YouTube has no button for downloading the comments on a video. YouTube Studio lets you read, filter and reply to comments, but not export them. To get them into a file, you need a tool that reads them through the YouTube Data API.
The fastest way: paste the video link into the YouTool Comment Downloader, pick how many comments you want (100 to 5,000), and download the results as CSV, JSON, XML, Markdown or plain text. Each comment comes with the author's display name, the publish date, the like count and, if you want them, the replies. The CSV opens in Excel or Google Sheets.
Export comments from a public YouTube video with replies, likes and dates. Download as CSV, JSON, XML, Markdown or TXT.
Scrolling comments on YouTube works for a few dozen. Past that, a spreadsheet is faster. Common reasons to export:
It's worth knowing the built-in options before using any tool.
In YouTube Studio, open Comments (or a video's Comments tab) to see every comment on your channel. You can search, filter (for example, comments that contain questions, or ones you haven't replied to) and reply in place. This is the best place to moderate and respond. There is no export, so you can't sort by likes or take the comments anywhere else. It also only covers your own channel.
Google Takeout's YouTube export includes comments you wrote on YouTube. It does not include the comments other people left on your videos, so it doesn't help here.
You can copy comments by hand from the watch page, which is fine for ten and painful for five hundred. If you code, you can call the YouTube Data API's commentThreads endpoint yourself with an API key. That's what a comment downloader does for you, without the setup.
The tool accepts a normal watch link, a youtu.be short link, a Shorts link, an embed link, or the 11-character video ID on its own. The video needs to be public with comments turned on.
Open Advanced Filters to choose the maximum number of top-level comments (100, 500, 1,000, 2,000 or 5,000; the default is 1,000), the order, a minimum like count, a keyword, a date range, and whether to include replies (on by default).
Paste the link into the search bar and press Enter. The tool fetches comments 100 at a time until it hits your limit or runs out of comments. When it's done you'll see the comment count, average likes, the date range covered and the top five comments by likes.
Pick TXT, Markdown, JSON, CSV or XML. The download happens in your browser, and you can download more than one format from the same results.
Relevance asks YouTube for its top comments, and the tool lists them by likes, highest first. Most Recent pulls the newest comments and lists them newest first. If you want the most-liked comments, use Relevance.
The keyword, minimum likes and date filters apply to the comments the tool fetched. With a 500 limit, a keyword filter searches those 500, not every comment on the video. The keyword matches the comment text or the author's name, and isn't case-sensitive. Filters apply to top-level comments; a matching comment keeps its replies.
| Format | What's in it | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| CSV | One row per comment or reply: Author, Text, Published At, Likes, Type, Parent ID | Excel, Google Sheets, sorting and filtering |
| JSON | Each comment with its ID, text, author, date, likes and a nested list of replies | Scripts, databases, your own analysis |
| XML | Comments with IDs, authors, likes and dates, replies nested inside each one | Tools that expect XML |
| Markdown | Video title, channel, comment count, then each comment with its likes, date and replies | Reading, notes apps, sharing with a team |
| TXT | Plain text: author, date, likes, comment, indented replies | Pasting into an AI assistant or a doc |
In the CSV, the Type column says whether a row is a comment or a reply. Replies sit directly under their parent comment, and their Parent ID is the ID of that comment's thread. If you need the nesting to stay intact no matter how you sort, use JSON.
Google Sheets: go to File > Import > Upload, choose the file, and pick "Replace spreadsheet" or "Insert new sheet". Emoji and non-English text come through cleanly.
Excel: double-clicking the file usually works, but the CSV is saved as UTF-8 without a byte-order mark, and some versions of Excel then show emoji and accented letters as garbled characters. If that happens, open a blank workbook, go to Data > From Text/CSV, select the file, and set File Origin to 65001: Unicode (UTF-8) before loading.
Published At is a UTC timestamp like 2026-10-01T14:03:22Z. To get a plain date in Sheets or Excel, use =DATEVALUE(LEFT(C2,10)) and format the column as a date. And a comment that starts with =, +, - or @ gets a leading apostrophe, so your spreadsheet treats it as text instead of trying to run it as a formula.
Likes are viewers voting on a comment. Filter Type to "Comment", sort Likes from largest to smallest, and read the top 20 or 30. That's usually the clearest summary of what people took away from the video.
Filter the Text column for words like "how", "can you", "what about", "part 2" or the name of a product in your niche. Every repeated question is a possible video, a pinned-comment answer, or a section you should add next time.
Copy the best questions into a new sheet, group the ones asking the same thing, and add up their likes. A question asked ten times with a few hundred likes in total is a stronger topic than one asked once. Then check the wording people use, since it's often close to what they'd type into search. Our YouTube comment strategy guide covers how to reply in a way that gets more of these.
Under the results, the ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude buttons copy a prompt to your clipboard and open that chat. The prompt includes every collected comment and asks for a sentiment breakdown, key themes, praise and criticism, common questions, and takeaways for the creator. Paste it and send. For a very large export, a smaller comment limit is easier for a chat to handle. Treat the summary as a starting point and check it against the comments.
Batch Download lets you paste several video links and download all of them in one go. The tool processes the videos one after another, applies your limit and filters to each, shows how many comments came from each video (or an error if one failed), and combines everything into a single set to download.
Batch Download is part of YouTool Pro, a one-time payment, not a subscription. Single-video downloads use your free weekly uses: guests get 1 use a week and signed-in accounts get 2 a week, shared across YouTool's tools and refilled every Monday at 00:00 UTC. One fetch counts as one use; downloading it in several formats doesn't use more. Pro removes the weekly limit.
One note: the combined batch file has no column saying which video each comment came from. If you need to tell videos apart, download them one at a time.
The Comment Downloader only gets what the YouTube Data API returns for a public video. That means no comments on private videos, no comments held for review or removed, and nothing from videos with comments turned off. It gets the display name YouTube shows for each commenter, not emails or other private details. For threads with a lot of replies, YouTube's API doesn't always return every reply with the thread, so very long reply chains may be partial.
The short version: YouTube Studio is where you reply to comments. A CSV is where you find patterns. Export with Relevance order, sort by likes, filter for questions, and you'll have a list of video ideas your viewers already asked for.
If you're picking a winner, use the Comment Picker instead. It picks random winners from up to 1,000 top-level comments and can filter by minimum likes, keyword, date range and comment length, and exclude the channel owner. Download the comments with the Comment Downloader at the same time if you want a record of the entries. Our YouTube giveaway guide covers the rest.
Yes. Download the CSV from the Comment Downloader and open it in Excel. If emoji or accented letters look garbled, import it through Data > From Text/CSV and choose UTF-8 as the file origin.
Up to 5,000 top-level comments per video, chosen in Advanced Filters. Replies are added on top of that when Include replies is on. If the video has fewer comments than your limit, you get all the ones YouTube's API returns.
Yes, by default. You can turn replies off in Advanced Filters. In the CSV, replies are marked "Reply" in the Type column and sit under the comment they answer.
Yes, as long as the video is public and has comments turned on. The tool reads the same public comments anyone can see on the watch page.
Yes. Paste the Shorts link (youtube.com/shorts/...) the same way you would a regular video link.
Paste a video link, choose up to 5,000 comments, and download them with replies, likes and dates in five formats.
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