5 Best YouTube Channel Scrapers of 2025

I needed a YouTube channel scraper for a research task, so I started Googling. After an hour of surfing, all I found was disappointment.

Most of the listicles feature general purpose web scraping APIs or scrapers who can only scrape search results or videos, no channel information included.

But I did manage to find the 5 best tools to scrape YouTube channel data.

But before doing a complete breakdown, is it even legal to scrape YouTube data?

Is it legal to scrape YouTube data?

Google officially prohibits automated bots from scraping its products, including YouTube. Yet, they rarely enforce this rule unless someone actually harms their business.

In fact, big companies like OpenAI scrape Google data to train their models.

Plus, YouTube channel information and videos are public data, so scraping them without bad intent is generally seen as legal.

Now the million dollar question is — how did I choose "best YouTube channel scrapers".

How to choose the best YouTube channel scraper?

This is the biggest struggle I had during my research. No article actually pin points the factors which they considered to test the scrapers.

How do you define best?

I didn't want my content to be generic like them, so I spent some extra time researching user pain points. I found out 4 key factors to consider.

1. Affordability
2. Speed
3. Ease of use
4. Scalability

To compare affordability, I calculated each tool's average cost of scraping 1000 channels.

To verify speed, I tested each scraper on a list of 100 YouTube channels and compared their speed per minute.

To check ease of use, I considered factors like clean interface, one-click access to key features, ease of launching the scraper, and how clean and organized the output is.

And finally, to verify scalability, I checked the number of results you can scrape in the highest pricing tier and option to get a custom quote.

Based on these factors, here are my top 5 picks.

5 best YouTube channel scrapers

1. Lobstr.io

Features

1. Collects all details from YouTube Channel about section
2. Gets emails from channel description
3. Export data to CSV, Google Sheet, Amazon S3, and other options
4. Cloud-based scraping
5. Offers both, a No-code app + Developer-friendly API
6. Schedule feature for continuous monitoring

Lobstr.io offers a really easy to use and clean interface. You can set up and launch the scraper in less than 90 seconds.

The output is pretty clean and organized. You don't have to re-arrange the CSV file or Google Sheet to analyze the data.

The best thing is, it has a separate column for emails found in the channel description.

This means you don't have to manually scan descriptions and separate emails from them.

It's one of the fastest scrapers in the list. With a free plan, you can collect 40 to 50 results per minute and get up to 40x speed by upgrading to a paid subscription.

Pricing

1. $0.5 per 1000 channels
2. Up to 1M channels per month

Best for

Lobstr.io is the most affordable tool in this list and arguably one of the fastest too. Plus it offers an easy to use interface and massive scalability.

If you're looking to collect channel info like channel name, total view count, subscribers, count, links, etc at scale and affordable cost, Lobstr.io is perfect for you.

2. Apify

Features

1. Collects channel information and videos meta data
2. Scrapes YouTube search results, video subtitles, and playlists too
3. Schedule feature for continuous monitoring
4. Multiple data export options including CSV, JSON, Excel etc
5. No-code app + well-documented API

The scraper is mainly useful for collecting video metadata from a channel or search results. But it also provides you channel information too.

It's not a great tool from an ease of use perspective. The user interface is quite messy and confusing.

Plus you'll have to do some workaround if you only need channel about section data instead of videos.

The best thing about Apify is that you can use channel URL, video url or even a keyword as input.

It collects all the data available in the channel About section plus verified status and monetization status too.

But this much data comes at a cost.

The output is quite messy and you'll have to spend some time re-arranging the columns in your output file.

Speaking of time, it's quite slow and collects around 5 to 10 results per minute at max.

Pricing

1. $5 per 1000 channels
2. Pay as you go, no maximum limits

Best for

If you're looking for an all-in-one YouTube scraper, Apify can be an ideal choice. But being an expensive tool, it's not suitable for SMEs and individuals.

3. Bright Data

Features

1. Multiple YouTube scrapers for channel info, videos, and comments
2. Supports both URL and search terms as input
3. Offers a huge ready-to-use YouTube profiles dataset
4. Provides a well-documented API and a no-code platform for scraping

Bright Data's is mostly popular for its YouTube comments scraping tool but it also offers channel profile and video scraping tools.

From the ease of use POV, I found it the easiest to use tool after Lobstr.io. The user interface is pretty clean and user friendly.

But the data output file is quite messy. Even if you choose CSV or any other format, the output is still in JSON format, which was a big turn off for me.

Speaking of data, there's not a lot of data points related to the channel About section. It only offers surface level information about the channel.

Though the platform claims 7 seconds per input response time, I experienced an average 25 to 30 results per minute speed.

If you're scraping comments or video data, there's a rate limit of 500 records per input.

Pricing

1. $1.5 per 1000 channels
2. Pay as you go, no maximum limit

Best for

It's a great tool for content analysis and video sentiment analysis. You can use the data to train AI models or analyze trends or user behaviors.

It's affordable and fast. But if you're using it only for collecting channel details, it's expensive and offers limited insights, making it a bad choice for influencer marketing.

4. Phantombuster

Features

1. Channel info, videos, and search results scrapers
2. Smart workflows to combine different scrapers
3. Schedule feature for channel monitoring
4. Separate column for emails (if found in description)
5. Multiple export formats including CSV, Excel, and 3rd party integrations

Starting with ease of use, Phantombuster offers a pretty clean and user-friendly interface. For confusing features, there are video tutorials and dedicated article links too.

But the bulk URL upload feature requires some extra effort.

Unlike Lobstr.io, which allows the flexibility of direct CSV, TSV, and TXT file upload, Phantombuster only supports Google Sheets.

This means, if you've a text or CSV file of 1000 YouTube channels, you'll first need to upload it to Google Sheets and then add the Sheet's URL as input.

The output file is similar to what you get from Lobstr.io and they both collect the same data points too, including email addresses.

But the interesting thing is, Phantombuster offers a separate scraper to collect channel videos meta data too.

You can even combine them both or use them with other scrapers using workflow features.

But you'll have to compromise on speed. Phantombuster only collected 5 to 8 channels per minute during my testing.

Pricing

1. $3.5 per 1000 channels (if no videos extracted)
2. Up to 120k channels per month (without videos)

Phantombuster's pricing is not straightforward. You get a fixed number of hours per month as execution time.

You pay for time taken to complete a scraping task, not the total number of rows collected.

To get an average cost per 1k channels, I took the average time to collect 1k channels and found the total cost.

Best for

It's a great choice if you want a combo for YouTube SEO analysis automation. Phantombuster collects all the data you need for this use case.

But this combo comes at a high cost, complicated pricing structure, and really slow speed. Plus it's not scalable.

5. Zenrows

Features

1. Interactive request builder
2. Download response directly from dashboard
3. Multiple programming languages
4. Collect video, channel info, and search data
5. JSON, HTML, Markdown, and screenshot output

Ease of use is definitely out of scope here. We can't compare an APIs ease of use to a no-code tool.

But compared to other APIs, Zenrows is pretty easy to use. It has well-written documentation, and an interactive request builder.

You can choose the output format, data points you need, and even initiate requests and download responses directly from the dashboard.

It can collect any type of video or channel data from YouTube except comments.

Being an API, it's super fast. The average response time was 20 to 25 seconds for the same number of URLs I used while testing no-code tools.

Pricing

1. $1 per 1000 requests
2. Up to 38 million requests per month

Zenrows charges per request instead of per row. This means if a request returns an empty response, you'll still pay for it.

Best for

If you're a nerd, looking for an affordable YouTube scraping API, Zenrows can be a suitable option. It's easy to integrate, fast, and highly scalable.

For non-nerds, it's obviously not a great option as you need to understand at least a little bit of coding to use it.

Which YouTube channel scraper is best for me?

Overall, if we stick to YouTube channel data scraping specifically, Lobstr.io wins easily. It's fast, affordable, scalable, and easy to use, and offers good data quality.

Plus it caters both nerd and non-nerd users.

If you need an all-in-one YouTube scraper, Apify would be a great choice but it's expensive.

If you're looking for an affordable programmatic solution, I recommend Zenrows. It's fast, scalable, and most importantly the second most affordable option in this list.

Now before wrapping up, let me answer some frequently asked questions.

FAQs

How do I scrape YouTube using Python?

There are multiple ways to do that. You can use scraping APIs or build your own scraping by either HTML parsing or using headless browsers with Python.

But building your own scraper is quite a headache because you'll have to deal with IP bans, Captchas, and rate limits.

Can I scrape YouTube data using YouTube API?

Plus there is a quota/rate cap of 10k requests per day.

YouTube does have an RSS feed which can be used to collect the number of views, subscriber count, and video titles etc.

What is the best Chrome extension to scrape data from YouTube channels?

I tested some Chrome extensions too but none of them works as good as advertised. Most of them were broken or too slow.

But you can use browser automation Chrome extensions like Browse AI or Bardeen AI to scrape YouTube videos and channel info.

Conclusion