How to Scrape Substack — Free No-Code Guide (2026)

#substack #webscraping #api #python

If you need to pull Substack data at scale and there's no clean official API, this guide shows how to export it to JSON, CSV or Excel in a couple of minutes — with no scraping code to maintain.

We'll use the Substack Scraper - Newsletters, Posts & Authors, a hosted scraper on the Apify platform. You only need a free Apify token — no Substack login, no proxies, no reverse-engineering.

What data you get

Each run returns structured records with fields like:

recordType
publicationName
authorName
category
postTitle
audience
postDate
reactions
commentCount
restacks
canonicalUrl
publicationId
subdomain
customDomain

Results are paginated automatically — you can pull thousands of rows per run and export them as JSON, CSV, Excel, JSONL or XML.

Option 1 — No code (Apify Console)

Open the actor: https://apify.com/logiover/substack-newsletter-scraper
Click Try for free.
Leave the input empty for a broad sample, or set the fields below.
Run it, then Export the dataset as CSV/JSON/Excel.

Option 2 — Node.js

npm install substack-newsletter-scraper

const scrape = require("substack-newsletter-scraper");

(async () => {
  const items = await scrape({}, { token: process.env.APIFY_TOKEN });
  console.log(items.length, "results");
  console.log(items[0]);
})();

Option 3 — Python

pip install substack-newsletter-scraper

from substack_newsletter_scraper import scrape

items = scrape({}, token="YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")
print(len(items), "results")
print(items[0])

Grab a free token at https://console.apify.com/account/integrations.

Input options

Field	Type	What it does
`categorySlugs`	array	Category Slugs to Discover
`categoryRanking`	string	Category Ranking Mode
`newsletterUrls`	array	Direct Newsletter URLs
`maxPublicationsPerCategory`	integer	Max Publications Per Category
`maxPostsPerPublication`	integer	Max Posts Per Publication
`audienceFilter`	string	Audience Filter
`minPostDate`	string	Minimum Post Date (ISO)
`maxPostDate`	string	Maximum Post Date (ISO)
`keywordFilter`	array	Keyword Filter (post title / subtitle)
`includePublicationMetadata`	boolean	Include Publication Metadata in Each Record
`alsoPushPublicationRecord`	boolean	Also Push Publication-Level Records
`language`	string	Publication Language Filter

Common use cases

Build a fresh Substack dataset for analysis or dashboards
Feed Substack records into your own app, CRM or spreadsheet
Monitor changes on a schedule and get alerts via webhooks
Enrich leads or research with up-to-date Substack data

Automation & export

Because it runs on Apify, you can schedule it, trigger it via webhook, and pipe results into Google Sheets, S3, Zapier, Make or n8n. Every run's dataset is downloadable as CSV, JSON, JSONL, Excel or XML.