The best YouTube scraping APIs of 2026
APIs that return YouTube channels, videos, comments and transcripts without the Data API quota.
Researched by Which Social API editorial teamLast reviewed 29 October 2026How we review
Which Social API uses a mix of qualitative and quantitative review methods, based on each provider’s documentation, published pricing and public user reviews. We never accept money in exchange for a higher ranking or a better review. Who runs this site
YouTube is the one big platform where the official API is worth using. The YouTube Data API v3 is free, reads any public channel, video, playlist and comment with just an API key, and its default 10,000 units a day will refresh stats for about 500,000 videos or channels if you batch 50 IDs per call. Start there.
Pay a third party for what it won’t do. Search is capped at 100 calls a day: since 1 June 2026 searches have their own bucket, so they no longer eat the rest of your quota, but there are no more of them. Transcripts need edit rights on the video. More quota means passing a compliance audit, and the policies make you refresh or delete data after 30 days and limit building your own metrics from it. That’s the gap these five fill.
ScrapeCreators wins: the most YouTube endpoints, one of the lowest prices, and nothing to subscribe to. Apify is the pick for scheduled, no-code jobs, Bright Data for bulk video records with transcripts, and SerpApi only if you need search results exactly as YouTube shows them. Influship is the pick for search and transcripts at volume: the cheapest search here, and up to 20 channel transcripts in one call.
Our picks
Full ranking
Before you choose
The official API comes first. Check these before you pay anyone.
- Try the official API first. It’s free, and batching 50 IDs per call stretches 10,000 units a long way. Most teams only outgrow it on search, transcripts or the storage rules.
- Nobody has exact subscriber counts. The API rounds them to three significant figures and YouTube’s pages abbreviate them. Distrust any provider that says otherwise.
- View counts changed meaning. Shorts views changed in March 2025 and all formats in August 2026, so trends that cross those dates break, whoever you buy from.
- Per page isn’t per result. SerpApi, ScrapeCreators and Influship charge per page of search or comments. Few publish page sizes, so work out the cost per item before you compare.
Five ways to get YouTube data
The providers here work in four different ways, and the official API is the fifth. Which suits you depends on volume, how you call it, and what the API already gives you for free.
Live APIs
Fetch from YouTube when you call, one request at a time.
- Good for
- Apps, lookups, transcripts
- Watch for
- Endpoints break when YouTube changes
- Examples
- ScrapeCreators, Influship
Scraper marketplaces
Run ready-made scrapers as jobs on a hosted platform.
- Good for
- Scheduled exports, no-code users
- Watch for
- Quality and price vary by scraper
- Examples
- Apify
Bulk record APIs
Collect or discover records in async jobs, or buy them pre-collected.
- Good for
- Large volumes into a warehouse
- Watch for
- Slow for single lookups; enterprise-shaped
- Examples
- Bright Data
Search-results APIs
Return YouTube pages as a viewer sees them.
- Good for
- Search monitoring, ranking checks
- Watch for
- Priced per page, and expensive
- Examples
- SerpApi
YouTube Data API
Google’s official API, free with a daily quota.
- Good for
- Stats for known channels and videos
- Watch for
- 100 searches a day, no transcripts, 30-day storage rule
- Examples
- Not ranked
Prices and coverage
Published prices and what each one returns, side by side. How we review
| Provider | Per 1,000 requests | Plans from | Free trial | Billing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ScrapeCreators | $1.88 | $47 for 25,000 credits | 100 free credits | Prepaid credits that never expire |
| Apify | $0.50 | Free ($5 credit), then $19 a month | $5 of usage a month | Per result, from monthly plan credit |
| Influship | $1.80 | $1.80 per 1,000 live calls, pay as you go | 500 free credits ($5), no card | Pay as you go, billed in arrears |
| Bright Data | $1.50 | $1.50 per 1,000 records, pay as you go | 5,000 records a month, shared across products | Per record |
| SerpApi | $25.00 | $25 a month for 1,000 searches | 250 searches a month | Monthly subscription |
| Provider | Channels | Videos | Shorts | Comments | Search | Transcripts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ScrapeCreators | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Apify | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Influship | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Bright Data | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| SerpApi | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Green marks the best result in each column.
The providers in detail
1. ScrapeCreators
Most developers and most jobsVisit ScrapeCreatorsout of 10
- Data
- Channels, videos, Shorts, comments, transcripts, search, sponsors
- 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 the YouTube API we’d start with. It has 18 YouTube endpoints, more than anyone else here: channels with their videos, Shorts, lives, playlists and community posts; video details; comments and replies; transcripts; search, typeahead and hashtag search; and trending Shorts. Most cost one credit, which is $1.88 per 1,000 calls on the $47 pack and $0.99 on the $497 pack. Credits never expire, so there’s nothing to subscribe to.
It also goes after things the official API won’t give you. Search can filter to paid promotions, an experimental endpoint infers a video’s sponsors from its description, links and transcript, and video details now carry the “most replayed” heatmap and AI-disclosure labels. Transcripts are free when a video has no captions, and repeat lookups can come from a cache at no charge.
The weak spots are the usual ones for a small team. Its status page lists YouTube breakages in January (transcripts) and May 2026 (channel videos), comment timestamps are estimates, there’s no SOC 2, and in October it apologised for changing Instagram error responses without notice. None of that outweighs the coverage and the price.
Good
- 18 YouTube endpoints, the most here, including playlists, community posts and trending Shorts
- $1.88 per 1,000 calls on the $47 pack, $0.99 on the $497 pack, and credits never expire
- Paid-promotion search and an experimental sponsor endpoint
Not so good
- Small team, no SOC 2
- Status page shows YouTube transcript and channel-video breakages in 2026
- Comment timestamps are estimates
2. Apify
Scheduled, no-code jobsVisit Apifyout of 10
- Data
- Videos, channels, Shorts, streams, comments, transcripts
- Freshness
- Live, on each run
- Plans from
- Free ($5 credit), then $19 a month
- Free trial
- $5 of usage a month
- Billing
- Per result, from monthly plan credit
- SDKs
- JavaScript, Python, CLI
On Apify you choose an Actor, not a vendor. For YouTube the one to pick is Streamers’ youtube-scraper: 191,013 users, a 4.81 rating from 196 reviews, and 99.1% of public runs finished in the last 30 days, per Apify’s store. That counts finished runs, not complete data, but it’s a strong track record. It handles videos, channels, Shorts, streams, search and subtitles, and the same author has separate channel, comments and Shorts Actors.
It costs more than the API-first options: $3.00 per 1,000 results on the $19 Starter plan, falling to $2.40 on Business, with transcripts charged per minute of video on top ($0.041 on Starter). The cheap alternative, API Dojo’s youtube-scraper at $0.50 per 1,000, has a 3.29 rating and 82% run success. Cheap Actors are cheap for a reason.
Where Apify wins is everything around the scraper: scheduling, webhooks, Zapier and n8n, JavaScript and Python clients, and a free plan with $5 of usage a month. If someone non-technical needs a weekly channel export, use Apify. If you’re calling YouTube from your own code, ScrapeCreators is cheaper and simpler.
Good
- Streamers’ youtube-scraper is proven: 191,013 users and a 4.81 rating
- Covers every YouTube data type, with separate channel, comments and Shorts Actors
- Scheduling, webhooks and no-code integrations built in
Not so good
- $3.00 per 1,000 results on Starter, before transcript add-ons
- Quality varies by Actor; the cheapest YouTube Actor has 82% run success
- Runs start a container, so single lookups are slow
3. Influship
Production apps and AI agents built on YouTube search and transcriptsVisit Influshipout of 10
- Data
- Channels, videos, transcripts, search
- Freshness
- Live, with timestamps
- 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 is built for the two jobs teams most often outgrow the official API on: search and transcripts. Search returns up to 50 videos or channels per page, with filters for upload date, duration, type, country and language, at $0.0018 a page. That’s under 4 cents per 1,000 results, the cheapest search here, and none of the official API’s 100-searches-a-day cap.
Transcripts are just as strong. One call returns up to 20 of a channel’s transcripts, sorted by popular, newest or oldest, at $0.0018 each, and single-video transcripts cover manual and auto captions in several languages. Channel lookups come back with up to 50 recent videos, and there are video details and typeahead suggestions too.
It bills like infrastructure: pay after use, no subscription or minimum, failed calls free, and 500 starter credits with no card, and whatever you spend, you get a direct line to its founders and solutions engineers. It doesn’t cover comments, playlists, community posts or a dedicated Shorts feed, so for projects built on those, ScrapeCreators goes wider.
Good
- Up to 50 search results per $0.0018 page
- Up to 20 of a channel’s transcripts in one request
- Billed after use, and failed calls aren’t charged
Not so good
- No comments, playlists or community posts
- No dedicated Shorts feed or full upload history
4. Bright Data
Bulk video recordsVisit Bright Dataout of 10
- Data
- Channels, videos with transcripts, comments
- Freshness
- Live, or pre-collected datasets
- Plans from
- $1.50 per 1,000 records, pay as you go
- Free trial
- 5,000 records a month, shared across products
- Billing
- Per record
- SDKs
- Python
Bright Data has three YouTube scrapers, for channels, videos and comments, and its video record is the richest single object here: 49 fields, including the transcript, a sponsored flag, chapters and the AI-content label. You can collect by URL or discover videos by keyword, hashtag, search filters or channel. At $1.50 per 1,000 records pay-as-you-go, getting the transcript inside the video record is cheap.
It’s built for bulk, not for a quick lookup inside an app. Jobs are usually triggered, polled and then downloaded or sent to a webhook or S3, and every call needs a dataset ID. There’s no documented Shorts scraper, and records that fail because the input was wrong are still billed. Trustpilot reviewers in 2026 complained about an AI bot standing between them and support.
Take it if you’re pulling hundreds of thousands of videos with transcripts into a warehouse: the $499 Scale plan brings the rate to $1.30, and pre-collected YouTube datasets start at $250. For anything interactive, ScrapeCreators or Apify fit better.
Good
- Video records carry 49 fields, including the transcript and a sponsored flag
- $1.50 per 1,000 records pay-as-you-go, $1.30 on the $499 Scale plan
- Discovery by keyword, hashtag, search filters or channel
Not so good
- Built for async bulk jobs, not quick lookups
- No documented Shorts scraper
- Records that fail on bad input are still billed
5. SerpApi
Search results as viewers see themVisit SerpApiout of 10
- Data
- Search, videos, comments, transcripts, channels
- Freshness
- Live, with a free 1-hour cache
- Plans from
- $25 a month for 1,000 searches
- Free trial
- 250 searches a month
- Billing
- Monthly subscription
- SDKs
- Official clients, including Python
SerpApi is a search-results API first, and for YouTube that’s both its strength and its limit. Its four YouTube engines (search, video, transcript and, since September 2026, channel) return what the page shows: search results with Shorts and channel shelves, comments paged through the video engine, and channel tabs for videos, Shorts, streams, playlists and community posts. Its docs are the best in this group, with a live playground and a Markdown copy of every page.
It’s also by far the most expensive. Every call is one “search”: $25 a month buys 1,000, and the $75 Developer plan buys 5,000, or $15 per 1,000. Fetching 1,000 video pages or transcripts costs about ten times what ScrapeCreators charges. Failed searches and repeats within an hour are free, and plans from $150 a month include its U.S. Legal Shield.
Then there’s the litigation. A California court dismissed Google’s anti-circumvention case over Google Search in July 2026, partly with leave to amend, and SerpApi has moved to dismiss the amended complaint. The same month a New York court let Reddit’s similar claims against SerpApi proceed. Neither is about YouTube. Pick SerpApi when you need YouTube search results as a viewer sees them; for creator data, skip it.
Good
- Full YouTube search pages, including Shorts and channel results
- The best docs here, with a playground and Markdown copies
- Failed and cached searches are free; Legal Shield from $150 a month
Not so good
- $25 per 1,000 calls on Starter, $15 on Developer
- Comments cost a search per page, and their format isn’t documented
- Facing scraping lawsuits from Google and Reddit
What YouTube data you can get
Most public YouTube data is easy to get. The hard parts are search volume, transcripts and anything only a channel’s owner can see.
- Channel stats
- Everyone
- Subscriber, view and video counts. Subscriber counts are rounded everywhere, including the official API.
- Videos
- Everyone
- Title, views, likes, length and description. View counts changed definition in March 2025 and August 2026.
- Shorts
- Most
- ScrapeCreators, Apify and SerpApi list them. Bright Data documents no Shorts feed, and Influship has no dedicated Shorts endpoint.
- Comments
- Most
- The official API, ScrapeCreators, Apify, Bright Data and SerpApi. Influship has none.
- Transcripts
- All five
- The official API only downloads captions for videos you can edit. Every provider here sells them.
- Search
- Everyone
- The official API allows 100 searches a day. Every provider here has search without that cap.
- Sponsorships
- Partial
- ScrapeCreators infers sponsors and filters search to paid promotions; Bright Data has a sponsored flag. Both unverified.
- Contact emails
- Rare
- Not in the official channel data. ScrapeCreators sells a separate creator-email lookup, and Modash, influencers.club and HypeAuditor find YouTube creators’ emails. Influencer data APIs
- Audience demographics
- Owner only
- Only the channel’s owner sees these, through the YouTube Analytics API.
Is it legal to scrape YouTube?
YouTube’s terms bar automated access without its written permission, except where the law allows it, and its API terms ban scraping outright. So every provider here works against YouTube’s wishes. In the US that has mostly been treated as a contract question, and in 2024 a court sided with Bright Data over logged-off scraping of Meta’s public pages.
The open question in 2026 is bot protection. In July a California court dismissed Google’s anti-circumvention case against SerpApi over plain search results, while a New York court let Reddit’s similar claims against SerpApi go ahead. Our view: public channel and video stats are the low-risk end. Commenters’ names and comments are personal data under GDPR, so you need a reason to keep them. And if you use the official API, its 30-day storage and no-derived-metrics rules apply to you.
This is a summary, not legal advice.
Why YouTube requests fail
What breaks, from YouTube’s own docs and the issue trackers of the open-source tools many scrapers build on:
Quota exhaustion
The official API returns 403 quotaExceeded once you’ve used 10,000 units or 100 searches, until midnight Pacific. Invalid requests still cost a unit.
Bot checks
YouTube asks datacenter IPs to sign in to prove they aren’t bots. yt-dlp’s tracker has had a steady stream of these reports through 2026.
Changing internals
Proof-of-origin tokens, streaming changes and expired sessions broke yt-dlp repeatedly in September and October 2026. Mostly a video-download problem, but it shows how fast YouTube’s internals move.
Transcript blocks
YouTube blocks IPs that hit its caption endpoint too often, and the popular youtube-transcript-api library has a run of issues about it. It’s why paid transcript endpoints exist.
Geo, age and consent walls
Region-locked and age-restricted videos, and the EU cookie-consent page, change what a scraper sees depending on where it runs.
What a request looks like
Most of these are a single GET with your key. This is SerpApi’s channel engine, new in September 2026. It takes a handle or channel ID, a tab (videos, shorts, streams, podcasts, playlists or posts) and a sort order; about=true adds country, join date, total views and links.
GET https://serpapi.com/search
?engine=youtube_channel
&channel_id=@handle
&tab=videos
&sort=popular
&about=true
&api_key=YOUR_KEYQuestions
Should I use the official YouTube Data API instead?
To start, usually yes. It’s free, needs only an API key for public data, and 10,000 units a day covers about 500,000 video or channel refreshes if you batch 50 IDs per call. Switch when you hit its limits: search volume, transcripts, or the storage and metrics rules.
What changed in the YouTube API quota in 2026?
On 1 June 2026 YouTube gave search.list and video uploads their own buckets of 100 calls a day. A search used to cost 100 of your 10,000 daily units; now it costs 1 unit from its own bucket. You still get about 100 searches a day, but they no longer drain the rest of your quota. A new videos.batchGetStats method got its own 10,000-unit bucket on 3 June.
Can I get exact subscriber counts?
No. The API rounds counts above 1,000 to three significant figures, even for the channel’s owner, and YouTube’s pages show abbreviated numbers. Be wary of any provider claiming exact counts for channels it doesn’t own.
How do I get transcripts for any YouTube video?
Not through the official API: captions.download only works on videos you can edit, and costs 200 units. Every provider here sells transcripts. ScrapeCreators charges one credit, and nothing when a video has no captions; Bright Data includes them in its video record; Influship returns up to 20 from one channel in a single call.
What’s the cheapest YouTube scraping API?
At volume, ScrapeCreators: $0.99 per 1,000 calls on its $497 pack. Pay as you go, Bright Data ($1.50 per 1,000 records), Influship ($1.80) and ScrapeCreators ($1.88 on the $47 pack) are close. For search, Influship returns up to 50 results per page, under 4 cents per 1,000 results. SerpApi is the most expensive, from $25 per 1,000 calls.
Is it legal to scrape YouTube?
YouTube’s terms forbid it without permission, and courts split this year on scrapers that get past bot protection. Public channel and video stats are the low-risk end; comments are personal data and bring GDPR in. See the section on the law above.
Can these APIs tell me who sponsors a video?
Partly. ScrapeCreators has an experimental sponsor endpoint and a paid-promotion search filter, and Bright Data’s video record has a sponsored flag. We haven’t tested how accurate they are. For sponsorship research, see our YouTube sponsorship tools ranking.
Quoting this ranking?
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Which Social API (2026). The best YouTube scraping APIs of 2026. whichsocialapi.com/best/youtube-scraping-apis