How to Download All Comments From an Instagram Post — 3 Ways Compared (Free, 2026)

To download all comments from an Instagram post, you have three real options: Instagram's own Download Your Information file, the official Instagram Graph API, or a comment export tool that turns the post link into a spreadsheet. Only the third works on any public post without code, and it is free for the first 100 comments. The first two are narrower than most people expect, and this guide explains exactly where each one stops.

We run an Instagram comment exporter, so we see the same question every day from people who tried the first two routes and came away with the wrong file. Here is what each route actually gives you.

Pick by whose comments you need

• Comments you wrote yourself: Instagram's Download Your Information. Free, official, takes a while to arrive.
• The comment section on a post your business account manages: the Instagram Graph API, if you can build or hire a small integration.
• The comment section on any public post, yours or not: a comment export tool. Paste the link, download CSV, Excel or JSON.

Copying comments by hand is a fourth option for a post with a dozen comments. Past that, it loses the like counts and dates and takes far longer than any of the above.

Way 1: Download Your Information (your own words only)

Instagram lets every user request a copy of their data from Accounts Center: Your information and permissions → Export your information (it used to be called Download your information). Instagram's help page on reviewing and exporting a copy of your information walks through it. You pick the information, a date range and a format (HTML or JSON), and once the export is ready you have four days to download it.

The catch is in what "comments" means inside that file. The comments section of Download Your Information lists comments your account has written. It is a record of your own activity. It does not contain the comment section under your posts, and it never contains comments from other accounts.

That makes it the right tool for a narrow set of jobs:

• Finding something you commented months ago and cannot locate.
• Reviewing your own comment history before a job search or a rebrand.
• Moving your own data out of Instagram for safekeeping.

If you were hoping to get a list of everyone who commented on your giveaway post, this file will not have it. We hear from people who waited a day for the download and found only their own replies.

Way 2: The Instagram Graph API (posts you manage)

The official developer route is the comments endpoint of the Instagram Platform. It returns the comments on a media object with the text, the commenter's username, the timestamp and the like count. It returns at most 50 comments per request, only top-level comments unless you also ask for the replies field, and nothing for live videos.

Three conditions apply before it returns anything:

1. The account must be a professional account (Business or Creator).
2. You need a Meta developer app with the comment-management permission granted, and an access token for that account.
3. The post must belong to that account. Meta requires an access token from the account that published the post. The API does not read the comment section of other people's posts. Competitor posts, influencer posts and brand collaborations on someone else's profile are out of reach.

The older Instagram Basic Display API, which some tutorials still mention, was retired by Meta on 4 December 2024, so guides built on it no longer work.

The Graph API is a good fit for a company that already has a developer and wants comments from its own posts flowing into a dashboard every day. For a one-off download, the setup takes longer than the job.

Way 3: A comment export tool (any public post)

An exporter reads the comments Instagram already shows to any visitor of a public post and writes them into a file. With ours, the steps are:

1. Copy the post or Reel link (three dots → Copy link).
2. Paste it into the Instagram comment exporter. It counts the comments first, which takes about a second.
3. Download CSV, Excel or JSON.

The file has one row per comment with these columns: author, username, text, likes, replies, created_at, language, is_pinned, id, reply_to_id and avatar_url. Replies come out as their own rows, linked to their parent through reply_to_id.

The first 100 comments of any public post are free with no signup. A longer comment section needs a one-time payment, never a subscription; the current options are on the pricing page. Private accounts are off limits to every tool, ours included, because their comments are not public.

If you want the full technical comparison of scraping options, including writing your own script, our guide to scraping Instagram comments covers the developer side.

Dead ends people try first

Before they find a working route, most people we talk to have tried at least one of these. None of them produces a list of the comments on a post.

• The Save button. It bookmarks the post in your Saved collection. The comments stay on Instagram, unchanged and not downloadable.
• Your activity → Comments. This screen in the app lists comments you wrote, the same data as the export file. It is useful for deleting your own old comments, not for collecting anyone else's.
• Screenshots and screen recordings. They capture what is on screen, but you cannot sort, count or search an image, and long comment sections take hundreds of them.
• Saving the web page. Instagram loads comments a few at a time as you scroll, so Save page as keeps only the handful that had loaded, inside a page full of code.
• Apps that ask for your Instagram password. Handing your login to an unknown app risks your account being locked or hijacked, and Instagram's terms forbid sharing it. Nothing that downloads public comments needs your password.

If a tool asks you to log in with Instagram or install something with access to your account just to read public comments, close it.

Which way fits your situation

• "I'm running a giveaway and need every entry." Use an exporter. Download Your Information will not include entrants, and setting up the API for one draw is overkill. Our giveaway entries guide covers duplicate entries and tag rules.
• "I want to study a competitor's audience." Use an exporter. The API cannot read posts you do not manage.
• "Our team needs comments from our own posts in a dashboard every day." Use the Graph API, or export on a schedule if you have no developer.
• "I want to find a comment I wrote last year." Use Download Your Information.
• "I need the comments in Excel to sort by likes." Use an exporter and download Excel directly. Our Instagram comments to Excel guide has formulas for counting and ranking.

What "all comments" really means on Instagram

"All" is the word that causes the most confusion, because the number on the post and the number of comments anyone can read are different things.

Instagram's comment count includes comments that are hidden by the account's filters, limited, restricted, or deleted. Those comments are visible only to the commenter and sometimes to the post owner. They are never shown to the public, so no exporter, scraper or API call made from outside the account can download them.

The gap can be large. On one post we investigated in detail, the badge said 1,189 comments. Every method we tried, including our exporter, a separate scraping service, a logged-in session and a normal browser, found the same 165 public comments. The other thousand-odd were filtered. The cause is the comment controls every account has: keyword filters, the hidden-words setting, restricted and limited accounts, and deletions.

So "all comments" in practice means all comments Instagram shows to the public. When your file is shorter than the badge, that is usually the reason, not a broken download.

What 3,383 Instagram exports taught us

This guide comes from operating an Instagram comment exporter, not from reading about one. Between 8 September and 8 October 2026 we ran 3,383 Instagram exports that produced about 1.7 million comment rows. A few things we see every week:

• The free 100-comment file is fast. Its median time to ready was 5 seconds, and 77% finished in under 10 seconds. A post with 1,000 to 5,000 comments took a median of under two minutes.
• The badge-versus-rows gap is the top support question. Almost every "you missed comments" message we get turns out to be filtered or deleted comments, as described above.
• People arrive after trying Download Your Information. Many have already waited for the official file and found only their own comments in it.

The column names, the free first 100 comments and the export times above are the live product values. For what Instagram permits, its Terms of Use are the authority.

Before you share the file

A comment file holds usernames and sometimes profile pictures. Treat it like any list of people:

• Delete the avatar_url column if you do not need it.
• Do not republish the file publicly or use it to message commenters in bulk.
• If you are in the EU or handle EU commenters' data for a business, the GDPR's lawful-basis rules apply to how you store and use it.

Download all comments from an Instagram post free →

Related reading: scraping Instagram comments (developer guide), why the real count beats the badge, exporting Reels comments.