Guide

How to export YouTube comments to Excel or CSV

YouTube gives you no export button, so the comments stay locked in an infinite scroll. Here is how to get all of them into a spreadsheet, and what usually goes wrong when people try.

The short version

  1. Paste the video or channelOpen the tool and paste a video URL, a channel URL, or an @handle. Every public comment and reply loads into your browser.
  2. Filter before you exportSearch by keyword or narrow by author, date range, word count or review signal. The export follows what is on screen, so filtering first makes a smaller, more useful file.
  3. Choose a formatCSV for Sheets and quick edits, Excel for a real workbook with numeric columns, JSON for scripts and pipelines.
  4. Open itThe file downloads straight from your browser. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored on a server.
Open the tool

Why YouTube has no export

YouTube Studio shows comments as a feed you scroll. There is no select-all, no download, and no way to see the whole set at once. For a video with ten thousand comments that is not a minor inconvenience — it makes questions like “what did people actually ask?” or “who has commented most often?” practically unanswerable.

The public YouTube Data API can list them, which is what ClearComments uses. It loads the whole comment section into your browser first, and everything after that — searching, filtering, sorting, exporting — happens on your machine.

The three formats, and when each is right

CSV

The safe default. It opens in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers and anything else that reads a table. One detail matters more than people expect: the file is written as UTF-8 with a byte-order mark. Without that mark, Excel on Windows guesses the encoding, guesses wrong, and turns accented characters and emoji into strings like é and 😀. Comment sections are full of both, so a CSV without the mark is usually ruined on opening.

Excel (.xlsx)

A real workbook, not a CSV with the extension changed. The difference shows the moment you try to work with it: like counts and reply counts arrive as numbers, so sorting puts 1,200 above 900 instead of ordering them as text where “900” wins. Dates behave as dates. If you plan to sort, filter or total anything, take this one.

JSON

For scripts and pipelines. It keeps the full metadata, including the parent ID of every reply, so you can rebuild the thread structure that a flat table flattens away.

Keeping replies attached to their parents

A comment section is a tree and a spreadsheet is a list, so something has to give. Every exported row carries the ID of the comment it replies to, which means the tree is recoverable: group by parent ID and you have the threads back. In JSON the nesting is explicit; in CSV and Excel it is that one column.

Replies that arrive alongside their parent are included at no extra cost. Very long threads load the remainder only when you open them, so a channel-wide export does not quietly spend the daily allowance fetching thousands of replies nobody asked for.

What you cannot export, and why

Only public comments on public videos — the same ones any visitor can read. Comments YouTube has already held for review or marked as likely spam are visible to the channel owner alone, through an authorised login, so no public tool can show them. Any tool claiming otherwise is either mistaken or describing something else.

Try it

Open ClearComments, paste a video or a channel, and export. It is free, needs no account, and nothing is uploaded.

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