Pushshift vs PullPush vs Arctic Shift: Reddit archives in 2026

Pushshift vs PullPush vs Arctic Shift, as of October 2026: only one of the three is still open to anyone, and it's Arctic Shift. PullPush turned away our scripted requests, and Pushshift serves approved Reddit moderators only. One limit on our side: ChatterAPI is not an archive. It searches live Reddit only as far back as Reddit's own search goes, so it can't return deleted posts or a complete history.

We checked everything below on October 14, 2026, against each project's own site, repo or API and against Reddit's posts. Reddit archives are changing week to week right now, which is why the date matters. For the background, our Reddit API shutdown timeline covers every date through March 2027.

Pushshift vs PullPush vs Arctic Shift at a glance

In March, a user in r/DataHoarder asked the same question in a post titled "Pullpush vs Arctic Shift vs Pushshift Dumps?". They wanted to know whether the services hold the same data as the dumps, and whether either one flags deleted posts. Seven months on, the question still stands, but the answer to it has changed.

Arctic Shift: still the open archive, for now

Arctic Shift describes itself on GitHub as "Making Reddit data accessible to researchers, moderators and everyone else." It offers three ways in: monthly dumps, an API and a search page. It lives on photon-reddit.com because the same developer builds Photon, a Reddit desktop client. That is where the "arctic shift photon" searches come from.

The API searches posts and comments by author, subreddit, keyword and date, and returns JSON, RSS or JSON Feed. Its docs promise "No uptime or performance guarantees" and ask heavy users to download the dumps instead.

It still works. When we queried it on October 14, the newest comment it returned had been posted that same morning, and the September 2026 dump went up on October 11. It did go dark on October 9 and 10, and people in r/redditdev took that as the end. One wrote "Arctic Shift has been down for a day now so I am going to say the answer is yes" (u/judasblue). The maintainer replied on GitHub on October 10: "It's back now. Was a temporary issue."

Arctic Shift and the comment ID change

The bigger risk gets less attention. Reddit's September 15 note says new comment IDs "will not be monotonically increasing anymore," starting the week of September 28. Archives that walk IDs in order break when that happens. In issue 53 on October 2, the maintainer wrote: "I have ways to work around this change. It is not as fast or efficient as simple commnet id scans, but it works", and put comment completeness at "90%+ complete, ideally 95%". That means Arctic Shift's comments from late September onward may have gaps that older months don't.

PullPush: Pushshift-style search with a closed door for scripts

PullPush copies Pushshift's old query style. Its docs, archived in July 2026, list /reddit/search/comment and /reddit/search/submission with parameters such as q, author, subreddit, after and before. The same page credits Watchful1's torrent data and says "Without him this service would not be possible."

On October 14 we sent a scripted request to that submission endpoint and got back HTTP 429 with this body: "This website does not provide free scraping resources for agents. Please contact the administrator on Discord if you're interested in a paid scraping service." The homepage answered non-browser requests with a Cloudflare check. Searching by hand in a browser may still work. If you planned to call it from code, you'll need another route.

PullPush coverage reports

Community reports on how fresh PullPush's data is don't agree, so read them as individual reports. In May 2026 a user found that PullPush "returns nothing" for a two-month-old thread while a year-old one worked. In September a post in r/spezholedesign said "Pullpush is finally archiving Reddit data past May 2025".

Pushshift: moderators only since 2023

Pushshift's terms page says users must be "a registered user of Reddit and a Reddit moderator" and may use it only for community moderation, enforcing community guidelines and member safety. Commercializing or redistributing the data is forbidden. Approved mods sign in with Reddit and get a bearer token that expires after 24 hours. Without one, the API answers {"detail":"Not authenticated"}, which is what we got on October 14.

You get access through Reddit. The June 2023 relaunch post says mods request it by modmail to r/pushshiftrequest and that Reddit "will prioritize requests from mods of reasonably sizable communities." Expect a wait. In June 2026 one mod posted that a week had gone by with no response.

Unlike the other two, Pushshift has Reddit's backing. The same September note on comment IDs says "Pushshift has updated how they ingest data from Reddit and will continue to work after this change goes out." If you moderate and need an account's history, this is the route Reddit endorses.

The data dumps route

For years, anyone who needed all of Reddit got the dumps: compressed monthly files of every post and comment, shared on Academic Torrents. That route is narrower now.

On July 24, 2026, Watchful1, who compiled the Pushshift-era dumps that PullPush credits, posted "Upon reddit's request, I am taking down my academic torrents pages". The stated reason: "I would rather do it now when they are asking nicely and not in the future when they ask in some less nice way." Commenters in that thread pointed to a combined 2005 to 2025 torrent page, and it now returns a 404.

Arctic Shift's download page still lists a separate torrent for each month through September 2026. The same combined entry is struck through there, and an open issue filed on October 14 reports that another of its torrents is down. The files are large, and you need scripts to read them.

Finding the files doesn't settle whether you can use them. Reddit's Data API Terms govern how Reddit data can be used, and Reddit's help article on accessing data names Reddit for Researchers as the authorized route for research. If your work has to pass an ethics board or a legal review, start there.

What will break these archives, and the counter-argument

You don't have to look hard for the bleak view. In r/redditdev, shiruken wrote that "tools like Arctic Shift will likely break before then because of imminent architectural changes that will make it functionally impossible for them to iteratively scrape content." Watchful1 argued that Reddit is "keen to cut out anyone who is not paying them."

Both camps have part of this right, so the other side is worth hearing out.

The "it's already dead" story keeps getting the timing wrong. Arctic Shift was declared dead on October 9 and came back on October 10, and its maintainer has a working answer to the ID change. History also doesn't vanish when ingest stops. As u/dougmc put it, cutting API access "would probably stop services like Arctic Shift from getting new data, but it wouldn't make all their existing data go away."

Reddit's side has a real case too. Under the dumps takedown, shiruken pressed the legal point: "I was never sure how academic researchers could justify (legally) using data sourced from your torrents since it was in clear contradiction to Reddit's Data API terms" (comment). People who deleted their posts may not want them searchable forever. And an archive that lets moderators check for predators lets anyone check on anyone.

Our read: plan for open archives to get less complete over 2027, but don't plan for them to disappear overnight.

How to search old Reddit posts without an archive

If the post still exists, you don't need an archive. Reddit's own search covers all time, and so does a hosted API built on it. You lose anything deleted, removed, or never indexed by Reddit's search.

ChatterAPI's Reddit post search takes time=all and sort=relevance, accepts Reddit's operators inside q, and costs 2 credits per page of up to 25 posts. A free version in the browser exists too.

curl -s "https://api.chatterapi.com/v1/reddit/search?q=crm+for+small+business&time=all&sort=relevance" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CHATTERAPI_KEY"

import os, requests

r = requests.get(
    "https://api.chatterapi.com/v1/reddit/search",
    params={"q": "crm for small business", "time": "all", "sort": "relevance"},
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['CHATTERAPI_KEY']}"},
    timeout=30,
)
body = r.json()
for post in body["data"]:
    print(post["createdAt"][:10], post["score"], post["title"])
cursor = body["page"]["nextCursor"]  # pass back as ?cursor= for the next page

The response below comes from a test key, trimmed to two posts. Test keys return one recorded real response per endpoint for free, so charged is 0.

{
  "data": [
    {
      "id": "1wdihhj",
      "title": "What CRM should a small business use?",
      "author": "NotedWhisky",
      "subreddit": "CRM",
      "score": 51,
      "numComments": 186,
      "createdAt": "2026-09-11T14:52:16.000Z"
    },
    {
      "id": "1vmy4xb",
      "title": "If You Had to Pick the Best CRM for Small Business Today, What Would It Be?",
      "author": "Living_Dependent242",
      "subreddit": "CRMSoftware",
      "score": 10,
      "numComments": 56,
      "createdAt": "2026-08-13T02:25:31.000Z"
    }
  ],
  "page": { "nextCursor": "AX-vad045wfn…", "hasMore": true },
  "credits": { "charged": 0, "remaining": 719 },
  "requestId": "req_01M4X1SD2Z10SRXYZMJH",
  "cached": true
}

Two limits apply. Comment search has no time filter, so sort by new and stop paging when results get older than you need. Per-user history comes from Reddit's own listings through the post history and comment history endpoints, which means anything the user deleted is missing there as well. Our Reddit API guide compares the other live access routes.

Which one to use

ChatterAPI fits that last row and no other. If you came here for deleted content, we're the wrong tool.

Try a time=all search on your own query

Sign up with Google to get 100 free credits without a card, then run the search above with your own terms and time=all. For two credits, it tells you whether Reddit's own search goes back far enough for your job before you commit to anything. Plans start at $19/month for 25,000 credits.