- Pushshift lost public access on 2 May 2023 and is now restricted to verified Reddit moderators, it is not coming back
- Arctic Shift is the closest successor for bulk history, free and unauthenticated, with dumps, an API and a web interface
- PullPush deliberately mimics the old Pushshift API so legacy code keeps running, but it never inherited Pushshift's privileged ingestion
- None of these replace live monitoring, historical archives answer what was said, not what is being said right now
Pushshift is not down, it is gone. Public access was revoked on 2 May 2023 in the wake of Reddit's API pricing change, and access today is limited to verified Reddit moderators for moderation work. More than 1,700 scholarly articles had been built on it, which is why the gap still gets talked about three years later.
If you landed here from an old script or an old paper, here is what replaced it, and what genuinely did not.
The honest summary
| Tool | Best for | Cost | Main limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arctic Shift | Bulk history, 2005 to now | Free | Full-text search is scoped to a user or a subreddit |
| PullPush | Keeping old Pushshift code alive | Free | No privileged ingestion, coverage gaps |
| Reddit for Researchers | Sanctioned academic work | Application | Eligibility and review, not instant |
| Official Reddit API | Live data, current state | Paid above free tier | Cannot reach deep history |
| Academic Torrents dumps | Frozen pre-2023 corpus | Free | Ends at the cut-off, by definition |
Arctic Shift, the closest thing to a successor
Arctic Shift is the project most people mean when they ask what replaced Pushshift. It is community-run, free and unauthenticated, and it exposes the data three ways: large downloadable dumps, an API, and a web interface for people who do not want to write code.
What it does well. Bulk historical work. If your job is "give me every post in r/example between 2018 and 2022", this is the tool.
Where it stops. Full-text search is scoped. You can run it across a single user or a single subreddit, not across all of Reddit at once. That single constraint is what sends most people to PullPush for one specific query and back to Arctic Shift for everything else.
PullPush, for code you do not want to rewrite
PullPush made a deliberate choice: mirror the old Pushshift API surface so that scripts written against Pushshift keep running with a changed base URL.
That is genuinely valuable if you maintain research tooling. But be clear about what it is not. Pushshift had privileged ingestion from Reddit before 2023, a firehose-level feed that no community project has been granted since. PullPush reconstructs from what is publicly reachable. Expect coverage gaps, especially on deleted and removed content, which is precisely what a lot of Pushshift research depended on.
Its one advantage over Arctic Shift is Reddit-wide full-text search.
Reddit for Researchers, the sanctioned route
Reddit's own answer to the gap it created is an academic access programme. If you are publishing, this is the path that survives peer review and terms-of-service scrutiny, and it is the only one on this list with an official blessing.
The trade-off is friction. It is an application with eligibility criteria and a review, not an endpoint you hit this afternoon. Plan it into your timeline rather than around it.
The historical dumps
The Pushshift dumps up to 2023 still circulate through academic torrent collections. They are useful and free, and they are honest about what they are: a frozen snapshot ending at the cut-off. For reproducing or extending pre-2023 work, that is exactly right. For anything about Reddit today, it is a museum.
The mistake most people make here
Almost everyone who searches for a Pushshift alternative is doing one of two very different jobs, and the tools do not overlap.
Job one is research. You want a corpus. You care about completeness, reproducibility and deleted content. Arctic Shift, PullPush and the dumps are built for you.
Job two is monitoring. You want to know when your product, your competitor or your category is mentioned, so you can act on it. Historical archives are a bad fit for this, and it is worth saying plainly: an archive tells you what was said. It cannot tell you what is being said right now, and it certainly will not tell you which of those threads is worth answering.
If that second description is you, the archive family is the wrong shelf entirely. Start with Reddit brand monitoring, and if you only want alerts, F5Bot is free and does that one job.
Why this matters more in 2026 than it did in 2023
When Pushshift closed, losing Reddit data was mostly an academic problem. It is now a commercial one, because Reddit threads feed the answers that AI assistants give about products. A thread you never saw is a citation you never influenced. Our own measurement on that: Reddit appeared in 44.7% of Perplexity's sourced shopping answers across 500 prompts, while an engine with no Reddit access cited it 0% (full study).
That reframes the question. For most commercial teams, the answer to "what replaced Pushshift" is not another archive. It is live monitoring plus a way to act on what it finds.
FAQ
Is Pushshift coming back?
No. Public access ended on 2 May 2023 and the service now exists as a moderator tool. Treat any guide that tells you to sign up for the public API as out of date.
What is the best free Pushshift alternative?
Arctic Shift, for most people. It is free, needs no authentication, covers 2005 to the present, and offers dumps, an API and a web interface. Use PullPush alongside it when you specifically need Reddit-wide full-text search.
Can I still get deleted Reddit comments?
Partially, and less reliably than with Pushshift. Pushshift captured content at creation through privileged ingestion, so it held items that were later removed. Community successors reconstruct from public sources and will miss some of it. The pre-2023 dumps remain the best source for deleted content from that era.
Do I need any of this to monitor my brand on Reddit?
No. Archives answer historical questions. For brand mentions you want live alerts and a way to reply, which is a different category of tool.
Is scraping Reddit directly a good alternative?
It puts you against Reddit's terms and its anti-bot defences, and it breaks quietly rather than loudly. For research, the sanctioned programme or the community archives are safer. For commercial monitoring, use a tool that maintains its own access.
Paul-Marie is the founder of Readyt, the Reddit growth platform for SaaS. He has generated 16K€+ in pre-sales in 2 months using nothing but Reddit, and now helps founders turn Reddit threads into their #1 acquisition channel.
