Instagram API in 2026: What the Official API Can Do, What It Can't, and the Alternatives

The Instagram API in 2026 is Meta’s Instagram Platform, a set of APIs for apps that manage Instagram professional accounts. It is the right tool for publishing, comment moderation, insights and messaging. It is the wrong tool for reading other people’s public content at scale. This guide covers the three official setups, which accounts they need, what you can read about other accounts, App Review, rate limits and price, and then the alternative for public data.

Every fact about Meta below comes from Meta’s own developer pages, linked where it appears. Meta updates these pages often, so check the date at the top of each one.

The Instagram API options in 2026

Meta’s Instagram Platform overview lists three API setups:

Setup	App user logs in with	Facebook Page	API host	Hashtag search
Instagram API with Unified Login (recommended for new integrations)	Instagram or Facebook	Not required	graph.facebook.com	Supported
Instagram API with Instagram Login	Instagram	Not required	graph.instagram.com	Not supported
Instagram API with Facebook Login	Facebook	Required	graph.facebook.com	Supported

All three support comment moderation, content publishing, insights, mentions and messaging. Product tagging and partnership ads are not supported with Instagram Login.

Messaging also has its own product. Meta’s Instagram Platform page describes Messenger API support for Instagram (called the Instagram Messaging API in the Developer Policies), which lets professional accounts manage Instagram and Facebook Page messages in one place. It needs a Business or Creator account linked to a Facebook Page. The same page lists webhooks, Sharing to Stories, Sharing to Feed and embeds for showing public posts on a website.

What happened to the Instagram Basic Display API

Many summaries still describe the Basic Display API as current. It is not. In a developer blog post dated September 4, 2024, Meta wrote that “starting on December 4th, 2024, Instagram Basic Display API will no longer be available” and that all its requests would fail from that day. Meta also wrote: “After December 4th, 2024, there will no longer be a set of Instagram APIs for consumer developer apps.”

Basic Display was the API that connected personal accounts to consumer apps, for example to show a user’s photos on their own site. If you followed an older tutorial and the calls fail, this is why. Meta pointed business use cases to the Instagram API with Instagram Login or with Facebook Login.

Which accounts the Instagram API works with

The overview is direct: “To use the APIs, your app users must have an Instagram professional account.” A professional account represents a business or a creator. Unified Login and Instagram Login serve accounts without a Facebook Page. Facebook Login needs the account linked to a Page, and the user must be able to perform admin-equivalent tasks on that Page.

So, can you use the Instagram API for a personal account? No. You can switch a personal account to a professional one in the Instagram app, and then it works with the API.

What you can read: your account versus other accounts

The API is built around the accounts your app users own. Meta’s overview says “a permission only allows access to data created by the app user who granted the permission,” with a few endpoints that return limited public data about others. Those endpoints are Business Discovery and hashtag search.

Business Discovery

Business Discovery returns data about other Instagram Business or Creator accounts. You query by username through your own professional account and can expand fields such as followers_count, media_count and, per post, like_count, comments_count and view_count. The limits, from the reference page:

• It is available for the Instagram API with Facebook Login and needs a Facebook User access token with instagram_basic, instagram_manage_insights and pages_read_engagement.
• It only works for Business or Creator accounts. Personal accounts are not covered, and age-gated business accounts return no data.
• You cannot open the returned media objects directly: a GET on one fails for insufficient permissions.
• media_url is omitted for videos with copyrighted or licensed audio, and for reels whose owner turned off downloads.

Hashtag search and Public Content Access

Hashtag search finds top or recent public media with a hashtag. To use it, you must pass App Review for the Instagram Public Content Access feature and the instagram_basic permission. Meta lists its allowed uses as finding content from your hashtag campaigns, understanding public sentiment around your brand, identifying contest entrants, customer support and managing your audience. The limits:

• 30 unique hashtags per account in a rolling 7-day period. Fetching media for a hashtag counts as a query.
• The recent media edge returns only media published within 24 hours of the query, up to 50 results per page, not always in date order.
• You cannot request the username field on returned media, so you see the post but not who posted it.
• No Stories hashtags, no emoji hashtags, no promoted media.

App review and permissions

Meta has two access levels (overview):

• Standard Access is the default. It is meant for people with roles on your app, development and testing. If your app only serves your own professional account or one you manage, Standard Access is all you need.
• Advanced Access is needed when your app serves professional accounts you don’t own or manage. It requires App Review and Business Verification.

Permissions depend on the login type. Instagram Login uses the instagram_business_* family, such as instagram_business_basic and instagram_business_content_publish. Facebook Login uses instagram_basic, instagram_content_publish, instagram_manage_comments, instagram_manage_insights, instagram_manage_messages and Page permissions. The Meta Platform Terms add that Meta may require App Review at its discretion and may remove access to permissions your app has not used within 28 days.

Tokens: the authorization code is valid for one hour, the short-lived access token for one hour, and the long-lived token for 60 days, refreshable before it expires.

Instagram API rate limits

From Meta’s rate limiting page and the overview:

• Most Instagram Platform calls (not messaging): 4,800 times the number of impressions per 24 hours, counted for each app and app user pair. Impressions are how often the account’s content entered someone’s screen in the last 24 hours, so a small account gets a small budget.
• Business Discovery and hashtag search fall under Platform Rate Limits. For app access tokens that is 200 calls per hour times your app’s number of daily active users. For user access tokens, Meta says it does not reveal the actual call count.
• Messaging: 2 calls per second per account for the Conversations API, 100 per second for text messages, 10 per second for audio or video, and 750 per hour for private replies to comments on posts and reels.

Instagram API pricing: is it free?

Meta’s Instagram Platform pages list no per-call fee and no price table, and we found no fee in the Platform Terms. In that sense the Instagram API is free. The real costs are developer time, a Meta developer app, App Review and Business Verification if you serve other accounts, and the rate limits above.

The gap: public data from accounts you don’t manage

Here is what the official API cannot give you:

• posts and reels of personal accounts, even public ones,
• the full post list of a competitor or creator, with captions and media links you can open,
• comments under other accounts’ posts,
• reels found by keyword,
• any of this without a professional account, a Meta app and, for most uses, App Review.

That is what a scraper is for. Our Instagram Scraper runs on Apify and reads public posts, reels, comments and profile details. You give it usernames, post or reel links, or reels search keywords. Each post comes with caption, hashtags, mentions, likes, comment count, views for reels, duration, photo and video links, carousel items, location and owner. Profile rows include bio, followers, following, post count, category and website. You need an Apify account, but no Instagram login, cookies or session.

	Official Instagram API	Our Instagram Scraper
Account needed	Instagram professional account and a Meta developer app	Apify account only
App review	Required for Advanced Access and for hashtag search	None
Whose data	Your own or managed professional accounts; limited public fields of other Business or Creator accounts	Any public account, including personal ones
Write access	Publish, moderate comments, reply to messages	None: read only
Cost	No per-call fee listed by Meta	Pay per result (below)

On the day we wrote this, prices were the same on every Apify plan, free plan included:

Result	Price per 1,000
Posts or reels from profiles or reels search	$1.50
Posts or reels fetched by link	$6.50
Comments	$1.00
Profiles	$6.50

There is no start fee. Duplicates, private profiles and posts outside your date or engagement filters are not charged. The free Apify plan is capped at 100 results per run; paid plans have no cap. The card at the end of this page shows current prices.

When to use which

1. You publish, moderate comments, answer messages or read insights for accounts you manage: use the official API. Our scraper cannot write to Instagram.
2. You track your own brand hashtag for a campaign: the official hashtag search fits, within its 30-hashtag weekly limit.
3. You research competitors, creators or a niche, including personal public accounts, or need comments at scale: a scraper is the simpler route.

Similar trade-offs apply on other platforms. If you also track ads, see our guide to Meta Ad Library search. Whichever route you take, follow Instagram’s terms and data protection law, and treat usernames and comments as personal data.