The best Instagram scraping APIs of 2026

Data

Profiles, posts, reels, comments, highlights, search, transcripts

Freshness

Live, with an optional free cache

Plans from

$47 for 25,000 credits

Free trial

100 free credits

Billing

Prepaid credits that never expire

SDKs

REST, MCP server, CLI

ScrapeCreators is our pick for most people. It has 20 Instagram endpoints behind one key: profiles with recent posts and related accounts, paginated posts and reels, tagged posts, comments and replies, highlights, transcripts, and search by keyword, hashtag, profile, reel or audio. Calls are synchronous, there are no account-level rate caps, and the docs spell out what every edge case costs.

Price is the other half of the case. $47 buys 25,000 credits that never expire, which is $1.88 per 1,000 profiles, and the $497 pack brings that to $0.99. Cached results cost nothing, and neither do many “account unavailable” responses. At volume it’s cheaper than Bright Data, and it has the search Bright Data doesn’t.

The gaps are real. There are no live stories and no follower lists, so if you need those, look at HikerAPI. Comments with replies cost 15 credits, and ScrapeCreators itself says to expect about 90% success. Instagram view counts dropped out of its search results in August 2026, and in October it changed Instagram error responses without notice, then apologised in its changelog. It’s a small team with no SOC 2, which will matter more to procurement than to developers.

Data

Profiles, posts, reels, comments

Freshness

Live, or monthly-refreshed datasets

Plans from

$1.50 per 1,000 records, pay as you go

Free trial

5,000 free records a month

Billing

Per record

SDKs

Python, MCP server

Bright Data won the case that matters most here. In January 2024 a US court ruled that Meta’s terms didn’t stop it scraping public Instagram data while logged off, and Meta dropped the case. It’s the easiest name to get past a legal or procurement team, it says it has 50,000+ customers, and it’s built for bulk: async jobs, webhooks, S3 delivery and, it says, up to 5,000 URLs per request.

Its Instagram product is thinner than its reputation. There are four scrapers: profiles, posts, reels and comments. The records are wide, with 40 fields per post including paid-partnership details, and an email field on profiles. But there’s no hashtag or keyword search, no stories and no follower lists. A $47 ScrapeCreators pack covers more of Instagram.

Pricing is simple: $1.50 per 1,000 records pay as you go, or $1.30 on the $499-a-month Scale plan, plus 5,000 free records a month. Read the small print, though: records that fail because the input was wrong are still billed. Trustpilot reviewers in late 2026 also complain about an AI bot standing between them and a human. Pick it for large, contract-backed collection; skip it if you need search or followers.

Data

Profiles with up to 50 recent posts, post details, transcripts

Freshness

Live

Plans from

$1.80 per 1,000 live calls, pay as you go

Free trial

500 free credits ($5), no card

Billing

Pay as you go, billed in arrears

SDKs

REST, TypeScript, MCP server

Influship does the Instagram calls most teams actually make, profiles, posts and reels, and does them well. A profile call returns the profile plus up to 50 recent posts for a flat $0.0018, so recent posts across a long list of creators cost under 4 cents per 1,000. Post lookups carry details others skip, such as coauthors, tagged users, the paid-partnership flag and product mentions, and you can batch 20 posts in one call.

Its billing is the best here. You pay after use, with no pack to buy and no minimum. Failed 4xx and 5xx calls aren’t charged, every response shows what it cost, and 500 free credits come without a card. Whatever you spend, you get a direct line to its founders and solutions engineers, and the docs are unusually clear about failure cases in the first place.

What it leaves out is deliberate. Nothing here needs a logged-in Instagram account, so there are no followers, stories or likers, and there’s no comments or hashtag search either. If you need that data and can live with the extra risk, HikerAPI sells it. Otherwise, only ScrapeCreators’ breadth and Bright Data’s bulk delivery put anyone ahead of it.

Data

Profiles, posts, reels, stories, highlights, followers, likers, comments, hashtags, locations, search

Freshness

Live

Plans from

$1 per 1,000 requests

Free trial

100 free requests

Billing

Prepaid balance that never expires

SDKs

Python, JavaScript, Go, PHP, MCP server

HikerAPI has the deepest Instagram data in this ranking, and one of the lowest prices per request. About 167 endpoints cover profiles, posts, reels, stories, highlights, follower and following lists, likers, comments, hashtags, locations, audio and search. It costs $1 per 1,000 requests, falling to $0.60 at volume, from a prepaid balance that never expires. It comes from the team behind instagrapi, the open-source Instagram library with 7,000 GitHub stars, and that experience shows in the endpoint list.

Here’s why it isn’t higher. Its About page describes a “managed account pool” that recovers from Instagram’s login and challenge errors, which suggests requests go through logged-in accounts. That’s outside what the Meta v. Bright Data ruling covered. Trustpilot has withheld its rating for a breach of its guidelines and removed fake reviews. The privacy policy says it’s based in Kazakhstan, but no legal entity or address is published, payment runs through a CloudPayments widget, and onboarding asks you to confirm a Telegram account.

It also bills 400, 403 and 404 responses, so a creator list full of deleted or private accounts still costs money, and responses mirror Instagram’s raw objects across several overlapping API versions. The same team runs LamaTok, which we review in our TikTok ranking. Use HikerAPI if you need followers or stories at scale and accept the risk; otherwise start with ScrapeCreators or Influship.

Data

Profiles, posts, reels, comments, hashtags, places, search; followers through third-party Actors

Freshness

Live, per run

Plans from

Free ($5 credit), then $19 a month

Free trial

$5 of free usage a month

Billing

Per result, from a monthly plan credit

SDKs

JavaScript, Python, CLI, MCP server

Apify is the most flexible option here because it isn’t one API. It’s a marketplace of scrapers, called Actors, and the Instagram set covers profiles, posts, reels, comments, hashtags, places and search, with follower lists from third-party Actors. Apify’s own Instagram Scraper has 456,644 users, and everything plugs into Make, Zapier, n8n and Apify’s own scheduler, so people who don’t write code can run it.

What you pay depends on the Actor and your plan. Apify’s Instagram Scraper costs $2.30 per 1,000 results on the $19 Starter plan and $1.50 on Business; API Dojo’s third-party version is under $0.50. Many Actors add fees for run starts, transcripts or downloads, so the headline price isn’t the whole bill. Each run handles one content type, and the free plan stops at about 15 comments per post.

Quality varies too. Apify’s own hashtag scraper is rated 3.49 out of 5, and its search scraper finished only 90.3% of runs in the last 30 days. Runs are jobs rather than instant calls, so a single profile lookup can be slower than a direct API. Pick Apify for no-code workflows or jobs nobody else covers. For plain profile and post lookups, ScrapeCreators is simpler and cheaper.

Data

Profiles, posts, reels, stories, highlights, followers, likes, comments, locations, search

Freshness

Live

Plans from

$0.001 a request, $5 minimum top-up

Free trial

$0.05 of free credit (about 50 requests)

Billing

Prepaid, per request; all sales final

SDKs

Python, Java, TypeScript, Go, C++

TikHub’s Instagram coverage is nearly as deep as HikerAPI’s: 93 endpoints for profiles, posts, reels, stories, highlights, followers, likes, comments, locations, music and search. It’s pay as you go from $0.001 a request with a $5 top-up, and on eligible endpoints daily volume discounts take that to $0.0005. If you also need TikTok, Douyin or Xiaohongshu, the same key covers them.

Three things keep it sixth. Its terms let it sell aggregated, de-identified data derived from what customers fetch through the API, unless you email to opt out. All sales are final, and refunds are at its discretion. And its status page was down (HTTP 521) when we checked on 29 October 2026.

The docs don’t help. There are three parallel Instagram API versions, some endpoint names are only half translated, and per-endpoint prices, somewhere between $0.001 and $0.01 a call, are hidden until you sign up. There are only two reviews on Trustpilot. It’s a cheap way to experiment, but for production Instagram work we’d take HikerAPI’s depth or ScrapeCreators’ clarity.

Data

Profiles, posts, reels, tagged posts, comments, follower counts, search

Freshness

Live

Plans from

$100 a month (Wood, 1,500 units a day)

Free trial

50 free units a day, no card

Billing

Monthly subscription, daily units

SDKs

Python, Node

EnsembleData is a TikTok specialist, and its Instagram API shows it. Eleven endpoints cover profiles, posts, reels, tagged posts, comments and search, with a follower count but no follower lists, stories or highlights. Its Instagram hashtag endpoint has disappeared from the docs, though the pricing page still lists it.

The pricing model hurts more on Instagram. Plans start at $100 a month for 1,500 units a day, units reset daily and don’t roll over, and Instagram is expensive in units: 3 for a profile, 10 for a detailed one, and 1 for every post. That’s $6.67 per 1,000 profiles on the entry plan, against $1.88 at ScrapeCreators with no subscription. It also takes your token in the URL, where it can leak into logs.

In its favour, it says it scrapes public data without fake accounts, its status page logs incidents openly, its docs show the unit cost of every endpoint, and Trustpilot reviewers, several of them academic researchers, praise how quickly the founder responds. If you already use it for TikTok, the same token covers Instagram. For Instagram alone, ScrapeCreators does more for less.

Data

Profiles, posts, stories, highlights, followers, comments, hashtag, location and keyword search

Freshness

Fetched on request, read back from Data365’s store

Plans from

€300 a month (Basic, one network)

Free trial

14 days, on request

Billing

Monthly subscription, credits

SDKs

None (REST, Postman workspace)

Data365 covers more of Instagram than its rank suggests: profiles, posts, stories and highlights, follower and following lists, comments and replies, and hashtag, location, keyword and profile search. Auto-update tasks re-run a collection on a schedule, which suits social listening and monitoring.

It’s held back by how it works and what it costs. Every request is a task: you create it, wait (Data365 says 1 to 5 minutes), then read the result from its store. That rules it out for anything interactive. The entry plan is €300 a month for one network and 500,000 credits, and a profile costs 9 credits, which works out at €5.40 per 1,000 profiles. The 14-day trial is by request.

There’s no status page, no SDK and no published legal entity, and its reviews are a handful of uniformly positive ones. Pick Data365 if you run scheduled monitoring on a monthly budget and want stories and followers from a vendor with named support. Everyone else should start with ScrapeCreators or Influship.