Social Blade alternative: Social Fetch vs Social Blade

Social Blade has been snapshotting public profiles for years. The website shows daily charts, growth over the last day to the last year, SB Rank, grades and top lists across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Twitch, and it's free to browse; Premium plans ($59.99 to $1,439.99 a year) add longer tables, more favourites and bigger top lists.

Its Business API exposes the same data: a statistics endpoint per platform with daily history, and a top-list endpoint. The history is the part you can't recreate. Social Blade offers up to 3 years of daily data for YouTube channels and up to 10 years for the other platforms. Social Fetch has no archive and no rankings. If you need to know what a channel looked like in 2023, or who the top 100 are, use Social Blade.

You prepay credits. A statistics call costs 1 credit per profile per platform and returns up to 30 days of daily data; asking for 1 year costs 2 credits, 3 years 3 credits, and 10 years (not available for YouTube) 5 credits. Once you've paid for a profile, looking it up again within 30 days is free, so a daily refresh costs 1 credit a month. Top lists are free for the first page and 20 credits for each page after, with 48 hours to page through.

Credits cost $0.50 each for 100 to 1,000, $0.25 at 5,000 and 7,500, and Social Blade lists rates as low as $0.10 and $0.06 on larger packages. Calls for Social Blade's own accounts are free, which makes testing easy.

Social Fetch reads the live profile every time you call it: GET /v1/youtube/channel returns subscribers, views and video count; GET /v1/tiktok/profiles/{handle} returns followers, following, likes and posts. Each costs 1 credit. Social Blade's API stops at profile statistics. We also return the content behind the numbers: a channel's videos and Shorts (/v1/youtube/channels/videos), a TikTok profile's videos with per-video views and likes, comments and replies, and transcripts.

For engagement, /v1/tiktok/profiles/{handle}/engagement and /v1/instagram/profiles/{handle}/engagement (5 credits each) calculate average and median engagement rates from recent posts and flag the best and worst performers. See the YouTube, TikTok and Instagram hubs for every route.

If you only need history from today onwards, you can build it. Call the profile route once a day for each account you track and store the counts with a timestamp. That's 30 credits per account per month: about $0.05 at the Scale pack rate. After a month you have a month of daily data; after a year, a year. It's your data in your database, with whatever fields and granularity you choose, but there is no way to fill in the time before you started.

Monitors cover the posting side. A monitor watches a TikTok profile's videos, an Instagram account's posts or reels, an X timeline or a subreddit, and sends a signed webhook with each new item, so you can log posts and their early engagement without running a poller. Monitors fire on new content, not on follower changes, so keep a scheduled profile call for the counts. Events are kept for 30 days; store the ones you want to keep. The monitoring quickstart walks through the setup.

They fit together well. Use Social Blade to backfill history and rankings for the accounts you care about, then Social Fetch for live stats, content, comments and new-post webhooks going forward, including on platforms Social Blade's API doesn't cover, such as X, Reddit and LinkedIn. If you don't need the past, Social Fetch on its own is usually cheaper at small volumes and adds the post-level data.

Social Blade owns the past: years of daily stats, growth figures and rankings, with an API priced per profile per month. Social Fetch doesn't have that archive or any rankings. It returns live stats, posts, comments and transcripts across more platforms, sends webhooks when accounts post, and lets you build your own history from the day you start. If you need the past, buy it from Social Blade; if you need the present and what's in it, use Social Fetch.