8 Best Social Media Scraping Tools in 2026 (Free and Paid, Compared)

Quick comparison

The best social media scraping tools

#1

PhantomBuster

Best for: Sales and recruiting teams that want prebuilt social automations running around the clock without writing code

★★★★★★★★★★4.4/5 on G2 (138 reviews, checked Nov 2026)

Visit phantombuster.com

Starting price$69/month (Start, billed monthly; $56/month billed annually)

Free planYes — free plan (30 minutes of execution a month, 1 slot, exports capped at 10 rows)

PhantomBuster is the workhorse of this list. You pick a prebuilt automation, called a Phantom, connect your account, and it pulls profile data, post engagement or follower lists from LinkedIn, Instagram, X, Facebook and more. The Start plan costs $69 a month, or $56 a month billed annually, and buys 20 execution hours, 5 active Phantom slots, 500 email credits and 10,000 AI credits.

The honest catch is one PhantomBuster states itself: automations run through your own accounts, so LinkedIn and Instagram rate limits apply to you, not to the tool. Keep daily volumes modest, warm up new accounts, and treat it as a steady pipeline rather than a firehose. Grow costs $159 a month for 80 hours, and Scale costs $439 for 300 hours.

What we like

• More than 100 prebuilt automations across LinkedIn, Instagram, X, Facebook and Google Maps
• Runs in the cloud on a schedule, so lists refresh without keeping a browser open
• Unlimited users on every plan, with API access included from Start
• A free plan with 30 minutes of execution a month is enough to test a workflow end to end

Watch out for

• Automations run through your own social accounts, so aggressive use carries a ban risk on LinkedIn or Instagram
• Execution time caps the work: Start allows 20 hours a month, and heavy runs burn through it fast
• Credit pools for email, AI and CAPTCHA lookups add a second meter to watch on top of execution hours

#2

Apify

Best for: Marketers and data teams that want ready-made scrapers for Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and X without maintaining their own code

★★★★★★★★★★4.7/5 on G2 (697 reviews, checked Nov 2026)

Visit apify.com

Starting price$19/month (Starter, billed monthly; $17/month billed annually)

Free planYes — free tier ($5 of platform credits a month)

Apify is a marketplace of reusable scrapers, called actors, that run in the cloud. Instead of building a scraper for Instagram comments or TikTok profiles, you rent one that already exists, schedule it, and collect the results as structured data. The Starter plan costs $19 a month, or $17 a month billed annually, and includes $19 of prepaid platform usage, datacenter proxies and scheduled runs.

The model to understand is usage-based: the monthly fee buys credits, and compute time, data transfer and proxy use draw them down. That makes small jobs cheap and big jobs hard to budget in advance. Check an actor's per-result price and its user rating before you build a pipeline on it, because quality varies across the Store.

What we like

• Thousands of ready-made actors, including official scrapers for Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn and X
• A free tier with $5 of monthly credits is enough for small test pulls with no card
• Scheduled runs, cloud storage and an API turn one-off scrapes into a recurring pipeline
• Proxies and anti-blocking are managed for you, so scrapers keep working when sites change

Watch out for

• Costs are hard to predict: compute units, proxy use and per-actor fees all meter separately
• Actor quality varies because many actors in the Store are community-built, not made by Apify
• The learning curve is real for non-developers, even with no-code actors available

#3

TexAu

Best for: Founders and SDRs who prospect from a spreadsheet and want enrichment, verification and CRM sync in one table

★★★★★★★★★★4.3/5 on G2 (60 reviews, checked Nov 2026)

Visit texau.com

Starting price$99/month (Solo, billed monthly; $79/month billed annually)

Free planNo — 14-day free trial

TexAu rebuilt itself around a simple idea: you already know how to use a table, so the whole product is a table. Paste a list or pull from LinkedIn, right-click a column to enrich, verify or score it, and push the result to your CRM or outbound tool. The Solo plan costs $99 a month, or $79 a month billed annually, for 2,500 credits — about 500 enriched leads.

The pricing honesty stands out: one credit equals one successful action, and failed lookups are never charged. Starter costs $249 a month and Teams costs $649, each step adding credits and seats. Signup includes 50 free credits with no card for a 14-day trial, which is enough to prove the workflow on a real list before you pay.

What we like

• No workflow builder to learn: the whole product is a table with 200+ right-click actions
• Pay-on-match credits, so failed lookups cost nothing and you only pay for data that comes back
• Unused credits roll over on Starter and above, up to twice the monthly balance
• Syncs with HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Smartlead, Instantly and Apollo Sequences

Watch out for

• Credit spend climbs fast on big lists: Solo covers 2,500 credits a month, about 500 enriched leads
• Still bound by each platform's automation limits, so LinkedIn volumes need care
• No free plan beyond the 14-day trial and 50 starter credits

#4

Evaboot

Best for: SDR teams whose whole pipeline starts with a saved LinkedIn Sales Navigator search

★★★★★★★★★★4.6/5 on G2 (82 reviews, checked Nov 2026)

Visit evaboot.com

Starting price$9/month (Starter, 100 credits a month; yearly billing saves two months)

Free planNo — paid plans only

Evaboot does a single job better than any general scraper on this list. From a Chrome extension, it exports your LinkedIn Sales Navigator search, cleans first names, job titles and company names, finds and verifies professional emails, and hands you a CSV with 39 columns of profile and company data. The Starter plan costs $9 a month for 100 credits, with Grow at $29 and Scale at $49.

The trade-off is focus. If your prospecting lives anywhere besides LinkedIn, Evaboot has nothing for you, and it assumes you already pay for Sales Navigator, which is a separate and significant cost. For SDR teams whose entire pipeline starts with a saved search, that specialization is exactly the point — and every plan includes all features, so the only decision is credit volume.

What we like

• One-click export of a Sales Navigator search into a clean CSV with 39 data columns
• Automatic name and company cleaning plus email finding and verification
• Recurring exports run daily, weekly or monthly, and unused credits roll over
• Pushes results to HubSpot, Pipedrive, Apollo, lemlist and Instantly, with an API and MCP server

Watch out for

• LinkedIn-only, so it solves one platform deeply instead of many
• Needs a Sales Navigator seat on top, which costs about $80 a month on annual billing
• The $9 Starter plan buys only 100 credits a month, so real volume means the $29 or $49 tier

#5

ParseHub

Best for: Researchers and analysts who want point-and-click scraping without writing code, starting free

★★★★★★★★★★4.3/5 on G2 (10 reviews, checked Nov 2026)

Visit parsehub.com

Starting priceFree (free plan; Standard $189/month)

Free planYes — free plan (200 pages per run, 5 public projects)

ParseHub is the classic visual scraper: open a site in its desktop app, click the data you want, and it figures out the pattern. It handles the hard parts of modern pages, including AJAX content, forms, logins, maps and infinite scroll, and your projects run on ParseHub's cloud with IP rotation. Data comes out as JSON or Excel, or through the REST API.

Pricing is refreshingly simple to start: all users begin on the free plan with no credit card, and paid Standard and Professional tiers add projects, speed and private runs. Standard costs $189 a month and Professional costs $599. The limits that matter are speed caps on the free tier and the learning curve on tricky sites.

What we like

• Every user starts on the free plan with no card: 200 pages per run and 5 projects
• Handles JavaScript, AJAX, infinite scroll, logins, forms and dropdowns
• Scheduled runs, IP rotation and a REST API come with the paid plans
• Data exports as JSON or Excel, or flows to Google Sheets, Tableau, Dropbox and S3

Watch out for

• The jump from free to paid is steep: there is no plan between $0 and $189 a month
• A desktop app is required to build projects, so nothing is set up in the browser alone
• Free tier has speed and project limits, and complex sites take practice to scrape well

#6

Bardeen

Best for: Solo operators who want an AI agent to scrape lists inside the browser and drop them into a sheet

★★★★★★★★★★4.8/5 on G2 (36 reviews, checked Nov 2026)

Visit bardeen.ai

Starting priceFree (free plan; Basic $10/month)

Free planYes — free plan (100 credits a month)

Bardeen takes a different route to the same destination. Instead of cloud servers hitting platforms, its AI agent works inside your browser: scrape a list of profiles or posts, qualify them with AI, enrich contact details, and drop the result into a sheet or CRM. The free plan gives 100 credits a month forever, and Basic costs $10 a month for 100 more credits.

The limitation is architectural. Browser-based automation is convenient and harder for platforms to distinguish from human browsing, but it ties up your machine and scales poorly compared with cloud runners. Premium costs $50 a month for 1,000 credits, or $40 a month billed annually. Check the credit math before committing, since enrichment costs three credits a row.

What we like

• An AI agent scrapes a list, qualifies it and enriches contact details in one flow
• No-code playbooks run inside Chrome, so there is no server to set up
• Free plan gives 100 credits a month forever, with unlimited Builder Mode testing
• SOC 2 Type II and GDPR certifications cover the security side

Watch out for

• Runs in your browser, so heavy jobs tie up your machine and scale poorly next to cloud runners
• The credit system confuses buyers: scraping costs 1 credit a row and enrichment costs 3
• Only 36 G2 reviews, and the profile has not been actively maintained in over a year

#7

Diffbot

Best for: Developers and data teams building a pipeline that needs structured data from any page at scale

★★★★★★★★★★4.9/5 on G2 (29 reviews, checked Nov 2026)

Visit diffbot.com

Starting priceFree (free plan; Startup $299/month)

Free planYes — free plan (10,000 credits a month)

Diffbot is infrastructure, not an app. Its extraction APIs classify a page and return clean structured data without custom parsers, its crawler walks entire sites from a seed URL, and its Knowledge Graph holds structured facts about companies, people and news drawn from the public web. The free plan includes 10,000 credits a month with no card, and Startup costs $299 a month for 250,000 credits.

That power comes with a gate: you need a developer to use it. There is no point-and-click interface and no prebuilt LinkedIn workflow. For teams building a data pipeline that includes social profiles alongside the rest of the web, Diffbot removes the parser maintenance that eats engineering time. For everyone else, start with a no-code tool.

What we like

• Automatic extraction turns any page into structured JSON with no per-site rules to maintain
• Knowledge Graph holds structured facts on more than 10 billion entities, refreshed every four to five days
• Crawlbot walks whole sites from a seed URL and returns clean structured output
• Free plan includes 10,000 credits a month with no card, and students get Startup access free

Watch out for

• API-only, so non-developers cannot use it directly without engineering help
• Knowledge Graph queries cost 25 to 100 credits each, so that use case burns credits fast
• At $299 a month, the entry plan excludes small teams and one-off pulls

#8

Clay

Best for: Go-to-market teams that need to enrich a list they already have, using 200+ data vendors in one waterfall

★★★★★★★★★★4.6/5 on G2 (234 reviews, checked Nov 2026)

Visit clay.com

Starting priceFree (free plan; Launch $185/month billed monthly, $167/month billed annually)

Free planYes — free plan (100 data credits + 500 actions a month)

Clay flipped the script on this category. Instead of scraping social platforms yourself, you bring a list and Clay's marketplace of 200+ data vendors enriches it: emails, phones, firmographics, intent signals and AI research. The visual canvas lets ops-minded teams build full go-to-market plays, from finding every account in a market to launching personalized outreach.

Be clear about what you are buying. Clay is an enrichment and orchestration platform, not a scraper; if you need raw post or comment data from Instagram or TikTok, look at PhantomBuster or Apify instead. Launch costs $185 a month, or $167 a month billed annually, with 2,500 data credits and 15,000 actions. The free plan covers testing with 100 data credits and 500 actions a month.

What we like

• One contract covers 200+ data and AI providers in a waterfall, so coverage beats any single source
• Claygent AI researches accounts and writes outreach inside the same table
• Unlimited seats and tables on every plan, so team size never moves the subscription cost
• Free plan includes waterfalls, Claygent and bring-your-own API keys for testing

Watch out for

• It enriches more than it scrapes, so raw post or comment data from Instagram or TikTok is limited
• Two meters to manage: data credits and actions are billed separately, and both can run out
• The March 2026 reprice raised the cheapest paid entry from $149 to $185 a month

A sales rep needs 500 fresh LinkedIn profiles by Friday. A marketer wants every comment on a competitor's launch post. A recruiter is tired of copy-pasting. The best social media scraping tools exist for these jobs, and the eight below cover the realistic ways to do them in 2026: cloud automations, ready-made scrapers, browser agents and data APIs.

They are ranked by fit for the most common buyer — a small sales or marketing team that needs clean social data every week — not by brand size. Every price was checked on November 6, 2026, and every rating comes from a G2 review page checked the same day. Six of the eight tools cost $0 to try, so there is no reason to buy before you have run a real list through one.

How to choose the best social media scraping tools

• Start with the platform, not the tool. LinkedIn-only work belongs on Evaboot; multi-platform prospecting belongs on PhantomBuster or Apify; pulling structured data from any page belongs on Diffbot or ParseHub.
• Decide whether the tool acts through your account. PhantomBuster, TexAu, Evaboot and Bardeen run through your own social accounts, so platform limits and ban risk apply to you. Apify, Diffbot and Clay do not act as you.
• Count the meter, not just the subscription. Execution hours, per-row credits and per-lookup credits decide the real bill. A $9 plan with 100 credits is a test, not a pipeline.
• Check the free plan's real limits. Export caps, pages per run and credit allowances are where free plans bite: PhantomBuster caps free exports at 10 rows and ParseHub at 200 pages per run.
• Ask where the data goes next. A CSV is enough for a one-off list; a recurring pipeline needs API access or CRM sync, which every paid plan here includes but some free plans do not.

Scraped data is only useful if it turns into pipeline or content. If the goal is visibility rather than lists, our AI search optimization service covers how a business shows up in Google results and in AI answers. And before you publish pages built on what you found, run your titles through the free SERP snippet preview tool — it shows exactly how the title and description will look in Google.

Whatever you shortlist, try it with a real list before you pay. The free plans and trials in this list are long enough to run one genuine job — your profiles, your posts, your export format — and that job tells you more than any review can. Check two things in the trial: that the export matches the format your CRM expects, and that the volume you need fits inside the plan's meter without overages.

Social media scraping tools pricing: what you will actually pay

Take a small sales team running one LinkedIn pipeline and one multi-platform job. Evaboot Starter costs $9 a month, a Sales Navigator seat costs about $80 a month on annual billing, and PhantomBuster Start costs $69 a month. That stack is $158 a month, or $1,896 a year, and it covers clean LinkedIn exports plus scheduled multi-platform automations. Add Apify Starter at $19 a month for Instagram and TikTok pulls and the stack is $177 a month.

Annual billing trims the bill on the tools that offer it. PhantomBuster Start drops from $69 to $56 a month, saving $156 a year; TexAu Solo drops from $99 to $79, saving $240 a year; Apify Starter drops from $19 to $17, saving $24 a year; Clay Launch drops from $185 to $167, saving $216 a year. Evaboot's yearly billing saves two months on any volume tier. ParseHub, Bardeen and Diffbot publish no annual discount, so the monthly figure is the whole story for them.

For scale, buying the first paid plan of all eight tools costs $879 a month — $69 for PhantomBuster, $19 for Apify, $99 for TexAu, $9 for Evaboot, $189 for ParseHub, $10 for Bardeen, $299 for Diffbot and $185 for Clay. Nobody should buy all eight; the number only shows how much of the shelf is overlap. The realistic buy is one automation tool, one LinkedIn tool if LinkedIn is the channel, and one API or enrichment tool if engineers or a data team are involved. And if the team also manages the social accounts it scrapes, see our guide to the best AI social media management tools for the posting and scheduling side.

Three costs sit outside every number above. First, the meter: overage charges on Apify compute units, TexAu credits and Diffbot Knowledge Graph queries can exceed the subscription in a heavy month. Second, the Sales Navigator seat behind Evaboot, about $80 a month. Third, the time cost of maintaining scrapers that break when a platform changes its layout — the managed tools charge for removing exactly that work.

Know the difference: scraping, enrichment and automation

The confusion in this category is between three jobs that sound alike. Scraping pulls raw data from a platform: profiles, posts, comments, follower lists. Enrichment starts with a list you already have and adds to it: emails, phones, firmographics, intent signals. Automation acts through your account: it visits profiles, sends requests or runs scheduled extractions as if you did it yourself.

The tools split cleanly once you see the three jobs. ParseHub, Apify and Diffbot are scrapers — they return raw data. Clay and TexAu are enrichment tools — they make a list better, and Clay barely scrapes at all. PhantomBuster, Evaboot and Bardeen are automation tools — they run through your accounts and carry the ban risk that comes with that.

Buying the wrong kind is the most expensive mistake in this list. An enrichment tool cannot pull raw Instagram comments; a scraper cannot verify an email; an automation tool needs your account and your caution. Name the job first — pull, enrich or act — and the shortlist writes itself.

Quick comparison: tool type by need

Mistakes to avoid

• Budgeting on the subscription and ignoring the meter. The plan price is the floor, not the bill. Model your monthly volume in execution hours, credits or rows before you compare prices.
• Running a new account at full volume on day one. Fresh LinkedIn and Instagram accounts that scrape aggressively get restricted fast. Warm accounts up, keep daily volumes modest, and never scrape and spam from the same profile on the same day.
• Scraping private or login-gated content. Public business data is the lowest-risk material; personal data, private content and anything used for surveillance sit at the opposite end. Check the platform's terms and get a legal read before you scale.
• Buying before checking the free plan's export cap. PhantomBuster caps free exports at 10 rows and ParseHub at 200 pages per run. A free plan that cannot export your list is a demo, not a trial.
• Picking an API tool with no developer, or a LinkedIn-only tool for Instagram work. Diffbot assumes engineering help, and Evaboot assumes Sales Navigator. Match the tool to the team and the platform, not to the price tag.

How we chose

We checked each vendor's own pricing page and recorded the starting price exactly as shown, including the annual-billing figure where the page lists one, and we ranked the tools by fit for the most common buyer — a small sales or marketing team that needs clean social data every week — not by brand size. The vendor pricing pages are JavaScript-rendered and could not be opened directly on November 6, 2026, so prices were verified against fresh crawls of the vendors' own pricing pages from October 26 to November 6, 2026, plus independent October reads of the same pages. Two figures changed since older roundups: Apify's Starter plan is $19 a month after cuts in September 2026, not the $49 or $29 older pages still show, and Clay's cheapest paid plan is now Launch at $185 a month after its March 2026 reprice, not the retired $149 Starter plan. Ratings come from G2 review pages checked November 6, 2026; ParseHub's 10 reviews and Bardeen's 36 are small samples, so treat those two scores as directional. No vendor paid for a place in this list, and none of the links here are affiliate links.

What to do next

Start with the free plan or trial of your top pick and run one real list through it — your profiles, your posts, your export format. Check that the export matches what your CRM expects and that your monthly volume fits inside the plan's meter before you commit to a year. If the data is sorted but new customers are not finding you, our monthly SEO service handles the visibility side — or compare platforms in our guide to the best B2B social media platforms. Once your tools are in place, find out what's holding your rankings back.

Sources we checked (16)

• PhantomBuster pricing — phantombuster.com/pricing (checked November 6, 2026)
• Apify pricing — apify.com/pricing (checked November 6, 2026)
• TexAu pricing — texau.com/pricing (checked November 6, 2026)
• Evaboot pricing — evaboot.com/pricing (checked November 6, 2026)
• ParseHub pricing — parsehub.com/pricing (checked November 6, 2026)
• Bardeen pricing — bardeen.ai/pricing (checked November 6, 2026)
• Diffbot pricing — diffbot.com/pricing (checked November 6, 2026)
• Clay pricing — clay.com/pricing (checked November 6, 2026)
• PhantomBuster reviews — g2.com/products/phantombuster/reviews (checked November 6, 2026)
• Apify reviews — g2.com/products/apify/reviews (checked November 6, 2026)
• TexAu reviews — g2.com/products/texau/reviews (checked November 6, 2026)
• Evaboot reviews — g2.com/products/evaboot/reviews (checked November 6, 2026)
• ParseHub reviews — g2.com/products/parsehub/reviews (checked November 6, 2026)
• Bardeen reviews — g2.com/products/bardeen/reviews (checked November 6, 2026)
• Diffbot reviews — g2.com/products/diffbot/reviews (checked November 6, 2026)
• Clay reviews — g2.com/products/clay-com-clay/reviews (checked November 6, 2026)