How to Export Instagram Followers to Excel or CSV (4 Methods, 2026)

Instagram does not have an "export followers" button. There is no menu item, no setting, and no official API for it on a normal personal account. Anyone telling you otherwise is describing a workaround.

There are four workarounds that actually work. Here is each one, honestly, including the two we don't sell.

Before you start: three things that trip people up

You can only export public accounts — or private ones you follow. If you can open a profile's follower list in the Instagram app and scroll it, a tool can export it. If Instagram hides that list from you, nothing can recover it. Your own account counts as one you can see. Full detail on private accounts here.

"Followers" and "following" are two separate lists. Most tools export one at a time. If your goal is who doesn't follow me back, you need both, then a comparison step — covered in exporting both lists.

The count you see is not a promise. The number on the profile, the number of rows in the list, and the number in a finished export routinely disagree by a few percent. That is normal, not a failed export — why the numbers don't match.

Method 1: Instagram's own "Download Your Information"

The official route. Free, complete, and nothing leaves Meta.

1. Open Instagram, go to your profile, tap the menu.
2. Accounts Center → Your information and permissions → Download your information.
3. Choose Some of your information, then tick Followers and following.
4. Set the date range to All time and the format to JSON.
5. Submit. Instagram emails a download link — usually within an hour, sometimes up to 48.

When to use it: you want your own follower and following lists, you're not in a hurry, and you don't want a third party involved at all.

What it costs you: the wait, and the format. You get followers_1.json (and following.json), which is a wall of unformatted text, and large accounts are split across followers_1.json, followers_2.json, and so on. It is readable, but not by eye — how to read the JSON files.

Method 2: A browser console script

Free, no installation, effective if you're comfortable with it. You open Chrome DevTools on instagram.com, paste a JavaScript snippet, and it walks the follower list and dumps a file.

When to use it: you're technical, you need this once, and you don't want to install anything.

What it costs you, and be honest about this one:

• You're pasting code you did not write into a live, logged-in session of your own Instagram account. A malicious snippet in that context can read your DMs and act as you. Only ever run one you've read line by line.
• Most published scripts break. Instagram changes its internals and its endpoint shapes frequently; a gist from last year often returns nothing, or half a list with no error.
• Most of them scroll the rendered follower dialog, so they inherit its limits — they stop where the scrolling stopped.
• Run too fast and Instagram rate-limits the account. The script has no pacing logic unless you add it.

Method 3: A no-login web tool

Paste a username into a website, it fetches the list server-side, you download a CSV. No install, no sign-in.

When to use it: a one-off export of a public profile that isn't yours, and you don't mind the profile's follower list passing through someone else's server.

What it costs you:

• It only works on public accounts. It can't see anything you'd need to be logged in to see.
• The request runs on their infrastructure, not your session — so the follower list you pull does travel through a third party.
• Free tiers here are usually the tightest: a few hundred rows, then a paywall.

Method 4: A Chrome extension

Install once, then export from the profile you're viewing. This is what most people settle on for anything above a small, one-time job.

The general shape:

1. Install the extension from the Chrome Web Store.
2. Open instagram.com and sign in as normal.
3. Open the profile, click the extension.
4. Choose followers or following, and export to CSV.

What to check before installing one, because this category attracts junk:

• Does it cap the free tier, and does it tell you before or after? The most common complaint about the biggest tool in this space is a 550-follower free limit that isn't shown until after you've waited for the export to run. A tool should show you the profile's real total and what this run will return before you commit any time.
• Does it pace itself? Aggressive pagination is what triggers Instagram's rate limiting, and a restricted account is a far worse problem than a slow export. Look for jittered delays and a hard backoff, not "as fast as possible."
• Can it resume? A 40,000-row export that dies at row 30,000 with no resume is 30,000 rows wasted.
• Does anything leave your machine? The export itself can run entirely in your browser, through the session you're already signed into. Read the store listing's privacy disclosure, not the marketing page.
• How does it take payment? At least one popular option is crypto-only (USDT, BTC). Requiring someone to acquire USDT to download a follower list is a red flag in itself.

This is the approach ListLift takes: it shows the real count first, paces every request (pick Safe, Balanced, or Fast), resumes interrupted runs, and the export runs through your own signed-in session — nothing reaches our servers.

Why your export might come back incomplete

Worth knowing regardless of method, because it affects three of the four.

Methods 2, 3, and most extensions read followers as fast as they can page them. Instagram has tightened its rate limits sharply — widely reported as a drop from 5,000 requests per hour to around 200 — so a tool paging aggressively either gets throttled mid-run or gets the account flagged. Either way you get a short file, and often no warning that it's short.

The measured version of this is in why Instagram follower exports come back incomplete.

Which method to pick

For anything routine, the extension route wins on time. The question is which one — and the checklist above matters more than the feature list on any landing page.