Best Instagram email scrapers for lead gen in 2025

Companies looking to collect emails for lead generation from Instagram often hit two major roadblocks:

1. Building an in-house scraper is usually out of reach unless you’re a large enterprise with a dedicated data engineering team. That’s because Instagram’s frontend and anti-bot protections change constantly, so any custom-built scraper needs continuous maintenance. Plus, developers have to fight through layers of anti-scraping barriers such as CAPTCHAs, rate limits, and bot detection, which require advanced setups like rotating proxies, headless browsers, and request throttling just to keep the system running.
2. They can’t rely on official Instagram Graph API access to get this data. Instagram used to offer two APIs: the Graph API for business and creator accounts, and the Instagram Basic Display API for personal accounts. However, Meta shut down the Basic Display API in December 2024, which means personal accounts now have no API access at all, and the Graph API only works with professional accounts.

Using Instagram Graph API in 2025

The Instagram Graph API is useful for managing and analyzing your own professional accounts, but it doesn’t allow extraction of contact information (like emails), access to personal accounts, or large-scale scraping of public profiles.

What it can do:

• Access posts, Reels, and Stories from accounts you own or manage
• Fetch insights such as engagement, reach, impressions, and follower demographics
• Moderate comments and publish content programmatically

What it can’t do:

• Pull contact details like emails from other users
• Collect data from personal accounts
• Perform large-scale competitive scraping (e.g. harvesting leads by hashtags or locations)

If you want to gather emails from Instagram for lead generation, the Graph API won’t help. Fortunately, you can use an off-the-shelf scraper to get instant, scalable results. Let’s compare the top five Instagram email scrapers offered by Apify, Clay, PhantomBuster, LeadStal, and IGLeads.io.

The best Instagram email scrapers: Quick comparison

1. Apify’s Local Lead Generation Agent

Local Lead Generation Agent from Apify is a complete end-to-end solution for sourcing qualified leads from Instagram. Instead of only extracting contact details, it first discovers relevant profiles based on your chosen keywords and locations, then pulls any publicly available emails or phone numbers listed. It also crawls linked websites to uncover additional contact information, giving you a fuller picture of each lead. What really sets it apart is its AI-powered lead scoring (built with LangChain), which not only ranks profiles but explains why each one is a strong match for your outreach.

Getting started

Create an Apify account to access Apify Console. From there the process is pretty straightforward as the scraper’s UI is intuitive. Simply add your search terms, and run the scraper to automatically collect emails.

If you want to prioritize high-quality leads in your dataset, the scraper offers an additional feature: it can analyze and score your leads using an LLM. Instead of wasting time on scoring processes, simply enable the toggle button to see which contacts are the most relevant for your prospecting activities.

Pricing: Pay per event model, $30.00 / 1,000 analyzed leads

Pros

• As well as public Instagram emails, it retrieves linked site emails and other contact information, such as phone number and business address
• Forever free plan includes $5 in platform credits monthly
• AI-powered lead scoring feature saves time prioritizing quality leads
• Provides ready-to-use datasets with structured output in JSON, XML, and more
• Offers versatile access methods (UI, API, CLI)

Cons

• Platform lock-in: You must run it in Apify’s ecosystem
• Reliant on Apify’s updates: If Instagram updates its frontend or anti-bot protections, you depend on Apify’s developers to do the fixes

2. Claygent by Clay

Clay is a no-code platform offering an AI web scraper (Claygent). Users can run it using natural language prompts, just like they would when using ChatGPT or similar models. The platform also offers a Chrome extension that lets you scrape as you browse. You can use a URL, name, or domain as the initial input.

Getting started

Getting started with Clay is complex. After creating an account and setting up your workspace, you have to devote some time to learning how to use the platform. Then you can either import a list of Instagram profiles (usernames, names, or domains) or use integrations to look up people and companies from other identifiers. Claygent (the AI agent) does not scrape emails directly from Instagram profiles, but uses enrichment instead - it pulls business emails from external data providers based on names or company domains.

Pricing: from $149/month

Pros

• Run the scraper using natural language (AI prompts)
• Enrichment options (company information, domain, upcoming events)
• Multiple scraping approaches using the AI agent or a browser
• Free plan with 100 free credits (allowing you to scrape up to 100 people/companies)
• Optional email validation through the ZeroBounce integration
• Integrations such as HubSpot and Salesforce are available

Cons

• Higher pricing tiers - Starter plan at $149/month, and an expensive credit system for inexperienced users
• Learning how to use the platform takes time
• Not Instagram-specific, so there’s always a risk of scraping outdated data
• Some users report slow performance (source: G2)

3. PhantomBuster’s Instagram Profile Scraper

PhantomBuster’s Instagram Profile Scraper is a cloud-based automation tool. It works with Instagram session cookies and a list of profile URLs as input. It was designed to fetch details such as username, bio, profile picture, follower/following counts, account type (private or business), and any visible email addresses listed in the bio.

Getting started

To start scraping with PhantomBuster you have to first provide it with a session cookie. Then, you can add a URL or, in case you want to scrape multiple profiles, create a spreadsheet with URLs. Then you share the spreadsheet URL with PhantomBuster in order to set up the scraping process.

Pricing: from $69 month; 14-day free trial.

Pros

• No-code automation tool with scheduling options
• You can scrape multiple profiles at once
• It can classify profiles by whether they are following you or you are following them

Cons

• Using a session cookie. If Instagram detects suspicious automation from your session, it could suspend or block your account
• Steeper learning curve for chaining Phantoms together
• No built-in enrichment options
• For scraping multiple profiles, you have to gather IG URLs into a spreadsheet first
• Scraping limit of 100 profiles per day

4. LeadStal - Instagram Profile Scraper

LeadStal’s solution is a Chrome extension offering real-time Instagram scraping. Apart from contact details such as emails, phone numbers, and website URLs, this tool can scrape user information (name, user name, followers, profile photo), status, and content shared on their profile. Manual work is required, though - you have to click through profiles you’re interested in to scrape them.

Getting started

To start working with LeadStal Instagram scraper, download the Chrome extension, unpack it, and load it to Chrome in developer mode. Then open Instagram in Chrome, type your target business category or keywords you’re interested in, and click the "Profile Leads" button to begin scraping.

Pricing: Standard $9.99/ month

Pros

• Affordable pricing, with a free-forever tier and 20 credits/month (1 credit = 1 validated lead)
• Built-in automatic email verification
• Real-time data access
• Simple, intuitive UI
• Provides email validation built in

Cons

• Less advanced than AI-powered tools
• Browser-based setup with manual work: User needs to click each profile individually
• No automation options
• Not suitable for large-scale scraping

5. IGLeads Instagram Email Scraper

The IGLeads Instagram Email Scraper is a cloud-based tool designed to make lead generation simple. What singles this tool out is that IGLeads leverages Google search results. It scans Google-indexed Instagram profiles to extract any publicly available emails from bios, giving you ready-to-use contact lists.

Getting started

Sign up to access the IGLeads platform and find the Instagram Scraper on the list. Next, enter a keyword or a hashtag (you can use up to five hashtags or keywords), choose B2B or B2C targeting, set a country, and specify how many emails you want to collect. Getting data takes time, though: You have to wait for a couple of hours to get results.

Pricing: $59/month

Pros

• Works entirely via Google-indexed public data, so it’s less prone to Instagram blocks or account suspensions
• Simple, no-code setup with hashtags or keywords
• Clean, ready-to-use exports. IGLeads removes duplicates and profiles without emails, generating clean CSV files
• Wide platform coverage for social media - supports scraping emails from Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter (X)

Cons

• Accuracy depends on what's publicly indexed, so you may end up with outdated contact info
• Very slow - most jobs finish within a few hours
• The free tier only allows exporting 20 leads after the scraper run

Start scraping

If you want to collect emails from Instagram, off-the-shelf tools are the fastest and most practical route. The best choice depends on your budget, the scale of your campaigns, and how technical your team is:

• Local Lead Generation Agent by Apify offers versatile access methods, making it suitable for developers and less technical users. It extracts multiple types of contact information, with lead scoring built in
• Claygent offers many enrichment capabilities, though it’s not so intuitive for less technical users, and is on the expensive side
• PhantomBuster offers simple cloud automation, but relies on session cookies. Scraping caps make it hard to scale
• LeadStal is budget-friendly and easy to use for small-scale prospecting, but is not designed for high volume
• IGLeads offers multi-platform coverage with a compliance-focused approach, but not the best option for up-to-date datasets

Try Apify today

Get $5 monthly credit and start scraping emails for free

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Note: This evaluation is based on our understanding of information available to us as of September 2025. Readers should conduct their own research for detailed comparisons. Product names, logos, and brands are used for identification only and remain the property of their respective owners. Their use does not imply affiliation or endorsement.

FAQ

Is it legal to scrape Instagram?

Scraping publicly available data is legal, but always double-check your output for data that would go against GDPR, CCPA, or could be considered intellectual property. Read more about the legality of web scraping in our blog post on the subject.

Can I create my own Instagram scraper on Apify?

Yes, you can build your own Instagram scraper on the Apify platform in Python or JavaScript - either for deployment or full production - and take advantage of built-in proxies, infrastructure, scheduling, and storage.