Compare public-data scrapers with official APIs and open-source libraries by access, setup, quota, fields, failure handling, and cost. Every factual row is first-hand tested or linked to a primary source, evidence classes are stated per row, and the cases where the alternative wins are stated plainly — apihq builds one side of every comparison.
2026-07-22 · last verified 2026-07-22 · Channel videos
The official uploads-playlist route lists a 10,000-video channel for about 201 quota units — the real differences are setup, statistics follow-ups, exact integers versus display strings, and the failure contract.
2026-07-22 · last verified 2026-07-22 · Comments
commentThreads.list is quota-generous at 1 unit per page of up to 100 threads — the real differences are setup, reply completeness on both sides, the disabled-comments contract, and watch-page flags the API schema omits.
2026-07-21 · last verified 2026-07-21 · Play reviews
Google's Reviews API is a support tool for apps your Play Console manages — a rolling seven-day feed that excludes star-only ratings — while the scraper reads any public app's listed review history, shown in a published first-hand run.
2026-07-21 · last verified 2026-07-22 · Search
Since Google's June 2026 docs revision, search.list lives in a 100-calls-per-day bucket at up to 50 results per call — the scraper prices per delivered result instead, shown in a published first-hand run.
2026-07-17 · last verified 2026-07-17 · Transcripts
Both tools ran the same 11 videos on 2026-07-17 — per-video results, exact costs, failure behavior, and the cases where the free library wins.
2026-07-17 · last verified 2026-07-17 · Transcripts
The Data API's captions endpoints serve accounts that can edit the video — for arbitrary public videos the real choice is between a free caption-reading library and a managed pay-per-result actor.