Best Facebook Scrapers: Apify, Oxylabs & Decodo
We benchmarked five web scraping providers on the same 1,000 Facebook post URLs, for 5,000 requests in total. For every request, we measured success rate, completion time and the number of parsed metadata fields returned.
Facebook scrapers benchmark results
- Apify was the fastest provider at 6 seconds per request and tied with Zyte for the highest success rate at 99.9%. Apify was also the only provider that returned parsed JSON, with 27 metadata fields per post. The other four returned rendered HTML.
- Success rate barely separates four of the five providers. Apify, Zyte, Nimble and Oxylabs all completed between 99.4% and 99.9% of the 1,000 Facebook post requests.
- Completion time separates them more. Zyte and Nimble averaged 12 seconds per request, Oxylabs 18 and Decodo 20, which is two to three times Apify’s 6 seconds.
- Decodo completed 86.2% of requests, so about 14 in 100 failed, and it was also the slowest.
Pricing of the best Facebook scraper tools
See the best Facebook scraping tools based on supported page types, output formats, pricing, and trial options.
- Dedicated: a Facebook-specific API that returns structured JSON with parsed fields.
- General-purpose: a scraping API that is not built for Facebook. It returns the page HTML, and you extract the Facebook data yourself.
- NDJSON and JSONL: newline-delimited JSON with one JSON object per line, which suits large datasets.
What data you can scrape from Facebook
Apify was the only benchmarked provider that returned structured JSON. Decodo, Oxylabs, Nimble and Zyte returned rendered HTML, so they had no parsed fields to count. The table groups the 27 fields Apify returned for a Facebook post by category:
Posts are one of several Facebook page types. Dedicated scrapers for the other types, such as Bright Data’s Facebook scrapers and SerpApi’s Profile API, return their own data:
- Profiles: name, profile and cover photos, intro text, work history, education, followers, verification status and photo galleries.
- Pages: name, category, intro text, followers, likes, verification status, address, phone, email, business hours, price range, ratings, Page Transparency data and links to other social accounts.
- Group posts: post text, hashtags and engagement counts, plus the group’s name, category and member count.
- Comments: comment text, likes, replies and details of the parent post.
- Reels: description, hashtags, engagement counts and latest comments.
- Marketplace listings: price, product category and location.
- Events: event type, date, location and engagement.
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 called Oxylabs through its Web Scraper API in Realtime mode, with the universal source and HTML rendering. The API returns the rendered page as HTML, so Facebook post data has to be extracted with CSS selectors. Oxylabs completed 99.4% of the 1,000 Facebook post requests and averaged 18 seconds per request.
We called Decodo through its Scraper API v2 with the generic endpoint, headless HTML rendering and the premium proxy pool. Decodo returns the page HTML without parsed fields, so Facebook post data has to be extracted from the markup. Decodo completed 86.2% of the 1,000 Facebook post requests and averaged 20 seconds per request, the lowest success rate and the slowest time in the benchmark.
SerpApi’s Facebook Profile API returns structured JSON for Facebook profiles and pages.
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.
Apify’s Facebook Posts Scraper is an Actor in the Apify Store that collects posts from Facebook page and post URLs and exports them as JSON, CSV or Excel. You can add URLs manually, upload them as a list or send them through the API.
You can add URLs manually, upload them as a list or send them through the API.
In our benchmark, Apify completed 99.9% of the 1,000 Facebook post requests and averaged 6 seconds per request, the fastest of the five providers. Apify was the only benchmarked provider that returned parsed JSON, with 27 metadata fields per post:
Nimble offers a general-purpose Web API with no dedicated Facebook endpoint. We called it with default settings, and it returned the rendered Facebook page as HTML, so post data has to be extracted with CSS selectors. Nimble completed 99.5% of the 1,000 Facebook post requests and averaged 12 seconds per request.
Nimble’s geo-targeting goes down to state and city level. Nimble sells pay-as-you-go and monthly plans.
We called Zyte API with browserHtml, which renders the page in a headless browser and returns the final HTML. Zyte returns no parsed Facebook fields, so post data has to be extracted with CSS selectors. Zyte completed 99.9% of the 1,000 Facebook post requests, the highest success rate among the HTML providers, and averaged 12 seconds per request.
Add as preferred sourceFacebook scraper benchmark methodology
We benchmarked five web scraping providers on the same 1,000 Facebook post URLs, for 5,000 requests in total.
Providers and settings
- Apify: Facebook Posts Scraper Actor (apify/facebook-posts-scraper), one URL per Actor run
- Decodo: Scraper API v2, generic endpoint, headless HTML rendering, premium proxy pool
- Oxylabs: Realtime API, universal source, HTML rendering
- Nimble: Web API, default call, rendered HTML
- Zyte: Zyte API with browserHtml
Each provider received each URL once, one URL per request and without batching, so every response time belongs to a single URL. All requests ran sequentially from a single cloud server.
We stored every response and scored it in a separate pass after the run. A parsing fix therefore needs no new requests, and every number in this benchmark can be re-derived from the saved responses.
Post types
The URL set has two post types: 555 group posts and 445 page or profile posts. Facebook renders them differently. A group post shows the member who wrote it and the group it belongs to, while a page post shows the page. Each post type has its own CSS selectors, because scoring a group post with page selectors would count a correct response as a failure.
Success criteria
A response counts as successful when it returns the post’s data. An HTTP 404 also counts as a success, because the post no longer exists and the provider reported that correctly. Any other status outside 200 to 399 counts as a failure. Some APIs return HTTP 200 even when Facebook answered their request with 403 or 404, so we read that inner Facebook status separately and apply the same rule to it.
Apify is the only benchmarked provider that returns JSON. An Apify response passes when at least two of these fields have a value of the expected type: pageName, text, time or timestamp, comments and shares. We require two fields because a response that only echoes back the input URL would pass on a single field.
Decodo, Oxylabs, Nimble and Zyte return rendered HTML. An HTML response passes when at least one of our CSS selectors for that post type matches. The selectors cover the author, the post body, the comment count and the share count. The author selector tries three sources: the member who wrote a group post, the group itself, and the page name in the og:title tag of a page post. We wrote and checked all selectors against captured responses before the run.
Deleted posts do not count against any provider. When two or more providers independently report a URL as unavailable, no provider is penalized for returning no content from that URL.
Metadata and completion time
The metadata count is the number of structured JSON fields a provider returns already parsed. Only Apify is scored on metadata. Decodo, Oxylabs, Nimble and Zyte return raw HTML and leave the parsing to you.
Completion time is the average time per request across successful responses only, so fast failures do not make a provider look faster.
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 = aug,
howpublished = {\url{https://aimultiple.com/facebook-scraping}},
note = {AIMultiple. Retrieved August 27, 2026}
}Results and timestamps of 12.0 thousand data points. Download the summary data shown in this article's charts and tables as a ZIP file containing 3 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.
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