k videos in an afternoon without filing a quota extension request. - Fields the API doesn't expose. Comment replies beyond the first page, channel join date, hashtag arrays, Shorts-shelf position, and auto-generated transcripts are all available through the scraping Actors but gated or missing in the Data API.
- Scheduling + webhooks. Apify schedulers, n8n/Make nodes, and dataset exports (JSON, CSV, Excel) mean you don't maintain a headless browser fleet yourself.
- When the Data API is still the better call. If you need official support, guaranteed ToS compliance, or you're inserting/managing your own channel's data (
videos.insertand friends), the Data API is the sanctioned path and these Actors aren't a substitute for it — they read public pages, they don't manage your account.
Start with YouTube Scraper (streamers/youtube-scraper) at $2.40/1k videos. It covers search, playlists, channel uploads, and watch URLs in one run. Add the Comments Scraper ($0.90/1k) if threads are the deliverable, and switch to the Channel Scraper ($0.50/1k) when you need daily channel-grain snapshots rather than per-video pulls.
No. The Streamers Actors and the codepoetry transcript Actor scrape public YouTube surfaces directly, so the Data API's quota buckets (100 search.list calls/day, 10,000 units/day for everything else) never come into play. You only authenticate with Apify and pay the Actor's pay-per-event price.
Yes. YouTube Transcript Scraper: Captions & AI Fallback (codepoetry/youtube-transcript-ai-scraper, $0.70/1k transcripts) returns a transcript_llm field with filler tokens stripped and chunked for RAG, drop it straight into LangChain or LlamaIndex. For videos with captions disabled, turn on the Whisper AI fallback and set maxAiMinutes to cap spend. No OpenAI key needed; Whisper runs on Apify compute.
Yes. YouTube Shorts Scraper (streamers/youtube-shorts-scraper, 60k+ users, 4.35★) reads the Shorts feed natively and returns vertical-format fields the long-form Actor normalises away. Same $2.40/1k pricing as the main video Actor.
Pay-per-result Actors land between $0.50/1k (Channel Scraper) and $2.40/1k (YouTube Scraper, Shorts). Comments run $0.90-$2.00/1k depending on your plan. Transcripts are $0.70/1k without AI, higher if Whisper fallback kicks in. The Video Downloader charges per second of output, from $0.00015/sec at 360p, no monthly fee. Most production workloads I run land between $5 and $50/month.
Technically possible with the epctex downloader, but YouTube's Terms of Service prohibit download of content you don't own or have licence for. Only use it on your own channels, licensed catalogs, or creators who have given written permission. Residential proxies are typically required; see the Actor README.
Common mistakes and fixes
Comments Actor returns far fewer rows than the visible count on the watch page.
YouTube hides held-for-review, spam-flagged, and some reply threads from public DOM. Set `maxComments` above the visible count, enable `includeReplies`, and re-run with a residential proxy if the channel is geo-restricted.
Transcript Actor returns empty items.
The video has captions disabled (creator setting) or is age/region-gated. Either switch to the YouTube Transcript Scraper with Whisper AI fallback or filter the input list by `hasCaptions` before you queue the run.
Shorts-specific fields (vertical duration, Shorts shelf position) are missing from the default video Actor.
YouTube Scraper normalises to the long-form video schema. Use YouTube Shorts Scraper for Shorts-native fields or post-process `duration < 60s` + `isShort` yourself.