Turning YouTube video content into text — for search, summarization, RAG pipelines, or just reading instead of watching — plus tracking channels, search results, and comments over time.
| Actor | Best for | Pricing |
|---|---|---|
| YouTube Transcript Scraper | One video, fastest way to get text out | Free (see Store page) |
| Video Transcript API | Same transcript, structured for RAG/agent pipelines | $0.005 / transcript |
| YouTube Subtitles Scraper | Raw caption/subtitle track instead of prose text | $0.005 / transcript |
| YouTube Channel Transcripts | Transcripts for ~15 recent videos on a channel in one run | $0.001 / transcript |
| YouTube Channel Videos Scraper | Get notified when a channel uploads (no transcripts) | $0.0005 / video |
| YouTube Search Scraper | Search by topic instead of watching a known channel | $0.0005 / video |
| YouTube Comments Scraper | Bulk-export the comments on a video | $0.0004 / comment |
| YouTube Channel Search Scraper | Find channels by keyword, filter by subscribers, optional country, links and business email | $0.0005 / channel + $0.002 / enriched channel |
| YouTube Creator Lead Finder | Qualified creators in a niche with views, engagement and verified contact | $0.004 / qualified creator + $0.002 / verified contact |
YouTube Transcript Scraper, Video Transcript API, and YouTube Subtitles Scraper all pull the same underlying caption data for a single video, at $0 — they differ only in output shape: prose text, RAG-ready structure, or a raw caption/subtitle track. YouTube Channel Transcripts is the bulk version: point it at a channel and get several videos’ transcripts in one run, billed per video after a free tier. YouTube Channel Videos Scraper does not fetch transcripts at all — it watches a channel for new uploads (title, URL, publish date), the notification layer. YouTube Search Scraper is for when you don’t know the channel yet and want to discover videos by topic. YouTube Comments Scraper is a separate axis entirely: the audience reaction to a video, not the video’s own content.
YouTube Transcript Scraper — single video, the simplest way to try this family. Try it: live example. Once you need more than one video, YouTube Channel Transcripts is the natural next step — same underlying data, scaled to a whole channel in one run.
See Turn YouTube videos into transcripts for AI workflows for the full walkthrough (single video → whole-channel scale-up), or Turn YouTube into text, at any scale for all four jobs this family covers (get transcript, feed AI/RAG, process channel transcripts, monitor for new uploads) in one place.
youtube-transcript-api exposes an MCP tool for “get the transcript of this YouTube video” — a natural-language agent request maps to it directly without custom integration code.
Turning video into text overlaps with News & Community if your goal is monitoring what’s being said about a topic rather than the video content itself.