The Best Instagram Follower and Following Scrapers in 2026, Checked One by One

Most "best Instagram scraper" lists are written once and never opened again. Half the tools in the roundup that ranks above us on Google were either shut down, pulled from the Chrome Web Store, or broken by Instagram's September changes by the time you read this. So we did it the slow way: we opened every tool's page on 21 September 2026, read the pricing and the limits as published that day, took a screenshot, and noted where the claims stopped matching reality.

This covers follower and following lists together, because the tools are the same and, since September, the difference between the two lists matters more than it used to.

The short version

If you want the list with the data that makes it usable (names, bios, categories, public emails and phones), HarvestMyData is the cheapest option on this page and it is not close: $12 for 10,000 enriched rows, $99 for 250,000, no login, no subscription, delivered in minutes to hours. Every cheaper number below is for bare usernames, needs your own Instagram session, or both, and once you add the enrichment step the others require, they cost two to four times more. The rest of this article shows the working.

First, what changed in September 2026

Two things happened within a week of each other, and they explain most of the "it stopped working" reviews you'll find on these tools.

Verified accounts now show only a sample of followers. Any account with the blue check returns roughly 40 to 50 followers to third-party sessions, with no way to page further. We measured it across nine verified accounts from 43k to 268M followers and three unverified ones; verification is the dividing line, not size. The tools below confirm it in their own words. PhantomBuster's Follower Collector page now carries the note "due to Instagram's limitations, a maximum of 50 followers will be displayed for certain profiles". One Apify actor's listing reports that nasa's 104 million followers returned 49 rows. The most-installed Chrome extension in this category describes itself as "updated after 2026-09 breaking change in IG".

Following lists are unaffected. We pulled all 1,189 accounts that a verified brand follows without a hitch. If your target is verified, its following list, plus the likers and commenters on its posts, is the audience you can still get.

And the follower endpoint most data APIs relied on was retired. Instagram-data APIs (the layer under many of these tools) had their main follower endpoint switched to "deprecated, Instagram no longer supports it". Replacements exist and paginate correctly on unverified accounts, at 25 rows per call instead of 50, so everything got a little slower and a little pricier per row.

If you scraped a verified account in September and got a 50-row file, that's why. No tool on this list gets around it, and any tool that says it does is selling you the sample.

How we judged them

Four questions, in order of how often they cause regret:

1. Does it use your Instagram login? Browser extensions and "cookie" automations act as you. They're cheap, and they're also the reason people wake up to a checkpoint or a temporary block. Cloud tools that need nothing from you carry no account risk.
2. Followers, following, or both? Several popular tools only do followers.
3. What comes out? A list of usernames is one thing. Full names, bios, business category and public contact details are what you can actually act on.
4. What does 10,000 rows cost, honestly? Per-1,000 prices, monthly plans and "free up to N" tiers all hide the real number.

The tools

HarvestMyData

Ours, and we'll make the case plainly and let the numbers carry it.

It is a cloud service: type a public username, choose followers or following and a count, pay per job by card or crypto, and a CSV and Excel file arrive by email. Nothing to install, no Instagram login or cookie at any point, no account to create on our side, no subscription. The scraping runs on our infrastructure, so your Instagram account is never the one making requests, which is the single biggest difference between this and every extension or cookie-based automation below.

Every row is enriched: full name, bio, follower and following counts, business and creator flags, category, external link, and, where the account has made them public, email and phone. The other tools here either give you usernames and a verified flag, or borrow your session to fetch the rest one profile at a time.

What it costs, against the alternatives, for an unverified target:

At 250,000 rows that is $0.40 per thousand enriched rows, versus $1.50 per thousand for the next cloud option that doesn't need your login, and $3.80 per thousand for the most-reviewed Apify actor, which only returns usernames. Following-list jobs start at $5.

What you get for it, from real paid jobs in the last two weeks: 12,368 followers delivered in 18 minutes with 2,678 emails; 15,834 in 18 minutes with 3,151 emails; 31,012 in 31 minutes; 250,000 in 4 hours 2 minutes with 17,939 emails and 7,693 phones. Six jobs, 325,409 rows, zero duplicate rows. Email yield depends entirely on the audience, from 6% on a meditation centre's followers to 22% on a Brazilian sales coach's, and the order form estimates it before you pay.

• Price: followers from $3 (up to 2,000) to $99 (250,000); following from $5. Optional +25% for country and account-age columns.
• Followers and following: both, plus hashtags, post likers, commenters and locations from the same form.
• Login needed: no. Nothing to install either.
• Verified accounts: followers jobs are refused before you pay, because Instagram only exposes the ~50 sample and we won't sell you fifty rows as a list. Following, likers and commenters of verified accounts work in full.
• Best for: anyone who wants the list to end in emails, at any size from 2,000 to 250,000, without putting their own Instagram account on the line.

Exporter for Followers (Chrome extension)

The most-installed tool in the category: 500,000 users on the Chrome Web Store, 4.2 stars from 104 ratings, last updated 12 September 2026. It runs inside your logged-in Instagram tab and exports followers or following to CSV or Excel. Fast mode gives IDs, usernames, names and verified flags; "detailed" mode adds bio, account type, counts, public email and phone, and it handles Instagram's rate-limit errors by pausing in a cooldown that doubles each time it's hit.

Two things you should know before installing. It's freemium: 550 rows free, then a paid upgrade. And on the day we checked, the listing showed the red banner "Item currently unavailable", which is what the Web Store shows while an extension is pulled for review. It may be back by the time you read this; check the listing, not this article.

• Price: free to 550 rows, paid above (price shown after signup).
• Followers and following: both, up to 50,000 per export.
• Login needed: yes, it uses your session.
• Verified accounts: subject to the ~50 cap like everything else.
• Best for: quick exports from your own or a small account when you accept using your login.

Scravio follower export (Chrome extension)

Another session-based extension, free with no account required, exporting followers and following to CSV, Excel or JSON. It reads what your browser can see and processes it locally, and the listing is unusually frank that "automated data collection is not endorsed by Instagram". Detailed rows include bio, category, verification, public email and phone. Desktop Chrome only.

• Price: free.
• Followers and following: both.
• Login needed: yes.
• Verified accounts: capped.
• Best for: the same job as the tool above if that one is unavailable, with the same account-risk trade-off.

IGExport (web app)

A website rather than an extension: you type a username and it returns the follower or following list without any login, "100% anonymous". The free tier is 100 rows per search; unlimited exports are routed through the same company's separate "Recent Follow" app. Output is CSV with basic fields.

• Price: free to 100 rows per search; paid app above that.
• Followers and following: both.
• Login needed: no.
• Verified accounts: capped.
• Best for: checking the first hundred followers of a small account without installing anything.

Apify actors (three different ones)

Apify is a marketplace, so "Apify" isn't one tool. Three actors in the followers category illustrate how different they are:

• Instagram Followers Scraper (instaprism): no login, followers only, "from $3.80 per 1,000 results", 4.9 stars from 56 reviews, 898 users, last modified five months ago. Output is username, ID, name, picture and verified flag. Stated speed: 10,000 followers in 15 to 30 minutes.
• Instagram Followers Scraper (steadyfetch): no login, followers and following, $0.50 per 1,000 on paid plans ($2.00 on the free plan), capped at 50,000 rows per list per run, 18 users. Its own listing notes the verified-account cap.
• Instagram Followers/Following Scraper (themineworks): requires your sessionid cookie, $0.72 per 1,000, hard cap of 5,000 rows per username, and a warning that bulk list pulls are "exactly the kind of bulk activity Instagram's own risk systems watch for", recommending a secondary account.

Rows on all three are the basic list fields; there's no enrichment beyond a verified flag, so emails need a second step.

• Price: $0.50 to $3.80 per 1,000 depending on the actor, plus Apify platform usage.
• Login needed: depends on the actor.
• Verified accounts: capped.
• Best for: developers who already run workflows on Apify and want raw lists in JSON.

PhantomBuster Instagram Follower Collector

A cloud automation that takes your Instagram cookie and a list of profiles and returns each follower's profile URL, username and a handful of fields. There's a separate Following Collector. Runs resume from where they stopped for about six hours after the first launch. The page is honest about two things: the 50-follower limit on "certain profiles", and the gap between Instagram's displayed follower count and what comes out (banned and deleted accounts are counted but not listed).

• Price: plans, not per row. Starter $69/month for 20 execution hours, Pro $159 for 80, Team $439 for 300 (about 20% less on annual billing). Free trial.
• Followers and following: both, separate automations.
• Login needed: yes, session cookie.
• Verified accounts: capped; the page says so.
• Best for: agencies already on PhantomBuster chaining collection into follow or DM automations.

Bright Data Instagram Followers Scraper API

An enterprise scraping API with a followers endpoint. Rows include handle, profile URL, ID, biography, counts, verification and external link, delivered as JSON, CSV or straight into S3, GCS, Snowflake or SFTP. Pricing is per record: 5,000 records a month free, then $1.50 per 1,000 pay-as-you-go, or $499/month for 384,000 records. Proxies, retries and unblocking are included, and you're not charged for failed rows.

• Price: $1.50 per 1,000; free 5,000/month.
• Followers and following: followers documented; following not stated.
• Login needed: no.
• Verified accounts: capped at the source like everyone else.
• Best for: data teams that want follower rows piped into a warehouse under an SLA, and can absorb the platform's minimums.

Octoparse

A visual, no-code scraper builder with Instagram templates and a cloud runner. Follower lists on Instagram need a logged-in session, so you supply one to the template. Free plan: 10 tasks and 50,000 exported rows a month. Standard $69/month (3 concurrent cloud runs), Professional $249 (20 runs), both with IP rotation, about 16% less on annual billing.

• Price: free tier, then $69 or $249/month.
• Followers and following: whatever the template you build or pick covers.
• Login needed: yes for Instagram lists.
• Verified accounts: capped.
• Best for: people who want to build their own scrapers without code and already scrape other sites.

Instaloader (open source)

A Python library and command-line tool, MIT licensed, version 4.15.3 released July 2026. It exposes get_followers() and get_followees() on a profile object; both need a logged-in session, and the project's troubleshooting page is mostly about "429 Too Many Requests" and "Too many queries", which is your account being throttled. There is a rate controller you can tune. It is the right answer for a developer who wants full control and accepts that the account doing the scraping is disposable.

• Price: free.
• Followers and following: both.
• Login needed: yes.
• Verified accounts: capped.
• Best for: technical users, research, small volumes with patience.

Instagram's own data download

For your own account only: Settings → Accounts Center → Your information and permissions → Download your information, choose Followers and following, and Instagram emails you a JSON or HTML archive within a day or two. Free, complete, official, and useless for anyone else's account.

Tools that are gone (check before you pay)

Two names that still appear in 2026 roundups:

• "IG Follower Export Tool" on the Chrome Web Store now returns "Item not available". Removed.
• Exportagram: the domain no longer resolves.

A roundup that lists either was not opened this month. That is not a small point: an extension that has been pulled from the store cannot be updated, so any copy still installed will break at the next Instagram change and take your session with it.

Comparison

Every row above is subject to the same verified-account cap; none of these tools gets a full follower list from a blue-check account in September 2026.

What 10,000 followers actually costs

Published prices converted to one job of 10,000 followers from an unverified account:

The pattern is simple. The free and cheap options cost you either an Instagram account's safety or the enrichment step, which is the step that turns a username list into something you can email. Add that step back (the cheapest profile-enrichment actor on Apify is about $1 per 1,000 profiles, on top of the list) and the raw-username options land at $15 to $50 per 10,000 rows. HarvestMyData is $12 with enrichment included and no login, and the gap widens with size: at 250,000 rows it is $99 against $375 for the only other no-login cloud option that reaches that scale.

Followers or following: which list should you scrape?

If you're choosing a target for lead generation rather than auditing your own audience, the following list is often the better dataset and, since September, sometimes the only one:

• A brand's following list is who it chose: partners, creators, suppliers, press. On verified brands it's also the only list you can still get in full.
• A brand's followers are its audience: bigger, noisier, and a third to a half of them private, which drops the email yield.
• Following lists are short (hundreds to low thousands) and dense with business accounts; followers lists are long and thin. On our jobs, following lists routinely return two to three times the email rate of the same brand's followers.

The ideal for outreach is usually a mid-sized, unverified account in your niche with 10k to 250k followers: big enough to matter, unverified so the full list is available, and specific enough that its audience is who you want.

FAQ

Can any tool export the full follower list of a verified account in 2026? Not that we could find or build. Instagram returns a ~50-follower sample for blue-check accounts to every third-party session. The following list, likers and commenters still work.

Is using a Chrome extension safe for my account? It's using your login to make hundreds or thousands of requests. The extensions above pause on rate limits, which is better than nothing, but checkpoints and temporary blocks are the documented failure mode. Use a secondary account if you go this route.

Why does the export have fewer rows than the follower count on the profile? Instagram's count includes deactivated and banned accounts that no longer appear in the list, and the count moves while a tool walks it. A few rows short of the displayed number is normal; half the number is the verified cap.

Do these tools get private accounts' followers? No. Private accounts' lists are visible only to approved followers, and none of these tools bypass that.

Summary

Check the tool exists before you read its reviews: two of the names in older lists are dead, and the biggest extension was pulled from the store on the day we looked. Decide whether your own Instagram login is on the table; that single choice splits the list in half. For enriched data without a login, HarvestMyData is the cheapest at every size we priced ($12 per 10,000, $99 per 250,000); raw usernames can be near free if you spend your own Instagram session to get them. And since September 2026, plan around the verified cap: for blue-check targets, scrape what they follow, not who follows them.