Best Reddit Scrapers in 2026: Compared and Ranked

Reddit hosts over 430 million monthly active users across 100,000+ active communities, making it one of the internet's largest sources of genuine user discussions. Unlike other social platforms where algorithms control what you see, Reddit's upvote system means the most valuable content naturally rises to the top.

That last point is what makes Reddit uniquely valuable as a data source. Twitter shows you what's trending. LinkedIn shows you what professionals want you to think. Reddit shows you what people actually believe — in communities where authenticity is enforced by community norms and downvote culture. For brand intelligence, product research, market sentiment, and LLM training data, Reddit sits in a category of its own.

The problem is accessing it programmatically in 2026. The official API is technically available. Using it for anything useful is a different matter.

The Reddit API Problem in 2026

Reddit's free tier requires account creation, OAuth app registration (which can be rejected), and is strictly non-commercial. Rate limits are 100 requests per minute for OAuth and as low as 1 request per 2 seconds on some endpoints.

And even within those limits, the data itself is capped: listings hard-cap at 100 results, comment trees are truncated and replaced with "more" stubs that need separate requests to expand, and post bodies are cut off in listing responses.

For commercial use: Enterprise agreements start around $12,000 per year and require direct negotiation. There is no self-serve upgrade path.

This is the same pattern that played out with Twitter's API in 2023. Reddit's 2023 API pricing change priced out most non-enterprise consumers — the widely-cited example was Apollo's $20 million per year bill for what had been free access.

The result is that every team needing Reddit data at any meaningful scale is looking at scraping tools, not the official API. This guide covers every meaningful option — including ScrapeBadger's new Reddit Scraper, which we just launched.

What Reddit Data Is Actually Worth Extracting

Before evaluating any tool, it's worth being specific about the data model. A complete Reddit data pipeline needs to cover:

Post data — title, full body text, subreddit, author, score, upvote ratio, comment count, flair, URL, timestamp, and post type (text, link, image, video, poll). The upvote ratio field is particularly valuable — it's a sentiment signal that raw score doesn't fully capture.

Comment data — comment body, author, score, depth in thread, parent ID (for reconstructing threading), timestamp, and whether the comment is a moderator or distinguished comment. Nested comment structure — reconstructing the actual conversation thread rather than a flat list — is where most tools diverge significantly in quality.

Subreddit metadata — subscriber count, active users, description, creation date, rules, and moderator list. Essential for understanding the community context of the data you're collecting.

User profiles — username, karma breakdown (post vs comment), account age, verified status, trophy list, and trophies. Unlike other social platforms, Reddit's upvote system means the most valuable content naturally rises to the top. User karma is a proxy for credibility within a community — a high-karma account's posts carry different weight than a brand-new account.

Search results — cross-Reddit search by keyword, subreddit-scoped search, and sorting by relevance, new, top, or hot. This is the entry point for most intelligence use cases — finding relevant discussions rather than crawling known subreddits.

The 6 Best Reddit Scrapers in 2026

1. ScrapeBadger Reddit Scraper — Best Overall

ScrapeBadger's Reddit Scraper is our newest product, and we built it specifically to address the data quality and infrastructure reliability issues that make other tools frustrating to depend on in production.

What It Returns

Structured JSON covering the complete Reddit data model — post content, nested comment trees with full threading context, subreddit metadata, user profiles, and search results. The response is clean and pipeline-ready; no HTML to parse, no truncated comment stubs requiring follow-up requests.

Anti-bot handling is built in. Reddit uses Cloudflare protection with session-based rate limiting that catches naive scraping attempts quickly. ScrapeBadger's infrastructure handles proxy rotation, TLS fingerprinting, and session management automatically — the same system that powers the Cloudflare bypass and handles all other protected targets across the platform. You pass a subreddit name, post URL, or search query; you get back complete structured data.

The Platform Advantage

The case for ScrapeBadger's Reddit Scraper over purpose-built Reddit tools isn't just the data quality. It's what sits next to it.

Teams that monitor Reddit for brand mentions need Google News for the same topics. Teams using Reddit for market research need Google Trends signals for demand validation. Teams building LLM pipelines need web scraping for the broader web alongside Reddit. All of this runs under one ScrapeBadger API key with unified billing — one integration, one billing relationship, 18 Google endpoints plus Twitter/X scraping, real estate, e-commerce, and now Reddit.

For AI agent workflows, the MCP integration exposes Reddit data alongside every other ScrapeBadger data source as native tool calls. An agent doing brand research can pull Reddit community sentiment, check Google News for the same story, monitor SERP rankings for branded keywords, and check Google Trends interest signals — in a single coherent workflow through the MCP server.

Best for

Teams who need Reddit data as part of a broader intelligence or data pipeline; AI agent developers; brand monitoring workflows that span multiple data sources; anyone building on ScrapeBadger's existing infrastructure.

2. Apify Reddit Scraper — Best Community-Maintained Option

The Apify Reddit Scraper is the default choice among Apify actors: first-party, covers posts, comments, subreddits, and users from a single input, runs at a 92.7% success rate, and has the largest active user base of any Reddit Actor in the Apify Store. It runs at $3.40 per thousand results.

Apify's Reddit actor is battle-tested. It handles Reddit's pagination, nested comment loading, and the rate limiting that breaks naive scrapers. The platform includes scheduling, storage, and no-code configuration through Apify Console — useful for non-technical teams who need Reddit data without writing integration code.

Reddit has a public JSON API — you can append .json to almost any Reddit URL and get structured data back. No auth needed for public subreddits. The reason to use a scraper is that Reddit rate-limits aggressively, pagination is a pain, and if you need data at scale across multiple subreddits, over time, with search, you'll spend more time fighting Reddit's API quirks than actually using the data. That's where Apify actors come in.

The community-maintenance caveat applies here as it does to every Apify actor. When Reddit makes changes — to its HTML structure, its anti-bot configuration, or its rate limiting behaviour — update timing depends on the maintainer rather than an SLA. For most research and moderate-volume use cases, this is fine. For production pipelines with uptime requirements, it's a genuine operational consideration.

Best for: Non-technical teams running batch Reddit data collection; researchers who want to configure via UI rather than API; developers already on the Apify platform.

3. Bright Data — Enterprise Infrastructure, Enterprise Cost

Bright Data offers Reddit scraping as part of their Web Scraper IDE and managed dataset products, running on their 400M+ IP residential network.

Bright Data offers enterprise-grade web scraping infrastructure with specific capabilities for Reddit data extraction. Best for developers needing simple API integration, teams with variable extraction requirements, and projects requiring reliable anti-detection capabilities.

The proxy infrastructure behind Bright Data's Reddit scraper is among the strongest available — which matters specifically for Reddit, which aggressively rate-limits shared proxy pools. Their residential IP quality reduces the block rate that affects tools with smaller or lower-quality proxy infrastructure.

The pricing reality remains what it is across all Bright Data products: minimum commitments, complex billing across proxy, scraper IDE, and dataset layers, and a total cost that makes sense for enterprise budgets but is difficult to justify for most teams. Web Scraper IDE starts at $499 per month.

Best for: Enterprise teams with formal compliance requirements and budgets that make Bright Data's infrastructure quality worth the cost.

4. PRAW — Free, Official, and Limited

PRAW is free for non-commercial, low-volume use. It's the official Python Reddit API wrapper — maintained by Reddit's community with good documentation and a long track record. For personal projects, academic research, and learning how Reddit's data model works, it's the right starting point.

The limitations are the same as the official API itself: strict non-commercial terms, aggressive rate limits, 100-result listing caps, and truncated comment trees. Any team that has outgrown personal projects or needs commercial use rights needs something else.

Best for: Individual developers learning Reddit's data model; personal projects at very low volume; academic research within official API terms.

5. ScrapeCreators — Reddit-Specific API, Clean Integration

ScrapeCreators built a Reddit-specific scraping API with a developer-first interface and clean JSON output. It handles session management and rate limiting without requiring proxy configuration on your side.

Scraping APIs like ScrapeCreators skip OAuth requirements, approval processes, and minimum commitments. They offer no credentials needed, no approval, no minimum commitment, and no artificial data caps.

The data coverage includes posts, comments, user profiles, and subreddit data. Response format is clean and consistently structured. The free tier is generous enough for evaluation.

The limitation compared to platform providers: ScrapeCreators is Reddit-only. If your intelligence workflow spans Reddit alongside other data sources, it's another integration to manage. For pure Reddit use cases, it's a legitimate lightweight option.

Best for: Developers who need a simple Reddit API without platform complexity; workflows that exclusively focus on Reddit data.

6. ScrapingBee — General Scraper With Reddit Support

ScrapingBee's general-purpose scraping infrastructure handles Reddit pages among any other web target. It returns rendered HTML that you parse yourself rather than pre-structured Reddit data — which means you're responsible for comment tree reconstruction, pagination handling, and field extraction.

The credit multiplier applies: Reddit pages with significant dynamic content consume stealth proxy credits (75 credits per request) rather than standard credits. Calculate your effective per-request cost at your actual configuration before comparing to purpose-built Reddit tools.

Best for: Teams already using ScrapingBee who want to add occasional Reddit scraping without adding a second vendor; low-volume, infrequent Reddit data needs.

Comparison Table

What Teams Are Actually Using Reddit Data For

Brand and Product Intelligence

Reddit is where people say what they actually think about products. The absence of real-name accountability and the community moderation that punishes obvious shilling means Reddit sentiment is more reliable than review platforms, which skew toward extreme experiences. A brand monitoring pipeline that surfaces Reddit threads discussing your product — especially negative ones in niche subreddits — catches issues before they compound.

The ScrapeBadger guide to how web scraping can help your business covers brand monitoring ROI in detail. Reddit adds a dimension that Google Maps reviews and Trustpilot miss: the organic community conversation that doesn't happen on review platforms.

AI Training Data and LLM Pipelines

Reddit is one of the most valuable sources of conversational training data for language models. Unlike other social platforms where algorithms control what you see, Reddit's upvote system means the most valuable content naturally rises to the top. Highly upvoted comments represent community-validated responses to questions — a stronger quality signal than random web text.

The volume of domain-specific knowledge in technical subreddits makes Reddit training data particularly valuable for fine-tuning models on specific topics. A model fine-tuned on r/legaladvice, r/personalfinance, and r/medicine threads responds differently to domain questions than one trained on general web crawl data.

Market Research and Trend Detection

Subreddits are communities of interest with consistent topic focus. Tracking post volume and sentiment in topic-specific subreddits over time is a leading indicator of market interest that precedes mainstream trend detection.

Combine Reddit post volume trends with Google Trends data for the same keywords and you get a two-signal picture of demand trajectory. Reddit often shows the signal first — niche communities discuss emerging topics before they reach mainstream search volume.

Competitive Intelligence

Competitor brand subreddits, product comparison threads, and community discussions about alternatives surface genuine market intelligence that no structured competitive analysis tool captures. The r/investing, r/personalfinance, and product-specific subreddits for your competitors contain unfiltered customer voices that are worth monitoring systematically.

Lead Generation and Community Outreach

As covered in the ScrapeBadger Twitter scraping article, social platforms where people ask questions publicly are lead generation opportunities for businesses that answer those questions well. Reddit's "help me find a solution to X problem" posts are qualified intent signals — someone publicly stating a pain point that your product solves. Monitoring relevant subreddits for these posts systematically, and responding helpfully before competitors do, is a lead generation strategy with high signal-to-noise.

Why Reddit Data Is Harder to Get Than It Looks

The .json trick is well-known — append .json to any Reddit URL and get structured data without any auth. This works for one or two requests. At scale, Reddit detects and blocks it quickly.

Reddit rate-limits aggressively, pagination is a pain, and if you need data at scale across multiple subreddits, over time, with search, you will spend more time fighting Reddit's API quirks than actually using the data.

The specific technical challenges:

Comment trees are the hardest part. Reddit truncates deeply nested comment trees with "MoreComments" objects — placeholders that require additional API calls to expand. A post with 500 comments might require 20+ separate requests to fully reconstruct the comment tree, and each of those requests is subject to rate limiting. Tools that don't handle this properly return partial comment data that looks complete but isn't.

Reddit's Cloudflare configuration catches automated requests that don't match real browser fingerprints. As detailed in the ScrapeBadger Cloudflare bypass guide, correct TLS fingerprinting and session management are prerequisites for any production-scale Reddit scraping.

The old-Reddit vs. new-Reddit structural difference means scrapers need to handle two different HTML structures depending on which interface a URL targets.

ScrapeBadger's Reddit Scraper handles all of this — comment tree reconstruction, Cloudflare bypass, rate limit management, and both Reddit interface formats — transparently. You query by subreddit, post URL, search term, or user profile and receive complete structured data.

How to Choose

If you need Reddit data as part of a broader intelligence workflow — combined with Google News, SERP monitoring, Trends signals, or any other web data source — ScrapeBadger's unified platform handles everything under one integration. This is the case for most commercial applications.

If you need a no-code solution and your team doesn't have developers who want to work with an API — Apify's Actor with its visual configuration interface is the most practical option. Accept the community-maintenance risk for the convenience trade-off.

If you're doing personal or academic research at low volume with no commercial intent — PRAW and the official API free tier is the right and cheapest starting point.

If Reddit is your only data source and cost per request is the dominant constraint — ScrapeCreators offers a clean Reddit-specific API at competitive pricing.

Start with ScrapeBadger's free trial — 1,000 credits, no credit card, no subscription. Test against the specific subreddits, post types, and search queries you actually need before committing to any production infrastructure. Full documentation at docs.scrapebadger.com.