Scraping social media websites has become quite imperative for multiple companies. You can track people’s sentiments through their comments, posts, likes, etc.
Companies can track feedback from their customers or they can track activities of their competitors.
Today influencer marketing is at its peak and by scraping the number of followers and their content reach one can decide to promote their products with them.
PR agencies can scrape social media to analyze hot topics and then they can ask their clients to create content on the same.
On the other hand, political parties can identify which topic should be on the agenda for the election campaign.
Among all social media websites, Twitter is the most dynamic one. It has around 568 Million active users which makes it a great data dump. From movie celebrities to top political figures all are pretty active over here and hence there will be a lot of user-generated data over here due to reactions from common people.
But scraping Twitter at scale is a challenge in itself because your IP will be blocked in no time and your data pipeline will be blocked. So, it is always advisable to use a Twitter Scraping API.
In this blog, we will have compiled a list of X (Twitter) scraping APIs, testing each for scalability and pricing.
Scrapingdog Twitter Scraper API
Scrapingdog provides a dedicated Twitter Scraper API which can be used for scraping Twitter at scale. Let’s sign up for the trial and see how it actually works.
After signup, you will be redirected to your dashboard. You will find an X Scraper on the left.
Suppose, I want to scrape this tweet. I can directly use the dashboard to scrape it.
In the above Screenshot, as you can see you got details like tweet text, number of likes, number of comments, etc.
You can also copy the ready-to-use Python code on the right and paste it directly into your development environment.
import requests
api_key = "your-api-key"
url = "https://api.scrapingdog.com/twitter"
params = {
"api_key": api_key,
"url": "https://x.com/MedvedevRussiaE/status/1902119607478939707",
"parsed": "true"
}
response = requests.get(url, params=params)
if response.status_code == 200:
data = response.json()
print(data)
else:
print(f"Request failed with status code: {response.status_code}")
If you want to learn more about this X Scraper API, then check out this video from Scrapingdog.
Brightdata
Of course, twitter Scraping APIs list incomplete without Brightdata. They provide a dedicated solution for scraping Twitter at scale. They do not provide a trial for this scraper but personally speaking, they have one of the best solutions for scraping Twitter. The cost for scraping each record will be around $0.0009.
Scrapingbee
Scrapingbee does not provide a dedicated X scraper API, but you can use their general web scraper to scrape it. You can sign up for their free trial to test the API.
After scraping the raw HTML you can parse the required data using libraries like BeautifulSoup in Python or Cheerio in Nodejs. Per page cost for scraping Twitter with Scrapingbee will be around $0.0016.
ScraperAPI
ScraperAPI used to provide a dedicated scraper but seems like they have removed it now. Just like Scrapingbee, you have to use their general web scraper in order to scrape raw HTML from Twitter.
Each request for scraping Twitter will cost approximately $ 0.0049.
Know Why: Scrapingdog is the best Alternative to Scraper API!!
Conclusion
We have curated a list of all the Twitter scrapers available in the market. Of course, there are a few more but they were not as good as these four. We will keep updating this list as we find better Twitter scraping solutions.
Additional Resources
Web Scraping with Scrapingdog
