TikTok Follower Scraper: What Actually Works in 2026 (and What Doesn’t)

If you’re reading this article, then you probably have reached the limit any developer reaches when crawling TikTok: your code was running just fine, and this morning, you cannot execute it anymore. 

Still, such a tough situation does not cancel the constant need of businesses to have access to public social network data. In this guide, we will discuss what’s wrong with TikTok follower scraper tools and how modern API products, such as Data365 Social Media API, can assist you. You will also get some beneficial code snippets that involve different TikTok follower endpoints.

Ready? Test the difference between struggling with anti-detection and just getting your data with the Data365 free trial.

Overview

• TikTok scraping tools that worked in 2025 are failing in 2026 due to advanced ML-based detection systems.
• Businesses need follower data and metrics, not just working scripts. The real value appears when data becomes inputs for competitive analysis, influencer vetting, or trend research.
• Knowing when traditional scrapers fail, and when professional APIs succeed, saves teams weeks of debugging and maintenance costs.

What’s the Matter with TikTok Follower Scraper Tools?

Every developer who's attempted TikTok scraping knows this pattern: your script runs perfectly for days, then suddenly stops working overnight with no code changes on your end. 

Bad karma? No. The reasons might be the bottlenecks that have destroyed your Selenium installation in a few hours, or Playwright requests that have caused immediate detection. Thought that anti-bot bypass libraries you found on GitHub would work? Nice try, but they ceased working almost three weeks after the last commit.

The news is: in 2026, old TikTok scrapers will no longer work. The platform currently implements ML-based detection capabilities, which scan canvas fingerprinting, WebGL signatures, and action timing patterns. Thus, when you try to scrape TikTok followers, you are not simply competing with rate limits anymore — you are fighting fire with fire (as one of the devs on Reddit have said.)

So, what’s the play? Throw in the towel after another TikTok follower count scraper has failed? Well, there’s a smarter way forward. We recommend you unlock Data365 Social Media API's full possibilities in the next section. 

Using Data365 for TikTok Data Retrieval

TikTok data can be accessed more effectively. For example, with the Social Media API from Data365 — a public data retrieval solution for six major social networks, which eliminates the technical burden of maintaining scrapers or dealing with overly restrictive official APIs. It’s a RESTful tool compatible with Python, JavaScript, PHP, and any language with an HTTP-capable environment.

So, why does Social Media API outperform the traditional TikTok scrapers? Let’s see it in our thoughtfully composed table. 

In contrast to social media management or social listening platforms that juggle posting, scheduling, and analysis, but break down on the attempt to export a TikTok followers list, Data365 is designed to retrieve raw public data only. This unique concentration ensures utmost precision and relevance: no bloated features, no degraded data quality, only full access to public social media information.

Here’s a list of available TikTok data endpoints across Data365:

• Profile search by username, ID, or keyword
• Public user profiles with bios, verification status
• Follower and following count 
• Video content and additions (views)
• Hashtag and trend analysis for content strategy insights
• Music and sound metadata for audio trend tracking

How about data integrity? Data365 provides information in database-ready JSON, so you can seamlessly pipe it to Pandas DataFrames or tools like Tableau or Power BI. Having over eight years of experience working with social media data has built expertise that generic solutions cannot replicate.

Social Media API from Data365 serves flawlessly for professionals such as:

• SaaS coders developing social network-based apps or analytics dashboards
• Marketing teams evaluating campaigns or conducting competitor analysis
• Data researchers fueling AI models with raw social media information
• Social scientists analyzing trends, demographics, or behavioral shifts

See it in action yourself. Request your 14-day free trial to test Data365's reliability with your own TikTok data extraction use cases.

TikTok Follower Count Scraper Alternative: Get Metrics Without Maintenance

For competitive benchmarking, growth tracking, or dashboard metrics where you need follower counts without extracting full lists, Data365's user profile update task delivers basic profile info, follower counts, following counts, total posts, and verification status — everything visible on a public TikTok profile for 9 credits per user page. 

Each request follows the POST-GET-GET structure. So here’s how the process of getting TikTok followers count through API calls will look in the practice:

1. Make a POST request.

"""This is a code example for demonstration only"""

import requests

access_token = "YOUR_DATA365_BEARER_TOKEN"
# Internal TikTok ID or username of the target profile without the @ prefix
profile_id: str = "SOME_PROFILE_ID"

# Step 1: Create a data collection task
# The URL has been changed for security purposes.
post_url = f"https://data365.co/tiktok/profile/{profile_id}/update"

post_params = {
    "access_token": access_token,
}

try:
    post_response = requests.post(post_url, params=post_params)
    post_response.raise_for_status()
    print("POST request successful. Data refreshing.")
except requests.exceptions.RequestException as exc:
    print(f"Error during POST request: {exc}")

2. Make a GET request.

"""It takes up to a minute to collect information. So run this part of the code in a minute."""

import requests
import sys

access_token = "YOUR_DATA365_BEARER_TOKEN"
# Internal TikTok ID or username of the target profile without the @ prefix
profile_id = "SOME_PROFILE_ID"

# Step 2: Check task status.
status_url = f"https://data365.co/tiktok/profile/{profile_id}/update"
get_params = {
    "access_token": access_token,
}

response = requests.get(status_url, params=get_params)
status = None

if response.status_code == 200:
    data = response.json()
    status = data.get("data", {}).get("status")
    print(f"Task status: {status}")
else:
    print(f"Error: {response.status_code}")
    print(response.text)

# Step 3: Retrieve results
if status != "finished":
    print("Task is not finished yet. Wait for 1 minute... and retry")
    sys.exit()

results_url = f"https://data365.co/tiktok/profile/{profile_id}"
get_params = {
    "access_token": access_token,
}

response = requests.get(results_url, params=get_params)

if response.status_code == 200:
    data = response.json()
    follower_count = data.get("data", {}).get("follower_count")
    following_count = data.get("data", {}).get("following_count")
    print("Results:")
    print(
        f"Total followers: {follower_count} and following: {following_count}"
    )
else:
    print(f"Error: {response.status_code}")
    print(response.text)

3. Repeat a GET request to get the data. Here’s a field in your JSON response that shows the followers count.

Total followers: 25000 and following: 250

Then, this type of information can be used in further processes by: 

• Marketing analysts create competitive dashboards — to check 20-50 competitor accounts per day, visualise growth curves in Tableau or Power BI without any manual checks.
• Growth teams that gauge followership movement — to compare the number of followers to show a spike upon content release or paid promotion, and compute the actual cost per follower.
• Investment researchers assessing influencer impact — to keep an eye on follower growth rates to conduct due diligence on creator economy investments.
• Software engineers enabling social proof squads — show follower counts in product interfaces in real time. 
• Scholars studying platform dynamics — to compile longitudinal follower data from thousands of accounts to understand growth dynamics and platform impacts.

Want to explore more TikTok data endpoints beyond follower extraction? Schedule a call with our technical team for more details. 

Export TikTok Followers List: Turn Raw Data Into Actionable Insights

Data365 returns all TikTok follower data in JSON format — and there’s a good reason why. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is lightweight, human-readable, and well-suited to the nested, hierarchical nature of social media data.

Why JSON matters for your workflow: It’s native to JavaScript and effortless to handle in Python, meaning you can parse API responses into usable data structures immediately — no custom parsers, no format conversions, just clean integration with your existing tools.

Working with JSON in Python

Python’s ecosystem makes JSON manipulation trivial. The requests library handles API calls, json parses responses into native Python dictionaries and lists, and pandas transforms that data into DataFrames for analysis:

This simplicity means data scientists, analysts, and developers can move from raw API response to actionable insights in minutes, not hours.

Piping JSON to Business Intelligence Dashboards

JSON’s structured format integrates seamlessly with BI tools like Tableau, Power BI, and Looker. Most platforms support direct JSON imports or lightweight connectors — upload your follower data file, and the dashboard auto-maps fields like follower_count, is_verified, and bio into visualizations. Marketing teams can build automated reports showing follower demographics, growth trends, and audience quality metrics that refresh daily via scheduled API calls.

Database Storage for Longitudinal Analysis

Store JSON responses in PostgreSQL (using JSONB columns), MongoDB, or traditional relational databases after parsing. This enables time-series queries like “How did competitor X’s follower demographics shift over Q4?” or “Which influencers gained the most followers last month?” Historical JSON snapshots become the foundation for predictive analytics, churn detection, and trend forecasting that static spreadsheets can’t support.

So, to Scrape TikTok Followers or to Not?

To sum up: the old-fashioned TikTok follower scraper — online, script-based, or otherwise — will be obsolete in 2026. The point is, however, that the necessity of follower data is not going anywhere.

Brands should continue to vet influencers before signing deals of $50K. The audience overlap analysis is something marketing teams still need to avoid paying three times for the same reach.

The API, such as Data365, addresses the problem of faulty scrapers. Instead of spending hours debugging Python scripts, you end up with structured JSON responses in minutes. You also pay transparent credit fees rather than disguised proxy bills and costly developer salaries. You concentrate on the authenticity of your followers, network mapping, campaign optimization, rather than updating your CSS selectors twice a month as TikTok changes its front end.

Stop debugging. Start extracting. You can have a 14-day free trial of Data365 and see what TikTok follower data would look like when it is simply doing its job.