Best Twitter (X) Scrapers in 2026: Benchmarked
We benchmarked the top Twitter (X) scrapers across 200 URLs (profile pages and posts), for a total of 400 requests. To help you choose the right tool for your specific Twitter scraping projects, we have categorized the top performers below.
Price comparison of the top Twitter scrapers
Page types: Some providers offer pre-built scraper API templates tailored for various types of Twitter data, such as Twitter post and Twitter profile scrapers.
Cost efficiency by request volume
- Bright Data’s cost efficiency improves with volume as request-tier discounts apply.
- For profiles, Nimble sits between the two, but returns mixed JSON and HTML output.
- Apify’s stays flat across all volumes.
Prices are monthly, disregarding annual discounts. The pricing chart shows data for those with a success rate exceeding 50%. See the methodology section for the Twitter scraping benchmark.
Search market share breakdown for Twitter scrapers
The best Twitter scraping tools
Bright Data provides three pre-built scraping templates for x.com: posts (collect by URL), posts (collect by profile URL), and profiles (collect by URL). The provider gives a snapshot list for each scraping project, which returns metadata for each snapshot. You can monitor the current state of data collection by its ID and cancel a running collection.
Due to website limitations, the scraper APIs can only get up to 100 posts per URL. The basic plan starts at $0.7 per 1,000 records.
Sign up and apply promo code AIM50 at billing to receive a 50% discount
Visit WebsiteApify’s Twitter scraper extracts publicly available Twitter information, including hashtags, threads, replies, images, and historical data. You can download the extracted data in any format. The tool allows users to scrape Twitter data either by a search term or URL input.
You can choose which proxies to use, including custom proxies and automatic proxies. You can either pick your own proxy servers or use the provider’s residential and datacenter proxies.
NetNut offers a social media scraping API to extract live and on-demand data from sites such as LinkedIn. This social scraping solution supports proxy use and includes automatic proxy rotation to improve data-gathering efficiency.
PhantomBuster offers a Twitter Follower Scraper that extracts follower information from a public Twitter profile. The scraper will enable users to scrape public follower information by a URL.
You can scrape the URL of a single user account or a Google Sheet containing a list of Twitter account URLs. However, you cannot collect data using a keyword or hashtag as the input.
Octoparse’s social media scraper enables users to extract data from platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. The scraper performs Twitter scraping on the cloud and saves the scraped Twitter data on the cloud rather than on the user’s local machine.
How to build a Twitter scraper with Python
X’s Terms prohibit scraping without written permission, and violations may incur a $15,000 penalty for every 1,000,000 posts requested, viewed, or accessed in a single day. Use X’s approved interfaces, obtain permission where required, and follow its data-collection rules.
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Open-source projects on GitHub provide a starting point, but often fail under X.com’s rate-limiting and anti-scraping defenses. For a production pipeline, offload rendering, IP rotation, and anti-bot bypass to a dedicated Scraper API and add automated retries.
If you are looking to build a production-ready pipeline in Python, we recommend following this detailed guide to scraping X.com.
How much does the official X API cost?
X uses a pay-per-use API model rather than fixed monthly tiers. Developers buy credits in the Developer Console and are charged per resource or request:
- $0.001 per owned read
- $0.005 per post read
- $0.010 per user read
- $0.015 per content-creation request
Prices change, so check the X Developer Console before budgeting. At these rates, third-party scrapers extract comparable public data at a lower per-record cost for most read-heavy workloads.2
Add as preferred sourceTwitter datasets
Datasets are a great solution if you are okay with data that is updated frequently. Most web data providers provide data sets that can be queried.
However, if you need real-time data, you need to rely on one of the other options.
Twitter scraper benchmark methodology
We leveraged top web scraping API solutions to collect data from pre-selected URLs. Each provider processed each URL once, and the responses were recorded. Asynchronous methods were used for every API request.
The benchmark involved 200 URLs across 2 page types: profiles and posts. All providers are charged only for successful results.
- Bright Data and Apify returned JSON in all their responses from their dedicated Twitter APIs.
- However, Nimble offers a general-purpose API that returns
- Profiles as JSON ~60% of the time and HTML for the rest
- Posts as HTML
In our benchmark, we compared the leading dedicated Twitter scrapers (see the table below) based on their response times and pricing offerings for different request needs.
For more on methodology, please see social media scraping methodology.
FAQs
The legal treatment of public web data scraping under laws such as the CFAA depends on jurisdiction and context.
X’s Terms prohibit crawling or scraping without written permission and impose liquidated damages of $15,000, or €15,000 in the EU/EFTA/UK, for every 1,000,000 posts accessed within 24 hours. 3
A Twitter scraper is software that extracts data from Twitter. It enables users to collect various types of data associated with Twitter content and users, such as user profiles, hashtags, and tweets.
Twitter profiles: Profile description, image, username, and follower/following counts.
Tweets: Metadata associated with the content of a tweet, including likes, retweets, and replies.
Hashtags: You can collect tweets containing specific hashtags.
Twitter lists: List names, descriptions, and memberships.
Cite this benchmark
Pick the format that matches where you're publishing. Pasting the link version into your CMS preserves the backlink.
@misc{karatas2026,
author = {Karatas, Gulbahar},
title = {{Best Twitter (X) Scrapers in 2026: Benchmarked}},
year = {2026},
month = jun,
howpublished = {\url{https://aimultiple.com/twitter-scraper}},
note = {AIMultiple. Retrieved June 10, 2026}
}Reference Links
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