YouTube Transcript API
Extract transcripts and subtitles from YouTube videos without headless browser.
Scraping, browsers and parsing PyPI MIT
How YouTube Transcript API is used
YouTube Transcript API is a dependency in 9 of the 6,211 public GitHub projects set up for AI coding agents that we scanned, too few to describe it from them alone. Our scan also samples projects by dependency (Solana 2,661, Ethereum and EVM 1,496, 3D and games 2,818, agent frameworks and SDKs 10,980); counting those, it appears in 154 projects, and what it is used with below comes from all of them. The most used alternative in our scan is Beautiful Soup (134 projects). Projects that use it most often also use python-dotenv (85.7%), OpenAI Python Library (71.4%), Requests (67.5%).
YouTube Transcript API popularity over time
Gid Score 60: downloads 77, use in agent projects 57, GitHub stars 47, downloads trend 47 (each 0-100). How it is calculated.
Often used with YouTube Transcript API
| python-dotenv | 85.7% of YouTube Transcript API projects · 9.4× more than average |
|---|---|
| OpenAI Python Library | 71.4% of YouTube Transcript API projects · 18.1× more than average |
| Requests | 67.5% of YouTube Transcript API projects · 9.9× more than average |
| NumPy | 65.6% of YouTube Transcript API projects · 11.3× more than average |
| Beautiful Soup | 61.7% of YouTube Transcript API projects · 28.6× more than average |
| Pydantic | 61.0% of YouTube Transcript API projects · 7.1× more than average |
| Pillow | 57.1% of YouTube Transcript API projects · 14.9× more than average |
| pandas | 54.5% of YouTube Transcript API projects · 12.7× more than average |
From all 154 projects in our scan that use YouTube Transcript API, including the dependency samples.
By coding agent
| Claude Code | 0.2% of projects set up for it |
|---|---|
| GitHub Copilot | 0.2% of projects set up for it |
Share of public repos configured for each agent that list YouTube Transcript API as a dependency.
How YouTube Transcript API is funded
Install
| Package | pip install youtube-transcript-api |
|---|---|
| Main stacks | Python (152), React Native / Expo (1), Next.js (1) |
| Example projects | Josh-XT/AGiXT, liyedanpdx/reddit-ai-trends, GAIR-NLP/DeepResearcher, ustc-ai4science/Science-Star, SPThole/CoexistAI |
Alternatives to YouTube Transcript API
Tools that do the same job, so a project picks one or the other. Add-ons and libraries used alongside YouTube Transcript API are not listed here; they are in "Often used with".
| Tool | Gid Score | Used in agent projects | Downloads / wk | GitHub stars | License |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Beautiful Soup pypi Python HTML/XML parsing and screen-scraping library for web data extraction. |
77 | 134 (8.3%) | 70.4M | — | MIT |
| lxml pypi High-performance XML and HTML processing library combining libxml2/libxslt with Python. |
72 | 79 (4.9%) | 88.4M | 3,066 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Playwright (Python) pypi High-level Python API for automating browser testing and web scraping. |
76 | 74 (4.6%) | 28.4M | 15.1K | Apache-2.0 |
| Selenium pypi Official Python bindings for browser automation and web scraping. |
62 | 27 (1.7%) | 7.3M | — | Apache-2.0 |
More in Scraping, browsers and parsing: Puppeteer Playwright Core Cheerio fast-xml-parser jsonc-parser Mozilla Readability linkedom Puppeteer Core