TikTok Scraper
If you’re interested in TikTok data scraping, you’re certainly in good company as TikTok has risen to become one of the most valuable social media platform, recently surpassing Instagram. As a result, it has built up a lot of interest from influencers & creators looking to scrape TikTok data.
Official TikTok API
If you look for an official TikTok API for data scraping, you’ll come across the official TikTok Developer Portal which has lots of great resources for how to build apps around TikTok, but nothing in the way of data scraping.
With some more searching, you’ll see that TikTok does not officially support scraping its public data (like Twitter & YouTube do), despite it being incredibly valuable for social media marketers, agencies & brands looking to monitor their performance and connect with TikTok influencers (all just making TikTok that much more valuable of a platform than Instagram ever was).
Unofficial Tik Tok Scrapers
There are several implementations of an Unofficial TikTok API in Python you can find on GitHub and use as alternatives to TikTok web scraping tools:
The problem with these however is that they most likely violate the TikTok Terms of Service, are subject to breaking at any time, and require you to actually run the code and put your IP address (and TikTok account) at risk of getting banned or blacklisted. While you’re welcome to use this code for whatever reasons you can imagine, if you simply need to scrape data from TikTok, this may be overkill.
Introducing TikAPI
Fortunately though, there’s TikAPI, which is a full-fledged TikTok Unofficial API Wrapper that allows anyone to scrape public data from TikTok via their API. The API also has plenty of cool “write” features, allowing you to manage your own TikTok account, but this webpage only contains integrations focused on scraping public data from TikAPI.
Check out the links above or see our TikAPI Integration for how you can use their API for scraping data from TikTok for your own use. A good starting point is to use the search or discover endpoints to scrape some popular TikTok posts. You’ll see that TikAPI also refers to these “posts” as videos, as in other TikAPI endpoints that ask for a video ID, for example to get the video details including the play URL, heart counts, and play counts.
TikTok Scraper Online
If you’re not comfortable maintaining your own code to use these APIs and Python tools (or just don’t want to re-invent the wheel), then we offer an online service to either scrape TikTok data directly from their website (using our HAR File Web Scraper), or via TikAPI as mentioned above.
We suggest using our TikAPI Scraper when available, but you’ll eventually encounter some use cases where TikAPI only works for certain use cases. For example, if you need to scrape TikTok comments, you’ll notice that TikAPI doesn’t support this option in its Public Data Endpoints. So as an alternative, you can use our HAR File Web Scraping service as outlined in How to Scrape TikTok Comments.