Best YouTube Scrapers in 2026: Comparing Every Apify Actor

YouTube is the world's second-largest search engine, and scraping it is one of the most common data extraction tasks. Whether you need competitor analytics, influencer research, or content trend tracking, you'll eventually need a reliable YouTube scraper. The Apify Store has several YouTube scraping actors, each with different approaches, feature sets, and reliability levels. In this article, I'll compare the most popular options and introduce a new actor built on yt-dlp — arguably the most battle-tested YouTube metadata extraction tool available today. Why Scrape YouTube Programmatically? The official YouTube Data API v3 has strict quota limits: 10,000 units per day by default. A single search request costs 100 units, meaning you can run only 100 searches per day. For any serious data collection — monitoring competitors, tracking influencers across hundreds of channels, or building content databases — you'll hit those limits within minutes. That's where scrapers come in. They extract