ExportComments alternative: exporting YouTube comments free

Why export YouTube comments?

Extracting YouTube comments into a clean CSV, Excel, or Google Sheets file is one of the most useful workflows for creators, marketers, and researchers.

Common use cases include:

• Running Fair Giveaways: Exporting all comments to randomly draw a contest winner.
• Customer Research & Sentiment: Analyzing viewer questions and feedback to generate new video ideas.
• Backup & Archiving: Keeping a record of user testimonials and community interactions.
• Lead Qualification: Finding highly engaged audience members who consistently comment on your content.

While services like ExportComments provide a quick way to download comments, their strict limits on free tiers often force users into expensive recurring subscriptions for simple one-off tasks.

The problem with paid comment exporters (ExportComments limitations)

ExportComments allows users to paste a YouTube video URL and download a spreadsheet. However, creators quickly hit several frustrating hurdles:

1. The free tier stops at 100 results per video, delivered as XLSX. If your video has 800 comments, 100 of them is a sample rather than an export.
2. Slow Scraping Speeds: Web scrapers often take several minutes to process high-volume threads.
3. CSV and JSON sit behind a paid plan, so the free download is a spreadsheet format rather than something you can pipe into a script.

Fortunately, there are several reliable, free alternatives available in 2026.

Top free & paid ExportComments alternatives compared

Method 1: a browser tool on the official API

The free exporter here exists because this was the gap. Paste the video URL, pick how many comments, download CSV or JSON. The free ceiling is 500 comments, five times ExportComments' free tier, and supplying your own YouTube Data API key raises it to 1,000 and spends your quota rather than ours.

One row per comment, with:

• comment_id and parent_id, so replies stay attached to what they answer
• author and author_channel_url
• text, the original rather than the HTML-formatted version
• like_count, published_at and updated_at in ISO 8601
• is_reply

The CSV carries a UTF-8 byte-order mark, which sounds like trivia until you open a file of Japanese or Korean comments in Excel and get a page of question marks.

The honest limits: 500 is a ceiling, so very large threads get truncated. Private and unlisted videos are not readable. Nothing is stored once the file reaches your browser, so there is no history to come back to.

Method 1b: an open-source command-line downloader

For tens of thousands of comments, a Python downloader is the only thing that will finish. Install with pip and run it against a video id.

Two things to know first. Most of these read YouTube's internal web endpoints rather than the Data API, which is the scraping side of the line rather than the API side, and worth understanding against what the API Terms actually prohibit. And the output is JSON lines rather than a spreadsheet, so budget a conversion step.

Method 2: Google Sheets & YouTube Data API

You can connect Google Sheets directly to YouTube's official API using a free Google Apps Script:

1. Create a new Google Sheet and open Extensions > Apps Script.
2. Enable the YouTube Data API v3 service.
3. Use a short script to fetch comments for any video ID directly into your spreadsheet rows.

This method gives you complete control over which data fields you pull (e.g., author name, comment text, publish date, like count).

From exporting comments to automating them with ReplyTide

A specific pattern shows up often enough to name. A creator says "comment CHECKLIST and I'll send it", gets four hundred takers, and exports the comments to work out who to email, which they cannot do anyway because YouTube does not give you commenters' email addresses.

If that is why you are here, the export is a workaround for a missing step rather than the job itself.

There is a much better way:

Instead of manually exporting comments and emailing leads individually, use ReplyTide to automate the entire process.

• When a viewer types your trigger keyword, ReplyTide automatically posts a reply with the download link instantly.
• You skip the export entirely, and viewers get the promised resource within a minute or two of asking.

What people are actually trying to do

Almost every export request is one of four jobs, and two of them do not need an export at all.

• Finding one comment somebody left two thousand deep. That is a search, not an export.
• Drawing a giveaway winner. The picker does deduplication, keyword filtering and a reproducible seed end to end.
• Research: finding the questions that keep repeating. Export to JSON and hand it to an AI assistant.
• Evidence: keeping a record of who said what. That is a genuine export, and CSV is right.

Common questions

Is it allowed to export YouTube comments?

Reading public comments through the official YouTube Data API is the route Google provides for exactly this, and it is what the tool here uses. The area to be careful about is scraping the watch page or driving a logged-in account, which is a different thing and is what the API Terms are aimed at.

What is the fastest way to export YouTube comments for free?

Paste the video link into a browser tool that reads the official API and download the file. No install and no account. Command-line downloaders go further on very large videos but cost you a Python install first.

Can I export comments from private or unlisted YouTube videos?

You cannot export comments from private videos using third-party web scrapers. However, if you own the channel, you can export them using your authenticated YouTube Data API credentials.

Official references

• ExportComments
• YouTube Data API: commentThreads.list
• YouTube API Services Developer Policies