How to Scrape Instagram and 6 Best Instagram Scrapers in 2023

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Social media scraping allows businesses to collect insightful data from social media networks for a variety of purposes, including market research, brand monitoring and lead generation. Instagram is one the great sources for businesses to increase their online visibility, leads, and sales. According to recent research:

Instagram is the 4th most-used visited social media platform in the world.¹
90% of Instagram users follow a business account.²
Instagram was the second-most popular social media platform worldwide among marketers in 2022. 79% of marketers used Instagram to promote their business.³

If you want to leverage Instagram data, you need to scrape a massive amount of public data from Instagram. Manually extracting data is tedious; you should use a web scraping tool to accelerate and optimize the data collection process.

This article discusses what Instagram scraping is, whether it is illegal or not, what Instagram data to scrape, how to scrape Instagram and the top 6 Instagram scrapers.

What is Instagram scraping?

Instagram scraping is the automated extraction of publicly accessible data from social media accounts, such as keywords/hashtags, posts and profiles.

Is it legal to scrape Instagram?

It is not illegal to scrape publicly available Instagram data as long as:

Your scraping activities do not harm the scraped website, such as using scraped data to duplicate or damage the website’s service and operation.
You do not gather personally identifiable data (PII).

There are technical best practices for web scraping that will allow you to collect data from websites in an ethical manner, such as:

Figure 1: The ‘robots.txt’ file for Instagram

Instagram's robots.txt file specifies which pages of the website web crawlers may access.

What Instagram data can you scrape?

There is so much Instagram data available to the public that we will divide it into three categories:

Keywords / hashtags: You can extract post URLs and media URLs containing a specific keyword or hashtag.
Posts: You can retrieve Instagram post data, including URL, permalink, date, likes, comments, and post author ID.
Profiles: Using a specific account name or URL, you can obtain all public data in an Instagram profile, such as posts, image URLs, likes, comments, and the number of followers/following.

What is the best way to scrape Instagram?

1. Web scraping APIs for Instagram scraping

Web scraping APIs enable users to access and scrape data from web sources using requests and responses. For instance, when a user makes a connection request to the target website, the web scraping API forwards the request using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Then, it receives the requested data from the target site in JSON or XML format.

However, API is only an option if the target web server supports API technology; otherwise, API cannot be used to scrape data from the web server. You can collect data from Instagram by either:

Instagram API

The Instagram Graph API allows businesses and creators to access and retrieve publicly available data from Instagram. Since it provides authorized Instagram access, you need not worry about being blocked or identified as a malicious actor. You can only use the Instagram Graph API if the Instagram account you are targeting is a business account.

Figure 2: Getting image url data with a hashtag query

Source: Instagram Graph API⁴

2. Web scraping bots for Instagram scraping

2.1 Low code & no code web scrapers

No-code or codeless web scrapers enable programmers and non-programmers to scrape Instagram data using prebuilt data collection templates. You can use a Instagram scraper that require no coding to collect data from Instagram without writing a single line of code.

It may be more expensive to outsource the development of scraping infrastructure than to build a Instagram scraper in-house. If you have a budget and do not want to waste time in maintaining a web scraping software, you can utilize a web scraping service to scrape Instagram.

2.2 Cloud web scrapers

Cloud web scrapers enable users to perform Instagram scraping on the cloud. Scraped Instagram data is stored in the cloud rather than on the user’s local device. Running your Instagram scraper in the cloud is a cost-effective way to collect massive amounts of data from Instagram.

2.3 Open source web scrapers

Open-source web crawlers allow users to scrape data from web sources and social media networks without the cost of licensing. Users can modify open-source Instagram scraping tools based on their particular Instagram scraping requirements.

3. In-house web scrapers for Instagram scraping

Another method for scraping Instagram is to create your web scraper. You can use scraping libraries such as javascript, python, and ruby to build your code environment. In-house Instagram scrapers enable users to customize and modify based on their business requirements.

Some programming languages, such as Javascript, are challenging to understand if you are unfamiliar with basic programming knowledge or are a less experienced developer. Before deciding on a programming language, you should investigate the community and resources available for that language online.

4. Proxies for Instagram scraping

You can use a proxy service to support your Instagram scraper while collecting data. Instagram scrapers integrated with proxies enable large-scale data collection and region-specific content access.

Instead of outsourcing the development and maintenance of a proxy solution, you can build an in-house proxy server. An outsourcing proxy solution makes sense if you don’t have the budget to outsource your proxy service and only need a small amount of Instagram data. However, in-house proxy services require an experienced technical team to build and maintain proxy activities.

Check out Top 10 Proxy Service Providers for Web Scraping to comprehend the proxy providers landscape.

Case study: Cely is a Brazilian startup that connects brands with influencers to promote their products and services.

Challenge: The company struggled to collect massive amounts of data without being blocked in the Brazilian market.
Initiative: Cely used Smartproxy’s residential IPs to circumvent IP blocks while collecting data from social media platforms.
Business outcomes: <0.61 second proxy response time and 99.47% success rate.

A step-by-step guide to scraping Instagram data

Determine your target and the method of data extraction. You can extract Instagram data using URLs or search queries such as keywords and hashtags.

Sponsored: Check out how Instagram data would look using Bright Data’s Instagram scraper.
Figure 3: Shows a publicly available profile output scraped from Instagram using a search query.

Source: Bright Data

Provide input, such as a profile URL, a post URL, or a specific hashtag or keyword, to the Instagram scraper.
Choose whether to receive data in real-time or in batches.
Scraping Instagram posts with the “show more button” is challenging for scrapers. It would help if you used an Instagram scraper or scraping API solution that handles loading more buttons and pagination while scraping.
Download your scraped data in the format offered by the web scraping service, which could be HTML, JSON, or CSV.

Instagram data collection use cases

Instagram is an effective social media platform for businesses to increase their brand awareness, leads, and sales.

1. Marketing

Instagram keyword and topic trendspotting

Instagram scraping allows businesses to target competitive keywords and hashtags in their domain. Using proper hashtags makes brand content visible to a larger audience.

Hashtags are clickable on Instagram. For instance, if a user clicks a hashtag on an Instagram post, Instagram will display all content that has been tagged with that hashtag. When you tag your content with the appropriate hashtag, your chances of appearing on the hashtag page increase.

However, it is tedious to go through each Instagram post on your explore page to find trending hashtags on Instagram. Instagram web scraping tools enable businesses to:

Track the performance of the hashtag marketing campaign
Find trending hashtags
Target niche hashtags

Figure 4: Finding relevant hashtags on Instagram with autocomplete feature

Instagram's autocomplete feature enables brands discover and cover top keywords in their domain.

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing industry is projected to reach approximately $21.1 billion in 2023. You can collaborate with influencers to promote your brand.⁵

Selecting the appropriate influencer for your target audience is essential to the success of your campaign. When asked how difficult it is to find a proper influencer, 78% of marketers said it is somewhat or very challenging.

Instagram scrapers allow brands to find top influencers who mention your hashtag. You can also gather social media hashtags these influencers use, their locations, and information about their follower audience from instagram profiles using Instagram scraper.

Figure 5: How simple it is for businesses to locate the right influencers for their marketing campaign

According to the study, 78% of marketers said it is somewhat or very challenging to find a proper influencer to promote their products. — Source: Influencer Marketing Hub ⁶

2. Sales

Lead generation with certain hashtags

Reaching out to people who follow specific hashtags in your domain effectively expands your audience. You can research what your competitors are posting and the hashtags they use to reach a new audience. Instagram scraping enables brands to collect user data by targeting specific keywords or hashtags.

3. Customer success

Instagram scraping allows brands to collect customer review data on Instagram posts. You can limit the number of comments and posts using a certain keyword or hashtag to narrow down your data. Businesses can conduct sentiment analysis on collected customer review data. Sentiment analysis allows companies to learn more about how their customers perceive their products or service.

6 Best Instagram Scrapers in 2023

We analyzed 6 social media scraping tools, which included no-code web scrapers and web scraping APIs:

No code Instagram scrapers:

Web scraping APIs:

Oxylabs
Apify
ScrapingBee
Diffbot

	Features	Pricing	Free Trial	Free Version
Bright Data	▸ Easy data scraping for beginners ▸ Adapts to site changes ▸ Collect as much data as you need ▸ Proxy-like integration ▸ Handle anti-scraping technologies	▸ Pay as you go ▸ $500/mo -> 250K pages ▸ $1,000/mo -> 670K pages	✅	❌
Smartproxy	▸ 40M+ proxy pool ▸ Results in raw HTML ▸ Headless scraping ▸ Handle anti-scraping technologies ▸ Proxy-like integration	▸ $50/mo -> 25K requests ▸ $100/mo -> 100K requests ▸ $250/mo -> 275K requests ▸ $500/mo -> 625K requests	✅	❌
Oxylabs	▸ Collect country-specific real-time data ▸ JavaScript rendering ▸ Handle anti-scraping technologies ▸ Proxy-like integration	▸ $99/mo – $999/month	✅	❌
Apify	▸ JavaScript rendering ▸ Proxy-like & webhooks integration ▸ Automatic proxy rotation	▸ Pay as you go ▸ $49/mo – $499/mo	✅	✅
ScrapingBee	▸ JavaScript rendering ▸ Handle anti-scraping technologies ▸ Proxy-like integration ▸ Automatic proxy rotation	▸ $49/mo -> 150K API calls ▸ $99/mo -> 1 million API calls ▸ $249/mo -> 3 million API calls ▸ $599+/mo -> 9+ million API calls	✅	❌
Diffbot	▸ JavaScript rendering ▸ Automatic proxy rotation ▸ Collect country-specific data	▸ $299/mo -> 5 calls per second ▸ $899/mo -> 25 calls per second ▸ Custom -> 25+ calls per second	✅	❌