Can I extract data from Instagram?

There were a lot of questions about scraping Instagram followers or posts for marketing purposes. Yes, you can scrape data such as Instagram post URLs and comments, but we'd say that Instagram is one of the toughest service for scraping and here's why:

1) Instagram prohibits accessing any content on the Service via automated means, so even residential proxies can be banned.

2) You'll be highly likely to be blocked by Instagram if you scrape data from Instagram.

3) High risk, low return. You will get only limited data.

Please also note that web scraping should be conducted ethically by respecting protections that many websites take, including anti-scraping measures. For further inquiries, please contact the Listly team at hello@listly.io.


What data you can extract from Instagram:

  • Instagram story highlights
  • Following accounts
  • Respective Instagram post URLs
  • Comments on each post
  • Instagram accounts that commented on a particular post