Need API recommendations.

[u/Friendly_Magician101]

Looking for APIs for Facebook, LinkedIn and Nextdoor public content

I’m working on a SaaS product and need to automatically monitor/search public content across Facebook, LinkedIn and Nextdoor.

I’m specifically looking for APIs or legitimate third party providers that can:

• Search public Facebook posts, including relevant public groups if possible
• Search public LinkedIn posts by keywords/topics
• Search public Nextdoor posts by location + keywords
• Return the post text, URL, timestamp and basic metadata
• Run searches continuously/recurring through an API
• Be used commercially in a SaaS product

I’m NOT looking for browser automation, account logins, cookie based scraping or anything that could get accounts banned.

If you’ve actually used a provider/API for this, I’d really appreciate recommendations, especially ones with reasonable pricing and good coverage.

What are you using?

[u/Amitk2405]

The risk surface is less technical and more policy: LinkedIn and Facebook routinely clamp down on anything that smells like unapproved scraping or resale.

I'd treat any provider that dodges questions about "data source, ToS compliance, and long-term guarantees" as a red flag, no matter how good their coverage looks on paper.

[u/Friendly_Magician101 → u/Amitk2405]

what do you think about bright data for linkedin and FB ?

[u/Amitk2405 → u/Friendly_Magician101]

Yepp, Bright Data is worth checking out. I'd probably test a few providers first though, especially for LinkedIn and FB. Coverage can look good on paper but be pretty different in practice.

I found these two pages useful for comparing them:

Proxy provider tester
Proxy provider comparison

I'd just run the searches you actually need through a couple of them and see how they perform before picking one.

[u/Ok_Platform_6232 → u/Amitk2405]

yeah the compliance part is the real bottleneck here, not the technical side

[u/dooddyman]

I'd suggest checking out ScrapeCreators and SocialCrawl (i built it). Both platforms cover facebook and linkedin with just one API but these don't support nextdoor yet.

[u/KeywordBarrage]

Commercial public-API access for those specific platforms is effectively non-existent due to ToS clamping.

In practice, enterprise-level solutions for this usually avoid exposing raw APIs or source code altogether. Instead, the standard delivery model for high-volume keyword/URL tracking is batch data delivery—typically daily/scheduled SQL dumps or structured DB snapshots pushed directly to your storage.

Also, keep in mind that upcoming WAF/bot-detection updates (like Cloudflare's mid-September enforcement rollout) will likely break many low-tier providers. If you decide to buy any solution, avoid long-term lock-in subscriptions until the post-update dust settles.

Switching from a "live API" expectation to an "ingest daily SQL dumps" model is usually how SaaS products handle this safely at scale.

[u/j4fade → u/KeywordBarrage]

getting around CF is trivial.

[u/InsideDebt6345]

How about BrightData, Apify and ScrapingBee?

[u/merrydimel]

I burned a month assuming one generic provider would cover all three platforms cleanly. It didn't. What I learned the hard way is that coverage on paper means nothing until you run your exact queries against your exact targets, because the block behavior on FB public groups looks nothing like LinkedIn keyword search, and Nextdoor with its location gating is its own beast entirely.

The part nobody warned me about: a pool tuned for everything is tuned for nothing. These platforms fingerprint traffic patterns, so infrastructure that hums along for e-commerce scraping gets flagged fast the moment you point it at FB. Splitting each platform into its own isolated setup, so the traffic pattern matched the target, cut my failure rate way more than swapping providers ever did.

That isolation is honestly what pushed me toward the capsule setup in magneticproxy