Knowing how to download YouTube comments from a video is useful for a range of tasks: content research, audience analysis, moderation review, or building datasets. This guide walks through the exact steps, explains your format choices, and covers what to do when you're dealing with a video that has tens of thousands of comments.
Step-by-Step: How to Download YouTube Comments
The fastest method uses this tool, which works in a browser — no installs, no code, no API setup.
Step 1: Get the video URL
Copy the URL from your browser address bar. Standard YouTube video URLs (youtube.com/watch?v=...) and short URLs (youtu.be/...) both work. You can also use channel URLs and playlist URLs if you want comments from multiple videos at once.
Step 2: Go to the tool
Open the tool page. No account is required for a basic export — paste your URL and go. Create a free account if you want CSV, Excel, or JSON output, or need more than 100 comments.
Step 3: Paste the URL
Paste your YouTube URL into the input field. The tool immediately detects whether it's a video, channel, or playlist, and shows you the appropriate options.
Step 4: Choose your settings
- Max comments: How many comments to fetch (free: up to 100, Pro: up to 10,000)
- Sort order: Top comments (most liked), Newest first, or Oldest first
- Include replies: Toggle on to also fetch the reply threads under each top-level comment (Pro plan)
Step 5: Pick a format
TXT and HTML work without signing in. CSV, Excel, and JSON require a free account. Pick based on what you'll do with the data — CSV/Excel for spreadsheets, JSON for code, TXT for quick reading.
Step 6: Click Export and download
The export runs immediately. You can watch the comment count increase as data streams in. When it's done, click the download button. Your file saves to your downloads folder.
What you get in the download
Each downloaded comment includes the author name, full comment text, like count, date posted, reply count, and the source video title and URL. Multi-video exports tag each comment with its source so you can filter by video later.Which Format Should You Choose?
The right format depends entirely on what you plan to do with the downloaded YouTube comments:
| If you want to… | Use this format |
|---|---|
| Open in Google Sheets or Excel | CSV |
| Share a polished report with a client | Excel or HTML |
| Use in Python, R, or a data pipeline | JSON |
| Read through quickly without a spreadsheet | TXT |
| Process in a database or import tool | CSV or JSON |
When in doubt, use CSV. It works everywhere and preserves all the fields without losing structure.
Tips for Videos with Lots of Comments
Some videos have hundreds of thousands of comments. A few things to know when you want to download YouTube comments at scale:
Set a realistic comment limit
For most research purposes, the top 1,000–5,000 comments by likes give you most of the actionable signal. The 100,000th comment on a viral video is likely to be low-quality or spam. Unless you specifically need the full corpus (for NLP training data, for example), start with a capped export.
Start with “Top comments” sort
YouTube's top-comment sort surfaces the most-liked and most-replied comments first. These are the highest-signal comments for understanding audience sentiment and popular opinions. Unless you're doing temporal analysis (watching how reaction evolves over time), top-sorted downloads are more useful than chronological ones.
Expect proportional export time
The tool processes around 5,000 comments per minute. A 10,000-comment export takes about 2 minutes. A 50,000-comment export takes around 10 minutes. Leave the tab open — the download button appears automatically when it finishes.
Check the comment count first
YouTube shows the total comment count below each video. If a video has 200,000 comments and you only need the top opinions, set your limit to 5,000 rather than letting the export run for an hour unnecessarily.
Downloading Comments from Playlists and Channels
The tool handles more than individual videos. You can also download YouTube comments from:
- Playlists: Paste a playlist URL (youtube.com/playlist?list=...). The tool fetches every video in the playlist and pulls comments from each one. Results are combined into a single file with video source tags.
- Channels: Paste a channel URL (@handle, youtube.com/channel/, or youtube.com/c/). The tool fetches the channel's video library and processes each video. This is a Business plan feature.
- Multiple videos: Use the “Add URL” button to paste up to 5 individual video URLs. Useful for comparing engagement across a set of videos side by side.
Channel export use case
A common use case: paste a competitor's channel URL to download comments across their recent videos. You get a combined dataset showing which content types generated the most discussion, what questions keep coming up, and what their audience praises or criticizes most.Key Takeaway