Fast Reddit Scraper ($2/1K)

What does Fast Reddit Scraper do?

Fast Reddit Scraper is a high-performance Apify Actor that extracts posts, comments, communities (subreddits), and user profiles from Reddit using Reddit's built-in JSON endpoints. No login required, no proxy needed — it works directly with Reddit's public interface at maximum speed.

Key capabilities:

• Scrape subreddits by Hot, New, Top, Controversial, or Rising and get full community info
• Search Reddit by keyword — search posts, comments, communities, and users all from one input
• Extract specific posts by providing direct Reddit post URLs in startUrls
• Search users — fetch detailed profile info (karma, verified status, gold, mod status, join date, description) plus their recent posts and comments
• Search communities — discover subreddits matching your keywords
• Fetch comments for discovered posts with full threading
• NSFW filtering — optionally include or exclude mature content
• Flexible input — combine subreddit listings, keyword searches, and post URLs in a single run

The Actor outputs clean JSON data directly to the Apify Dataset, accessible via API in JSON, CSV, Excel, or HTML formats. It includes built-in retry logic and rate-limit handling to ensure reliable scraping.

Why use Fast Reddit Scraper?

Reddit contains billions of discussions across hundreds of thousands of communities — making it one of the richest sources of public opinion, market research, trend analysis, and content discovery. This Actor gives you:

• No login or API key needed — works directly with Reddit's public JSON interface, no authentication required
• No proxy needed — direct HTTP requests, no proxy configuration or costs
• Structured data output — every post, comment, community, and user is normalized into consistent fields
• High performance — lightweight HTTP requests with no browser overhead, concurrent connections with rate-limit awareness
• Scalable — pagination support to collect hundreds or thousands of posts per run
• All-in-one input — one clean JSON config controls everything

Common use cases: market research, sentiment analysis, trend monitoring, competitor intelligence, content curation, academic research, and brand monitoring.

How to use Fast Reddit Scraper

1. Open the Actor in Apify Console
2. Configure your input — provide startUrls, searches, or both
3. Optionally toggle search types, disable comment scraping, or change sort
4. Click Run and wait for completion
5. Access your data from the Dataset tab — download as JSON, CSV, Excel, or HTML

Quick example — search and browse

{
  "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/" }],
  "searches": ["react", "typescript"],
  "sort": "top",
  "time": "week",
  "maxItems": 50,
  "includeNSFW": false,
  "searchPosts": true,
  "fetchPostComments": false
}

This scrapes the top 50 posts from r/javascript this week, then also searches for "react" and "typescript" across that subreddit.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
startUrls	array	[]	Reddit URLs — subreddit URLs (e.g., https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/) are scraped as listings; post URLs are fetched individually; user URLs fetch profiles.
searches	array	[]	Keywords to search Reddit for. Each keyword is searched independently.
sort	string	hot	Sort method: relevance, hot, new, top, controversial, rising.
time	string	all	Time filter: all, hour, day, week, month, year.
maxItems	integer	100	Max items per source.
includeNSFW	boolean	false	Include NSFW content in results.
skipComments	boolean	false	Skip all comment collection.
skipUserPosts	boolean	false	Skip user posts when searching users.
skipCommunity	boolean	true	Skip community/subreddit info.
ignorestartUrls	boolean	false	When searching, ignore subreddit listings from startUrls (still use them as search context).
searchPosts	boolean	true	Search for posts matching keywords.
searchComments	boolean	false	Search for comments containing keywords.
fetchPostComments	boolean	false	Fetch comments for discovered posts.
searchCommunities	boolean	false	Search for subreddits matching keywords.
searchUsers	boolean	false	Search for Reddit users matching keywords.

Input examples

Scrape a subreddit listing:

{
  "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/python/" }],
  "sort": "new",
  "maxItems": 50
}

Search all of Reddit for posts + communities:

{
  "searches": ["machine learning"],
  "searchPosts": true,
  "searchCommunities": true,
  "searchUsers": true
}

Scrape specific posts:

{
  "startUrls": [
    { "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/python/comments/1abc/example/" },
    { "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/2def/another/" }
  ]
}

Search within a subreddit + fetch comments:

{
  "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/news/" }],
  "searches": ["election"],
  "sort": "relevance",
  "searchPosts": true,
  "fetchPostComments": true,
  "maxItems": 25
}

Output

The Actor outputs items of four types — post, comment, community, and user — each with a consistent field set.

Post record

{
  "type": "post",
  "id": "1abcde",
  "title": "Example Reddit Post",
  "body": "This is the post content...",
  "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/python/comments/1abcde/example_post/",
  "author": "reddituser",
  "subreddit": "python",
  "score": 342,
  "upvoteRatio": 0.89,
  "numComments": 27,
  "createdUtc": "2026-06-22T14:30:00+00:00",
  "isVideo": false,
  "isNsfw": false,
  "domain": "self.python",
  "flair": "Resource",
  "thumbnail": "https://example.com/thumb.jpg"
}

Comment record

{
  "type": "comment",
  "id": "fghijk",
  "postTitle": "Example Reddit Post",
  "body": "This is a comment on the post...",
  "author": "commenter123",
  "score": 45,
  "createdUtc": "2026-06-22T15:00:00+00:00",
  "depth": 1,
  "subreddit": "python",
  "isSubmitter": false
}

Community record

{
  "type": "community",
  "id": "2defgh",
  "name": "javascript",
  "title": "JavaScript community",
  "description": "All about JavaScript...",
  "subscribers": 2500000,
  "activeUsers": 8500,
  "createdUtc": "2008-01-15T00:00:00+00:00",
  "isNsfw": false,
  "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/"
}

User record

{
  "type": "user",
  "id": "3ijklm",
  "username": "reddituser",
  "createdUtc": "2015-03-10T12:00:00+00:00",
  "linkKarma": 4521,
  "commentKarma": 12890,
  "totalKarma": 17411,
  "isGold": true,
  "isVerified": false,
  "isMod": true,
  "description": "A short bio...",
  "url": "https://www.reddit.com/user/reddituser"
}

You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel directly from the Apify Console.

Data fields

Field	Types	Description
type	all	post, comment, community, or user
id	all	Reddit content/user ID
title	post, community	Post title or community display name
body	post, comment	Post self-text or comment body
author	post, comment	Reddit username
subreddit	post, comment	Source subreddit
score	post, comment	Upvote score
numComments	post	Number of comments
createdUtc	all	ISO 8601 timestamp
url	all	Permanent link
isNsfw	post, community, user	Mature content flag
flair	post	Post flair text
upvoteRatio	post	Upvote/downvote ratio
depth	comment	Nesting depth in thread
subscribers	community	Subreddit subscriber count
activeUsers	community	Currently active users
username	user	Reddit username
linkKarma / commentKarma / totalKarma	user	Reddit karma stats
isGold / isVerified / isMod	user	Account badges

Pricing

From $2 per 1,000 results — the Actor uses lightweight HTTP requests with no browser overhead, making it very cost-efficient. No proxy costs, no API fees.

Tips and advanced options

• Combine listings + searches: provide a subreddit URL in startUrls and keywords in searches — the subreddit is scraped as a listing and used as scope for keyword searches
• Search users by keyword: set searchUsers: true and the Actor looks up the exact username via about.json and also searches for their posts
• Avoid duplicates: the Actor deduplicates results by type:id across all sources
• NSFW filtering: set includeNSFW: false (default) to filter out mature content from all result types
• Monitoring: run on a schedule with sort: "new" to track all new posts in a subreddit
• Large scrapes: set maxItems to 0 for unlimited pagination (up to Reddit's ~1000-item visibility limit)
• Comment depth: comments are flattened from the full reply tree — nested replies become individual records with a depth field
• Ignore startUrls when searching: set ignorestartUrls: true to use startUrls only as search scope without scraping their listings
• Search scope: when a subreddit URL is in startUrls, searches are scoped to that subreddit; otherwise searches span all of Reddit

FAQ, disclaimers, and support

Is this against Reddit's terms? This Actor scrapes publicly available data that is accessible without authentication. It respects rate limits and uses reasonable delays between requests. Users are responsible for complying with Reddit's Terms of Service and applicable laws.

Does this use the Reddit API? No — it uses Reddit's public JSON endpoints (the same data served to the web interface). No API key or OAuth is required. No login or proxy needed.

Why are some posts missing? Reddit's JSON endpoint returns approximately the first 1,000 results for any listing. For complete historical data, use Reddit's official API.

Can this scrape private/restricted subreddits? No — only public subreddits and posts are accessible. Private or quarantined communities return a 403 error.

How do searchUsers and startUrls user URLs differ? searchUsers takes a keyword and attempts an exact match lookup plus searches for that user's posts. User URLs in startUrls (e.g., https://www.reddit.com/user/username) fetch the exact profile and posts by that user.

Need help? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab in Apify Console. For custom scraping solutions or feature requests, contact us directly.