TikTok is the fastest-growing video-sharing platform with a wide variety of videos in different genres. If you are a vlogger or a branding marketer, you may need to analyze TikTok data. This could include collecting information such as video links, hashtags, views, shares, comments, etc. This data can be very useful for staying updated on the latest trends and your competitors’ activities.
So, in this article, we will recommend the 6 best TikTok scrapers to help you extract data from TikTok easily and quickly, even without any coding skills.
What is TikTok Scraping?
TikTok scraping involves extracting and collecting public data from TikTok. The TikTok data includes user profiles, videos, comments, likes, and hashtags. TikTok scraping tools automate the repeated collection and extraction of substantial volumes of TikTok data. They help businesses save a lot of time and resources compared to old-school manual data collection methods.
Why TikTok Scraping
According to the studies, more than 2 billion downloads across the globe and more than 100 million monthly active users combined on iOS and Android have been reported as of February 2021. This increasing huge number is enough to catch the attention of the personnel for data as well as marketing research and opportunities. Around 50 types of details can be collected by TikTok from a user through different means like views, followers, engagement rate, and more.
TikTok features a single HTTP endpoint and the same is also provided to its developers that are used for getting the embedded code for different videos. TikTok features an integrated system that makes data scraping and extraction difficult. Moreover, the site also tracks the cookies and the IPs and also has the user’s fingerprint.
Is it legal to scrape data from TikTok?
Does TikTok allow scraping? Will I be banned The legality of scraping data from TikTok is complex. It can be legal if you respect and follow data protection regulations and TikTok’s terms of service (TOS). It is generally not legal if the scraping activities violate relevant terms, such as copyrighted data collection or privacy breaches. Additionally, data protection regulations such as GDPR and CCPA may also impact the legality of scraping certain types of data.
Before scraping TikTok data, make sure to consider the following key factors:
- Personally Identifiable Information (PII)
- Copyrighted material
- Database protection laws.
- TikTok’s terms of service
Best TikTok Scraper to Extract Video Details from TikTok
Scraping data from TikTok or any other site can be quite complicated if you are going the coding way. But if you are not good at coding, there are ready-made tools available such as Octoparse, the best web scraping tool.
It provides an auto-detect mode to create a scraping workflow and customize the data field with simple Xpath, Ajax, pagination, etc. It also supports advanced functions like IP rotation, cloud extraction, schedule scraping, and others.
A step-by-step guide to scrape TikTok data without coding
Download Octoparse on your Windows or Mac device and follow the simple steps below to scrape data from TikTok.
Step 1: Launch Octoparse and paste the TikTok link
After installing Octoparse, open it and search TikTok on the search bar if you want to use a preset template. Otherwise, enter the TikTok link you want to scrape in the search box and then click on the Start button.
Step 2: Start auto-detecting and customize the workflow
Next, you’ll enter the auto-detecting by default, which will help you to create a workflow. When the process is complete, check the data which is selected using Data Preview. Here you can also remove the data fields which are not required, and add or revise any data field you want.
Step 3: Extract data from TikTok in Excel
Once you have checked all the data, click the Run button to start the scraping process. You can finally download the TikTok data in Excel, CSV, or any other format. Read Octoparse TikTok Scraping Guide to learn more details.
Preset TikTok data scraping template
Octoparse has preset TikTok scraping templates that you can get data with only a few clicks. If you want to scrape video URLs from TikTok by keywords or video comment content, title, author, comment count, click the Template section and search for TikTok to get the results. With the preset template, you can quickly and easily extract the data by entering several parameters only. Try the online TikTok scraper template below for TikTok video details and comments data.
https://www.octoparse.com/template/tiktok-video-comments-scraper
Other 5 TikTok Scraping Tools
There are several other readymade as well as coding-based methods and tools available to scrape TikTok data. Below we have shortlisted the 5 popular ones.
1. Phantombuster
Using this software, data from TikTok videos can be easily collected to any CRM. The site comes with more than 100 ready-made automation that can let you do the task quickly. A wide range of data from the site can be collected using the software so that you can analyze, study, as well as compare the TikTok data from its competitors. The program works on the cloud, which prevents you from the hassle of downloading any tool.
Key features
- Cloud-based tool for collecting data from TikTok and other sites.
- Comes with over 100 ready-made automation.
- Allows importing the data to any CRM.
- No coding is needed.
- Simple and quick process of extracting TikTok and other site data.
2. ScraperAPI
With this scraping tool, you simply need to send the URL for which data needs to be extracted to the site and the HTML response will be returned. The program uses retargeting JS rendering and residential proxies for data scraping.
Key features
- Allows scraping TikTok data along with proxy service for keeping your activities anonymous.
- Comes with a free trial version to check out the features and functioning of the tool.
- Offers 40M IPs across the globe along with 50 relocations.
- Offers unlimited bandwidth.
- The tool never gets blocked as it features anti-bot detection.
- Allows scraping a huge amount of data quickly and easily.
3. Python
Python is a programming language that lets you do multiple tasks by coding as needed. So, data scraping can be done using Python along with the Selenium platform if have knowledge about the coding and it’s working.
Key features
- Create coding using Python language for TikTok data scraping.
- Works by automating Google Chrome to have access to the data required.
- Customized codes as needed can be created using Python.
4. Apify
This is a powerful web scraping tool that helps in automating tasks using several bots and actors. Using the program, several popular sites can be scraped and the list also includes TikTok.
Key Features
- Allows extracting ide range of TikTok data including hashtags, users, profiles, posts, comments, shares, etc.
- The extracted data can be downloaded in Excel, HTML XML, JSON, CSV, and Excel.
- This proxy service provider is free to use, but proxies need to be added to browse.
- Allows freemiums tools.
5. ScrapeStorm
ScrapeStorm is an AI-driven web scraping tool designed to automate the extraction of data from websites. It is known for its user-friendly interface and ability to handle complex scraping tasks without requiring extensive programming knowledge. Here are some key features and aspects of ScrapeStorm：
Key features
- Intuitive interface for scraping data using the visual click operations that are embedded.
- The program supports desktop as well as cloud-based operations.
- The extracted data can be saved to TXT, CSV, MySQL, JSON, Excel, Google Sheets, etc.
- Comes with a free trial version (though with limitations).
- Support Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Final Thoughts
So, while selecting a TikTok data scraping tool, you need to be quite cautious so that your software is not blocked in just a few attempts. If you are confident with your coding skills, you can create customized codes using Python to scrape TikTok data. On the other hand, if you do not have any prior experience with coding and language, using a ready-made tool like Octoparse no code scraper works as the best solution.
