snscrape
A social networking service scraper
Decision gist · record as of 2026-08-14
Yes, if you need to scrape social media data and can tolerate dormant maintenance. The low install friction and lack of vulnerabilities make it safe to try. However, be prepared for scrapers to break without warning as platforms change; test against your target service first and monitor the GitHub repository for community fixes. Not suitable for production systems requiring active support.AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying
Before you install
- Requires Python 3.8 or higher; lxml dependency also requires libxml2 and libxslt system libraries to be installed.
- Low install friction with standard web-scraping dependencies.
- Maintenance is dormant—last release was June 2023 and last commit November 2023—so expect no active bug fixes or feature updates, though the repository remains public and unarchived.
License · maintenance · safety
copyleft license (copyleft) — Licensed under GPLv3+, a copyleft license. Any derivative work or distribution must also be open-source under compatible terms; proprietary use or closed-source redistribution is not permitted.
last release 2023-06-22 (1149 days) · last repo commit 2023-11-15 · 5,439 stars
0 known vulnerabilities (OSV.dev, 2026-08-14) · 73,937 downloads/mo, #14,907 on PyPI
Alternatives
Verify before relying
pip install snscrape
# CLI: collect tweets by a user
snscrape twitter-user textfiles
# Or with options
snscrape --max-results 100 --jsonl twitter-hashtag archiveteam- Whether scrapers remain functional given social networks' frequent API and page-structure changes since last update in June 2023.
- Whether library-mode usage (undocumented per the description) is stable or has breaking changes.
- Current rate-limiting or blocking behavior from target platforms.
What it is and what it does
snscrape is a multi-platform social network scraper that extracts posts, profiles, hashtags, and search results from eight services: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, Mastodon, Telegram, VKontakte, and Weibo. It works both as a command-line tool (outputting URLs or JSONL) and as a Python library, though library usage is undocumented. The tool depends on requests, lxml, beautifulsoup4, filelock, and pytz to handle HTTP requests, HTML parsing, and timezone logic.
The project is in Beta status and has been dormant since mid-2023—the last release was June 2023 and the last commit November 2023. While it has no known security vulnerabilities and low install friction, the lack of recent maintenance means scrapers may break as target platforms change their page layouts or APIs. It is licensed under GPLv3+, requiring any derivative work to remain open-source.
Use it for
- Archive Twitter threads or user timelines for research, journalism, or personal record-keeping.
- Collect hashtag posts from Instagram or Twitter for sentiment analysis or trend monitoring.
- Scrape Reddit discussions or subreddit posts for data analysis or community research.
- Gather user profile information or public posts from multiple platforms in bulk.
- Export social media data to JSONL format for downstream processing or database ingestion.
Worth the install?
AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page. Verify before relying on it.
Yes, if you need to scrape social media data and can tolerate dormant maintenance.
The low install friction and lack of vulnerabilities make it safe to try. However, be prepared for scrapers to break without warning as platforms change; test against your target service first and monitor the GitHub repository for community fixes. Not suitable for production systems requiring active support.
Install
snscrape on PyPI
Before you install
Low install friction with standard web-scraping dependencies. Maintenance is dormant—last release was June 2023 and last commit November 2023—so expect no active bug fixes or feature updates, though the repository remains public and unarchived.
Requires Python 3.8 or higher; lxml dependency also requires libxml2 and libxslt system libraries to be installed.
License in practice
Licensed under GPLv3+, a copyleft license. Any derivative work or distribution must also be open-source under compatible terms; proprietary use or closed-source redistribution is not permitted.
Quickstart
pip install snscrape
# CLI: collect tweets by a user
snscrape twitter-user textfiles
# Or with options
snscrape --max-results 100 --jsonl twitter-hashtag archiveteamVerify before relying
- Whether scrapers remain functional given social networks' frequent API and page-structure changes since last update in June 2023.
- Whether library-mode usage (undocumented per the description) is stable or has breaking changes.
- Current rate-limiting or blocking behavior from target platforms.
Package facts
| License | copyleft license copyleft |
| Python support | Supports the current Python release ~=3.8 |
| Install friction | Low. Pure-Python wheel |
| Runtime dependencies | 5 packagesrequestslxmlbeautifulsoup4filelockpytz |
| Maintenance | Dormant 1,149 days since the last release |
| Last repo commit | |
| First released | |
| Downloads | 73,937 / month, #14,907 on PyPI 30-day window, as of 2026-08-14 |
| Known vulnerabilities | None known OSV.dev, checked 2026-08-14 |
| Classifiers | Development Status :: 4 - BetaLicense :: OSI Approved :: GNU General Public License v3 or later (GPLv3+)Programming Language :: Python :: 3.10Programming Language :: Python :: 3.11Programming Language :: Python :: 3.8Programming Language :: Python :: 3.9 |
Evidence: snscrape-0.7.0.20230622-py3-none-any.whl
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See also Scweet · instaloader · socid-extractor · twikit · sherlock-project · zernio-sdk · twscrape · python-jobspy · instagrapi · vk-api