The best ways to download Twitter videos in 2026, compared
Extensions, websites, phone apps and yt-dlp side by side: quality, speed, privacy and what breaks. An honest look at every kind of Twitter downloader.
Search for a Twitter video downloader and you get hundreds of near-identical websites, a few apps, some extensions and a Reddit thread telling you to use a command-line tool. They are not interchangeable. This comparison looks at each type on the things that matter: quality, speed, privacy and how often they break.
Full disclosure: we make Twitter Video Downloader, a Chrome extension, so we have an obvious interest in one category. We have tried to be fair to the others, and for several situations below, something else is the better choice.
At a glance
| Extension | Website | Phone app | yt-dlp | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best quality automatically | Usually | You choose | Varies | Yes |
| Steps per video | 1 click | 4 to 5 | 3 to 4 | 1 command |
| Ads | Rarely | Heavy | Common | None |
| Photos and GIFs | Usually | Some | Some | Video; use gallery-dl for images |
| Protected or sensitive posts | Yes, via your session | No | Rarely | With browser cookies |
| Works on phones | No | Yes | Yes | No |
| Bulk downloads | No | No | Rarely | Yes |
Browser extensions
An extension adds a download button directly to posts on x.com. It is the fastest option for anyone who saves videos regularly on a computer, and because it runs through your own browser session, it can download whatever you are able to see, including posts from protected accounts you follow.
Watch out for: permissions. A downloader needs access to x.com and X's media servers, not to every website you visit. Also check the last update date: X changes its code often, and abandoned extensions break.
Good pick if: you download from X more than occasionally and use Chrome, Edge, Brave or another Chromium browser.
Download websites
Paste a post link, get download links. They need no installation and work on any device, which makes them the default on phones. Most offer every version of the video, so quality depends on you choosing the largest one.
Watch out for: advertising. These sites earn money from ads, and many use misleading download buttons, pop-unders and notification prompts. They also see X as a signed-out visitor, so protected and sensitive posts are out of reach, and they tend to go down for days after X changes something.
Good pick if: you need one video, on a phone, right now.
Phone apps
Dedicated downloader apps for Android and iPhone mostly wrap the same process as the websites: share the link to the app, and it fetches the file. Some add a gallery or a clipboard watcher.
Watch out for: subscriptions and heavy ads for something a mobile browser can do for free, and apps that request far more access than they need. Apps in this category also disappear from app stores regularly.
Good pick if: you download on Android many times a day and find an app with a clean track record. On iPhone, the Safari method in our mobile guide is usually enough.
yt-dlp and gallery-dl
yt-dlp is the open-source tool Reddit threads recommend, and for good reason: it is free, has no ads, picks the best quality automatically and can process a whole list of links in one go. gallery-dl plays the same role for images and can archive the media of an entire account.
Watch out for: the learning curve. You work in a terminal, you update the tools when X changes, and many X downloads now require passing in cookies from your browser.
Good pick if: you are comfortable with a command line and need bulk or automated downloads.
X's own download option
X has offered a download button to some Premium subscribers in its mobile app, limited to videos whose authors allow downloads. If you have it and the video allows it, it is the simplest option of all. For everyone else, and for most videos, it is not available.
Which one should you use?
- Regular downloads on a computer: a browser extension.
- One video on a phone: a download website in Safari or Chrome, following the safety rules.
- Hundreds of videos, an archive or a script: yt-dlp, plus gallery-dl for images.
- Videos you can only see while signed in: an extension, or yt-dlp with your browser's cookies.
- Animated GIFs as real .gif files: a tool that converts, or FFmpeg; see how to save GIFs from Twitter.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a Twitter video downloader without ads?
Yes: yt-dlp and most well-kept extensions have none. Websites and free phone apps almost always rely on advertising.
Which downloader gives the best quality?
Any tool that saves X's highest-bitrate MP4 gives identical quality, because it is the same file. Differences come from tools that pick a lower version by default. More in how X video quality works.
Why did the downloader I used last month stop working?
X changes how its site and media requests work every few weeks, and every tool has to adapt. See why Twitter downloaders stop working for what to try.