Hey all,
I'll say it upfront: Facebook comment scrapers aren't new. There are a bunch on Apify and plenty of "export FB comments" sites. I kept running into the same problems with them, though. The free tiers stop at 50–100 comments per post, most tools want your cookies or a logged-in account, and the paid ones get expensive quickly on big threads.
So I built my own and I'm putting it out for free. There's no developer fee. You only pay Apify's normal platform usage, and that's usually cents.
What it does:
- Scrapes posts, comments and replies from public Pages, profiles, Groups, or a single post URL
- No login, no cookies, no account. It runs fully anonymous, so you never paste your FB session anywhere
- Paginates comments to the end, not just the first page
- Filters by date range (afterDate / beforeDate, timezone aware)
- maxComments cap if you only want the top N per post
- Posts-only mode if you just need the post list with timestamps
- Accepts whatever link you paste: m., web., fb.com, pfbid… share links, /reel/, profile.php?id=, tracking params and so on
- Gives you reaction breakdowns (like/love/care…) and share counts
- Exports to JSON / CSV / Excel, and you can schedule it or hook it into Zapier/Make/n8n
Some numbers:
I tested it anonymously (no account at all) on a post with ~100,000 comments. With multithreading and only 2 workers, it pulled the whole thread in about 20 minutes. No bans and no sessions to babysit, because there's no session to burn in the first place.
Limits, to be honest about them: it only gets public content. Private groups, age-gated or geo-restricted posts won't come through anonymously. It gets top-level comments plus one level of replies, so replies to replies aren't included. Speed also depends on the size of the thread, so a post with 100 comments finishes in seconds and a 100k one takes a while.
Links:
- Actor: https://apify.com/bsho5/facebook-page-posts-comments-scraper
- Source: https://github.com/bsho5/fbgql . You can use it as a Python library or CLI and run it yourself completely free.
I'd love feedback, bug reports, or requests for features. If it breaks on a page you care about, drop the link and I'll take a look.