Best Facebook Scrapers: Apify, Oxylabs & Decodo
We benchmarked seven web scraping APIs with 9,000 Facebook requests on 1,500 URLs: 500 profiles, 500 posts and 500 reels. For every request we measured success rate, completion time, and the number of parsed metadata fields returned.
Facebook scrapers benchmark results
Pricing of the best Facebook scraper tools
What data you can scrape from Facebook
Bright Data returned JSON for every Facebook page type. Apify returned JSON for profiles and posts, SerpApi and Nimble for profiles only, while Zyte, Oxylabs and Decodo returned raw HTML. The JSON providers share the core data, such as the profile name, follower count, category, intro text and profile picture, and the post text, date, reaction, comment and share counts and media.
The tables below list only the fields that one provider returned and the others did not, matched by meaning rather than by name.
Facebook profiles:
Facebook posts:
Bright Data was the only provider that returned reels as JSON, with the same 40 fields it returns for posts:
Features of the best Facebook scraping tools
Bright Data offers 16 Facebook scraper APIs, grouped by content type:
- Posts: collect by profile URL, group URL or post URL
- Comments: collect by post URL
- Pages and profiles: collect page data by page URL, or profile data by profile URL
- Marketplace: collect by listing URL, or discover by keyword or search URL
- Events: collect by event URL, or discover by search URL or venue URL
- Reels: collect by profile URL
- Company reviews: collect by URL
- Meta Ad Library: collect by ad URL, or discover by keyword
- Scraper API: for developers, with scheduling, storage, delivery and integration options.
- No-code scraper: a control panel where non-developers enter Facebook URLs and collect the data.
Bright Data also provides 11 ready-made Facebook datasets in its Dataset Marketplace, including posts by profile, group or post URL, comments, pages and profiles, Marketplace listings, events and reels.
We used Bright Data’s Facebook pages and profiles scraper and its posts scraper, both collecting by URL. The posts scraper also ran the reels.
Bright Data succeeded on 98.2% of profiles, 99.8% of posts and 98.0% of reels; all 10 failed reels failed the value check on likes. It returned 39.9 fields per post and 39.8 per reel, the most of any provider, and 17.6 per profile.
We called Oxylabs through its Web Scraper API, now named Web API, in Realtime mode with the universal source and JavaScript rendering. The API returns the rendered page as HTML, so the data has to be extracted with CSS selectors.
Oxylabs succeeded on every reel and on 97.0% of profiles, but on 90.6% of posts: 38 of its 47 failed posts were HTTP 500 errors from Oxylabs’s own servers, and 6 were blocked. Requests averaged 27.8 seconds.
For Decodo we used the Web Scraping API’s generic endpoint with headless rendering and the premium proxy pool. The response is the page HTML, so the data has to be pulled out of the markup. Decodo succeeded on every reel and on 97.8% of profiles, but on 91.2% of posts.
Decodo’s Web Scraping API is now part of its Web Data API, and works as /scrape under the same API key.
SerpApi answers in one synchronous call, which made it the fastest provider in the benchmark at 2.5 seconds per request, with 15.5 fields per profile. It succeeded on 90.0% of profiles; for 44 of them the API answered “Facebook Profile hasn’t returned any results for this query.” SerpApi has no API for Facebook posts or reels.
The API takes a profile ID and returns the name, ID, URL, verification status, profile and cover photos, likes, followers, profile type, intro text and category. Depending on the profile type, the response also includes the address, phone, email, business hours, price range, social links and photos.
We used two Apify-maintained actors: Facebook Pages Scraper for profiles and Facebook Posts Scraper for posts. Apify’s reels actor lists the reels of a page and takes no single reel URL, so Apify was not tested on reels.
It succeeded on 98.6% of profiles and 99.8% of posts, and it was the fastest provider on posts at 6.7 seconds per request (12.2 seconds for profiles).
Apify returned the most fields per profile, 25.7 on average, including ratings, price range, service area and WhatsApp numbers when the page lists them.
Nimble returned Facebook profiles as JSON through its facebook_page Extract Template and fetched posts and reels as rendered HTML through its Extract API. Its post template needs numeric page and story IDs that a shared post URL does not carry, and it has no reel template.
Nimble succeeded on 97.6% of profiles, 99.4% of posts and 99.6% of reels, with 11.1 fields per profile. It averaged 13.0 seconds per request, the fastest of the providers tested on all three page types.
We sent Zyte API every Facebook URL with browser rendering turned on, which returns the rendered page as HTML. Zyte returns no parsed Facebook fields, so the data has to be extracted with CSS selectors.
It succeeded on 98.4% of profiles, 99.8% of posts and 99.4% of reels, 99.2% overall, and averaged 14.3 seconds per request.
Add as preferred sourceFacebook scraper benchmark methodology
We collected the Facebook results from our social media scraping benchmark, where we tested 7 providers on 6,500 pages across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X and LinkedIn. For Facebook, we used 500 profiles, 500 posts and 500 reels. We tested Bright Data, Decodo, Nimble, Oxylabs and Zyte on all three, Apify on profiles and posts, and SerpApi on profiles only.
We explain the full methodology in the social media scraping benchmark: how we chose the URLs, which endpoint we used for each provider, and how we decided whether a response was successful.
Cite this research
Pick the format that matches where you're publishing. Pasting the link version into your CMS preserves the backlink.
@misc{dogan2026,
author = {Dogan, Sedat and Şipi, Nazlı},
title = {{Best Facebook Scrapers: Apify, Oxylabs & Decodo}},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
howpublished = {\url{https://aimultiple.com/facebook-scraping}},
note = {AIMultiple. Retrieved October 22, 2026}
}Results and timestamps of 15.1 thousand data points. Download the summary data shown in this article's charts and tables as a ZIP file containing 8 CSV files and a README.
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Changelog
10 updatesAdded a SerpApi Facebook Profile API section covering its benchmark success rate and metadata fields.
Added Facebook scrapers benchmark results.
Added a Facebook scraper benchmark methodology section.
Added the "Pricing of the best Facebook scraper tools 2026" section.
- Has 20 years of experience as a white-hat hacker and development guru, with extensive expertise in programming languages and server architectures.
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