Who used Octoparse parser? Is a cool scraper for the reels profile database (likes, comments, views, number of posts)

[Boba228ai]

Hi all! I learn different scrapers and I want to find the optimal for myself. I used Apify for a mounth but it seemed expensive to me. I tried FireCrawl, but it does not allow to parse the acounts of social media. The Bright Data seemed cool, but the price of 1.50$ per 1000 records is a lot, given that I have 10 acounts of 500-1000 videos each and I want to update them once a day only for likes, comments, views, number of posts. Found www.octoparse.com and I want to ask a question-is it enough for a monthly subscription for my task or will it be necessary to as Pay-as-you-go + monthly subscription for that?

[AlvLeoAI]

Hi Bova228al, what you’re really looking at here are two separate issues: licensing a third‑party scraper and how n8n fits into that picture.

Octoparse licensing
Octoparse sells its own plans – it isn’t “pay per account” in the way some proxy providers are. Their Standard plan (around US$69/month at the time of writing) includes 100 tasks that can run in the Octoparse cloud with up to three concurrent processes, unlimited data export and built‑in IP rotation, residential proxies and CAPTCHA‑solving

octoparse.com. The higher‑tier Professional plan increases the task and concurrency limits, and the Enterprise plan is “contact sales.” A free tier exists but only runs up to 10 tasks on your local machine and caps monthly data exports at 50 k. There is no hybrid “subscription + pay‑as‑you‑go” model; the only add‑on that uses metered billing is for residential proxies (priced per GB).So if you need to scrape 10 accounts with hundreds of videos every day, you would almost certainly need at least the Standard plan, and possibly Professional depending on concurrency and throughput requirements. For exact costs it’s best to contact Octoparse support, as pricing and quotas change frequently.

Legal and technical considerations!
Most social‑media platforms prohibit scraping in their terms of service, and they employ rate limiting and bot detection. You should review the terms of each platform you intend to scrape and consider using their official APIs instead. “Likes, comments, views” for reels, for example, can be accessed via Meta’s Graph API for business accounts. n8n doesn’t offer a built‑in Octoparse node; you would either trigger Octoparse workflows via their API or run your own scraping logic in n8n (for example, with an HTTP Request node), but in both cases you remain responsible for complying with the target site’s policies. Then tell me if this information was useful to you!

[Boba228ai]

thanks for the answer @AlvLeoAI ! I didn’t take into account that http://www.octoparse.com/ doesn’t have scraping for Instagram and Facebook xD. By the way, you’ve explained the topic of subscription and connection in n8n well, so the issue is resolved. But if you know which parsers are good for these social networks like Instagram and Facebook you’ll really help me

[AlvLeoAI]

Hi Boba228al. How are you doing?

There are two broad approaches:

1-Use the platforms’ official APIs. Meta’s Graph API for Facebook and Instagram exposes metrics such as plays (views), reach, likes, comments and shares for posts, reels and videos. For Instagram you can use the /{ig_user_id}/insights and /{media_id}/insights endpoints with the appropriate metrics parameters (e.g. plays, reach, comments, likes).

Access requires a business or creator account, an app registered with Meta and the correct permissions (instagram_basic, instagram_manage_insights, pages_read_engagement, etc.), but it is the only fully compliant way to retrieve these numbers. Facebook Pages have analogous endpoints in the Graph API for video and post insights. n8n has an HTTP Request node that you can use to call these APIs directly once you’ve obtained an access token.

2-Rely on a third‑party analytics provider. There are companies (e.g. Metricool, Phyllo, Data365) that offer APIs or dashboards for social‑media analytics, but they generally wrap the same Graph API data or operate under their own licences, and you’ll pay per‑account or per‑request. You can call their APIs from n8n via HTTP Request nodes. You should review each provider’s terms and ensure they have permission from Meta; avoid tools that scrape content without consent, as scraping Facebook or Instagram’s site directly violates their terms and may result in account bans or legal issues.

n8n doesn’t maintain or endorse any particular scraper. If you decide to go the scraping route, please make sure you understand the legal and ethical implications!

[Boba228ai]

Thank you pal! Yeah, I tried to do it via official API, but meta dev asks for logins and passwords of the profile from which I will collect data. I`ll check at Metricool, Phyllo, Data365 for the statistics of likes and views.