Short verdict: for a YouTube workload, Tapline is the one to beat. More calls per dollar at every comparable paid tier, more YouTube endpoints than Supadata publishes, and no charge at all for the calls that come back empty. Supadata is the better buy in a short list of situations: the bill has to land under $49, you need burst speed, or you need an AI transcript or a translation for a video nobody has captioned.
If your workload is mostly TikTok, Instagram, X, or Facebook, stop reading here. That is Supadata, and Tapline does not cover them. Everything below is scoped to YouTube, which is the only ground these two actually compete on.
Supadata vs Tapline at a glance
| Dimension | Tapline | Supadata |
|---|---|---|
| DimensionCheapest paid plan | TaplineStarter: $49 a month | SupadataBasic: $5 a month |
| DimensionIncluded standard requests | Tapline50,000 Starter; 500,000 Growth; 2,000,000 Pro | Supadata300 Basic; 3,000 Pro; 30,000 Mega; 300,000 Giga; 1,000,000 Supa |
| DimensionCalls that find nothing | TaplineFree. Credits are charged only when a call reaches its target and returns data | SupadataA transcript request that comes back 206 Unavailable still uses 1 credit |
| DimensionPublished rate limits | Tapline5 req/s Starter; 25 Growth; 50 Pro | Supadata10 req/s Basic and Pro; 50 Mega; 100 Giga and Supa |
| DimensionVideo has no captions | TaplineNo transcript. Tapline reads existing caption tracks only | SupadataAI generates one at 2 credits per video minute |
| DimensionOther social platforms | TaplineNone. No TikTok, Instagram, X, or Facebook endpoints | SupadataTikTok, Instagram, X, and Facebook |
| DimensionEndpoints the other lacks | TaplineCursor-paginated comments and replies, engagement heatmaps, video formats, and subtitle-track listings | SupadataBatch requests, transcript translation, and AI extraction |
| DimensionCredit rollover | TaplineNo. Unused credits expire at the end of the billing period | SupadataNo. Every month restarts at the plan allowance |
What 1,000 calls actually cost
Neither company sells calls by the thousand. You buy a monthly bucket of credits and hope you sized it right. So the only honest way to compare the two is to pair the closest tiers, divide the price by the calls included, and see what a thousand of them works out to.
| Closest tiers | Tapline | Supadata | Gap per call |
|---|---|---|---|
| Closest tiersStarter vs Mega | Tapline$0.98 per 1,000. $49 buys 50,000 calls | Supadata$1.57 per 1,000. $47 buys 30,000 calls | Gap per callTapline 1.6x cheaper |
| Closest tiersGrowth vs Giga | Tapline$0.40 per 1,000. $199 buys 500,000 calls | Supadata$0.99 per 1,000. $297 buys 300,000 calls | Gap per callTapline 2.5x cheaper |
| Closest tiersPro vs Supa | Tapline$0.25 per 1,000. $499 buys 2,000,000 calls | Supadata$0.90 per 1,000. $897 buys 1,000,000 calls | Gap per callTapline 3.6x cheaper |
| Closest tiersUnder $49 | TaplineNo paid plan. Signing up gets you 500 free credits, about 250 calls | SupadataFree includes 100 requests; Basic is $16.67 per 1,000 ($5 for 300); Pro is $5.67 ($17 for 3,000) | Gap per callSupadata, by walkover |
Tapline is cheaper per call at all three pairings, and the gap widens as the plans get bigger because the allowance grows faster than the price does. The catch is in the caption: those rates only exist if you drain the bucket. Buy Growth, make 40,000 calls, and you paid $4.98 per 1,000, which is worse than every number in the table.
That is also why the actual invoice comes out smaller on Supadata until you are somewhere past 100,000 calls a month. At 10,000 calls, Mega is $47 against Tapline Starter at $49. At 100,000, Supadata's Auto Recharge packs (5,000 credits for $10 on Mega) get you there for about $187 against Growth at $199. Then it flips, and not gently: $199 against $297 at 300,000 calls and $199 against $497 at 500,000. That $497 figure is Giga at $297 for 300,000 requests plus ten $20 recharge packs of 20,000. At one million, the comparison is $499 against $897.
Where Supadata wins
Small workloads, first. Basic is $5 and Pro is $17, and both live under Tapline's $49 floor. The per-call rate on those plans is the worst on this page, but nobody pulling 2,000 transcripts a month is optimizing per-call rates. They care that the bill is $17.
Throughput is the bigger win. Mega allows 50 requests a second against 5 on Tapline Starter, Giga allows 100 against 25 on Growth, and Supa allows 100 against 50 on Pro. Twenty thousand transcripts takes about seven minutes on Mega and over an hour on Starter. No per-call saving buys that hour back, which is what makes Supadata the better fit for burst ingestion and the afternoon a pipeline falls over and leaves you a backlog. Steady work is a different story. Five requests a second is 13 million calls a month if you never stop, roughly 260 times what Starter includes, so the per-second ceiling only bites when the job arrives all at once.
Supadata also transcribes videos that have no captions at all, at 2 credits per video minute, so a 45-minute video costs 90 credits. Translation runs 30 credits per transcript minute, which climbs quickly: one 20-minute translation eats 600 credits, a fifth of what the $17 plan includes for the whole month. Tapline does neither. It reads caption tracks that already exist, and no track means no transcript. Supadata covers TikTok, Instagram, X, and Facebook on top of that, and publishes batch, extraction, and web-scraping endpoints on the same account.
Where Tapline wins
The per-call economics above are half of it. The other half is what happens when a call finds nothing. Tapline's published rule charges credits only when a call reaches its target and returns data. Supadata's transcript pricing documentation says a request that returns 206 Transcript Unavailable uses 1 credit. Sweep 100,000 video IDs where 15,000 have no usable transcript and Supadata bills you for those 15,000 misses. On Tapline the misses cost nothing, and the 85,000 that worked cost the same either way.
None of that is a trick on Supadata's part. A miss still costs a vendor a real request, and the charge is documented in plain sight. It does mean the two products behave very differently on messy ID lists, and most ID lists are messy. Supadata's latency guidance adds that a request counts if your client times out before the response arrives. That is a client-side timeout after Supadata has started work, not a claim that it bills its own internal timeouts.
Then there is depth. Of these two, only Tapline publishes endpoints for comments, engagement heatmaps, video formats, and subtitle-track listings, which is roughly the difference between a transcript pipeline and something that can answer questions about an audience. The comments endpoint returns 20 threads and a cursor, so a job can walk a whole comment section instead of sampling the first page, and replies page the same way from their own endpoint. There is a Python walkthrough of a full comment extraction if that is the workload you are sizing. Supadata is wider across platforms. Tapline is deeper inside YouTube.
Which one should you choose?
On YouTube, the default is Tapline. Reach for Supadata when it does something Tapline cannot, and those cases are specific enough to list.
| Choose | When the workload looks like this | What you give up |
|---|---|---|
| ChooseTapline | When the workload looks like thisYour videos have captions, which is true of most mainstream uploads. You want everything attached to a video: whole comment threads, replies, subtitle tracks, formats, and the most-replayed curve. Your ID lists fail often, or your volume is big enough that the per-call rate lands on the invoice | What you give upA $49 floor, a ceiling of 5 to 50 requests a second, no AI transcript when captions are missing, and nothing outside YouTube |
| ChooseSupadata | When the workload looks like thisThe bill has to come in under $49, you need to clear a backlog at 50 to 100 requests a second, you need an AI transcript or a translation, or you want TikTok, Instagram, X, and Facebook on one key | What you give upStandard calls cost 1.6x to 3.6x more per 1,000, every 206 miss still uses a credit, and the published YouTube endpoint set is narrower |
Landing in both rows is common, and the split has an obvious shape: Tapline for the YouTube volume, Supadata for the captionless leftovers and the platforms Tapline does not touch. Keep the bulk of the calls on the cheaper per-call plan and pay Supadata's rate only for the work Tapline cannot do. Price the split before you commit to it, though. Two clients, two schemas, two invoices, and someone has to remember which key does what at 3am.
The cheapest way to settle any of this is to run your own video IDs through it. Tapline hands you 500 free credits at signup with no card, about 250 calls, which is enough to find out how much of your list comes back empty and who charges you for it.
Method and sources
Prices, rate limits, recharge packs, and rollover terms came from Tapline's pricing page and Supadata's pricing page on August 4, 2026. Endpoint and billing claims came from Tapline's YouTube billing FAQ and Supadata's transcript documentation. Where this page calls an endpoint missing, it means the endpoint was not in that vendor's published reference on that date, not that the vendor could never add it or will not support it privately.
Full disclosure: Tapline publishes this page and sells one of the two products on it. Every Supadata figure here is Supadata's own published number, and pricing pages move, so check both before you commit to a plan.
FAQ
Per call, yes, at every comparable tier: $0.98 per 1,000 on Starter against $1.57 on Supadata Mega, $0.40 on Growth against $0.99 on Giga, and $0.25 on Pro against $0.90 on Supa. The monthly bill is a different question. Below roughly 100,000 calls Supadata comes out lower ($47 against $49 at 10,000 calls, about $187 with Auto Recharge against $199 at 100,000). Tapline is cheaper from 300,000 calls up ($199 vs $297), at 500,000 ($199 vs $497), and at 1 million ($499 vs $897). The $497 figure is Giga at $297 plus ten $20 recharge packs of 20,000 calls. Monthly prices checked 2026-08-04.
Not one published in its API reference as of 2026-07-31. Of these two products, only Tapline publishes a comments endpoint. It returns top or newest comment threads with author, likes, timestamps, and pinned status at 2 credits per request, 20 threads a page, and a cursor that walks the rest of the comment section. Replies have their own endpoint and page the same way.
No. Tapline returns transcripts for public videos with an existing caption track. Supadata can generate a transcript with AI at 2 credits per minute of video. Supadata is the better fit when missing captions are common.
For caption-backed YouTube workloads, Tapline publishes more YouTube-specific endpoints and delivers about 1.6 to 3.6 times as many standard calls per dollar at full use of comparable paid tiers. It is not a full Supadata replacement if you need AI transcription, translation, high burst throughput, web scraping, or other social platforms.
No. Supadata's pricing page says each month starts with the plan allowance. Tapline's paid credits also expire at the end of the billing period. Policies checked 2026-07-31.
Tapline's published rule charges credits only when a call reaches its target and returns data. Supadata's transcript documentation says a request that returns status 206 Transcript Unavailable uses 1 credit. It also says that a request still counts if the client app times out before receiving the response.
Weighing up more than these two? Our roundup of YouTube transcript options covers the rest of the field, including the free Python library and Google's official API.
