How to Export Instagram Comments: Every Method Compared

Why there is no built-in way

Instagram lets you read comments in the app and on the web, but it doesn’t offer an export. Meta’s “Download your information” tool gives you your own activity — comments you wrote — not the comments other people left on a post. So whether you are running a giveaway, collecting feedback on a product launch, or gathering data for a research project, you need some other route.

There are five realistic options. They differ mainly in three things: whether they need your Instagram login, whether they work on posts you don’t own, and how much effort they take once a post has more than a few dozen comments.

Method	Any public post?	Needs login	Effort	Good for
Copy by hand	Yes	No	Very high	Under ~50 comments
Instagram Graph API	No, your own business or creator account	Yes (Meta app + token)	High, one-off setup	Developers automating their own account
Scripts and scrapers	Usually	Often	High, and ongoing maintenance	Technical users who like tinkering
Browser extensions	Usually	Yes, your logged-in session	Low to medium	Occasional exports, if you trust the extension
Web tool (like IGComments)	Yes, public posts	No	Low	Most people, most posts

Option 1: copy the comments by hand

For a post with twenty or thirty comments, copying by hand is genuinely fine. Open the post on a computer at instagram.com, expand every “View replies” link, select the comment area and paste it into a spreadsheet or document.

Pros: free, nothing to install, no third party involved.

Cons: the pasted text arrives as a jumble of usernames, comment text, “Reply” links and relative dates like “3w”, which you then have to clean up. Instagram loads comments in batches, so on a busy post you have to keep clicking to load more, and it is easy to miss a batch or a reply thread without noticing. Exact timestamps and like counts don’t come across cleanly. Past roughly fifty comments, the cleanup usually takes longer than any other method.

Option 2: the Instagram Graph API (your own account only)

If the post belongs to an Instagram business or creator account that you manage, Meta’s official Instagram Graph API can return its comments and replies. This is the cleanest route for developers who want to automate something on their own account — for example, pulling new comments into a CRM every hour.

The setup, in broad strokes: connect the Instagram account to a Facebook Page or use Instagram Login for business, create an app in Meta’s developer dashboard, request the comment-reading permissions, generate an access token, then call the media and comments endpoints and page through the results. Meta changes the details from time to time, so follow its current documentation rather than an old tutorial.

Pros: official, stable, and suitable for ongoing automation on your own content.

Cons: it only covers media owned by the account you authorise — you can’t use it to export comments from a competitor’s post, a collaborator’s Reel or a giveaway someone else is hosting. It requires a developer app, tokens that expire, and code to handle paging and nested replies. For a one-off spreadsheet it is a lot of work.

Options 3 and 4: scripts, scrapers and Chrome extensions

Scripts and scrapers. There are open-source Python and JavaScript projects that fetch Instagram comments, and plenty of tutorials for writing your own with a headless browser. If you are comfortable on the command line, they can work.

Pros: free, flexible, and you control the output format.

Cons: Instagram changes its web pages and internal endpoints regularly, so scripts break without warning and you become the maintainer. Many of them want you to log in with your own account, and automated activity on a logged-in account can trigger rate limits, checkpoints or restrictions on that account. Handling replies, pagination and retries properly is more fiddly than it looks. And you need to stay within Instagram’s terms and data protection law yourself — see is it legal to export Instagram comments.

Chrome extensions. Several browser extensions add an “export comments” button to instagram.com. They work by reading the page while you are logged in, scrolling and expanding comments for you, and saving what they collect.

Pros: easy to start, often free for small posts.

Cons: an extension that can read Instagram pages runs inside your logged-in session, which means you are trusting its developer with access to your account. Extensions are sometimes sold to new owners, and permissions you granted to the old one carry over. Because they drive your real account, heavy use can look like automated activity to Instagram. Many cap free exports at a low number of comments, and some skip replies. Read the permissions and reviews carefully before installing one, and prefer an option that doesn’t need your login at all if it does the job.

Option 5: a no-login web tool

A web tool fetches the public comments for you on its own servers. You paste a link; it returns a file. IGComments works this way: no Instagram login, no password, no extension, and replies are included.

Pros: nothing to install, nothing to maintain, nothing touches your account. Works on any public post, Reel or carousel, including ones you don’t own. You get clean columns — usernames, full comment text, exact UTC timestamps, likes and reply threads — instead of a pasted mess.

Cons: it only works on public posts (private accounts are off limits for every legitimate method except the API on your own account), very large posts cost something, and you are relying on a third-party service. With IGComments the first 200 comments of any post are free; above that, a one-time Export Pass unlocks the rest — no subscription.

Step by step: export Instagram comments with IGComments

Copy the post link. In the Instagram app, open the post or Reel, tap Share (the paper-plane icon) and choose Copy link. On a computer, copy the address from the browser bar. Links look like instagram.com/p/… for posts and instagram.com/reel/… for Reels.
Paste it into IGComments. Go to the IGComments home page, paste the link and press Get comments.
Wait for the fetch. Posts with a few hundred comments are usually ready in seconds. Posts with tens of thousands take a few minutes. You can close the tab and come back to the same link, or leave your email and you’ll get a message when it’s ready.
Narrow it down if you want. Search for a word or an @username, show only top-level comments or only replies, keep comments with @mentions or hashtags, show questions, set a date range, or keep one comment per person. Sort by oldest, newest or most liked.
Download. Choose CSV, Excel (XLSX) or JSON. The file contains exactly the rows you filtered.

If the post has more than 200 comments, you see the first 200 straight away as a free preview — you can search them and check the stats before deciding. An Export Pass is a one-time payment for that post: $4.99 for up to 10,000 comments, $9.99 for up to 30,000, or $14.99 for up to 100,000. See pricing.

What you get in the file — and what you don’t

Every export has one row per comment with these columns: #, comment_id, username, user_id, comment, posted_at_utc, likes, is_reply, reply_to_comment_id, reply_to_username, mentions and hashtags. Replies say yes in is_reply and carry the ID and username of the comment they answer, so you can rebuild threads (see exporting comments with replies).

Timestamps are in UTC and written as 2026-10-06 14:05:31, a standard format that sorts correctly and that Excel and Google Sheets can convert to a date. If you need local time, add or subtract your offset in a helper column — for example =--F2-TIME(5,0,0) in Excel for UTC−5 — rather than editing the original column, so you always keep the exact source value. Comment text keeps its emoji, accents and line breaks; the CSV is UTF-8 with a byte-order mark so Excel reads it correctly, and the XLSX file sidesteps encoding questions entirely.

The export does not include display names, follower counts, email addresses or any other profile data — only what is attached to the comment itself. That keeps the file focused and avoids collecting personal data you probably don’t need.

Before you open a spreadsheet at all, the free stats panel answers the common questions: total and unique commenters, repeat commenters, replies versus top-level comments, questions, the most active commenters, most-mentioned accounts, top hashtags, words and emoji, most-liked comments and comments per day. More on that in how to analyze Instagram comments without AI.

Which method should you use?

A handful of comments, once: copy them by hand.
Your own business account, every day, feeding another system: build on the Instagram Graph API.
Any public post, any size, as a spreadsheet, today: a no-login web tool such as IGComments.
A giveaway: export the comments if you need a record of entries, but use a dedicated picker for the draw itself — our sister tool Pickfetti picks a random winner and gives you a public proof page.

Whatever you choose, expect the number of exported comments to be lower than the count Instagram shows under the post. Instagram counts comments that nobody can see — spam-filtered, hidden and deleted ones among them. The reasons are covered in why the Instagram comment count doesn’t match.

Once your file is downloaded, these guides pick up from there: working with the export in Excel, in Google Sheets, and finding who commented most.

FAQ

Can I export Instagram comments for free?

Yes. Copying by hand is free, and IGComments exports any public post with up to 200 comments for free in CSV, Excel or JSON. Larger posts show the first 200 free and need a one-time Export Pass for the rest.

Does Instagram have an official comment export?

Not in the app. Meta’s Download your information tool covers your own activity, not comments other people left on a post. The Instagram Graph API can return comments, but only on media owned by a business or creator account you manage.

Do I need to give my Instagram password to export comments?

Not with IGComments. You paste a link to a public post and the comments are fetched without your login. Browser extensions and many scripts do use your logged-in account.

Can I export comments from someone else’s post?

Yes, as long as the post is public. The Graph API can’t do this, but a web tool like IGComments can, because it reads comments that anyone can already see.

Are replies included in the export?

Yes. Replies are included and marked with is_reply, reply_to_username and reply_to_comment_id. You can filter to top-level comments only before exporting.

Why are there fewer comments in my export than Instagram shows?

Instagram’s count includes comments that are hidden from everyone, such as spam-filtered, Hidden Words, restricted and deleted comments. Those can’t be exported by any outside tool.