Lionel Messi's December 2022 World Cup trophy carousel crossed 7 million comments inside 24 hours. Three years earlier, an anonymous account called @world_record_egg posted a stock photo of an egg and racked up 5.5 million. And sitting at the top of the all-time leaderboard, mostly unnoticed outside giveaway-economy circles, is a Greek lifestyle creator named Alexandros Kopsialis with a single post north of 43 million comments. Three giant numbers — not telling the same story.
Most-liked vs most-commented — the critical distinction
People conflate these two metrics constantly, and the conflation is where bad analysis starts. Likes are cheap — a tap, a half-second of approval. Comments cost something. So you'd expect the most-commented posts to be the ones the audience cared most deeply about.
They aren't. Not even close.
Messi's World Cup post is the most-liked in Instagram history at roughly 74.6 million likes — and yes, it's also got 7.3 million comments. But it isn't the most-commented. Kopsialis's giveaway is, by a margin of roughly six to one. The reason is mechanical: every "tag a friend in the comments to enter" giveaway turns the comment box into a lottery ticket dispenser. One person can drop 30 comments tagging 30 friends. Multiply by a few hundred thousand entrants and you're at 43 million.
Working rule when you read any "most-commented" leaderboard:
- Giveaway mechanic? The count is mostly entries — useful for campaign design, useless for sentiment.
- Major life event (Messi, Selena Gomez's September 2025 wedding photos)? Reflects organic emotional reach.
- Deceased creator's last post (XXXTentacion, May 2018)? Comments accumulate as a tribute pattern; the count is about time-on-platform, not virality.
- The World Record Egg? Pure novelty stunt — half the comments are people commenting because everyone else was.
Different mechanism, same scoreboard. Don't average across them.
Where to find the candidates
Instagram doesn't let you sort posts by comment count. No advanced search, no engagement filter, no leaderboard. Manual research means scrolling and trusting listicles that mostly recycle each other.
Faster path: we maintain a curated leaderboard at exportcomments.com/most-commented-instagram-posts. It's a research surface, not a definitive ranking. Instagram doesn't publish official numbers — any list is reconstructed from public counts. Use it as a candidate pool, then verify each entry against the live post.
What you're looking for depends on the job:
- Brand monitoring — find your industry's outlier posts and study what triggered the spike.
- Competitive research — sort competitors' top posts by comment count and you see which campaigns earned conversation versus which only earned likes.
- Journalism — verifying claims like "the most-commented post about [topic]" needs a source. Leaderboard plus a fresh export is that source.
- Academic research — Top-N by comment count is a defensible sample-selection method for engagement studies.
How to export the comments from any of these
Step 1 — Copy the post URL
Open the post in a desktop browser and copy the URL. It looks like https://www.instagram.com/p/Cm0xxxxxxx/. Reels, carousels, single-image posts — same URL pattern, same exporter.
Step 2 — Paste into the Instagram exporter
Go to exportcomments.com/export-instagram-comments, paste the URL, and pick your output format. Excel (XLSX) is the default; CSV for piping into a database or BI tool; JSON for scripted analysis.
Step 3 — Run the export
Click Export. Most jobs finish in under a minute. Multi-million-comment posts take longer and will hit your plan's per-export cap before they hit the post's actual total — that's fine. A 50,000-row sample is more than enough for almost any analysis worth doing.
Step 4 — Download and open
The file shows up in your dashboard under My Exports and a copy lands by email. Every comment is one row, with replies linked to their parent by ID — threaded structure reconstructable in Excel or a recursive SQL query.
Step 5 (optional) — Bulk-export several posts at once
Comparing five candidates? Drop all URLs into the bulk-upload box, one per line. You get back one file per URL bundled in a single ZIP — not a merged spreadsheet — so each post stays cleanly separated. Matters more than it sounds: merging a giveaway post with an organic post in the same sheet will silently destroy any sentiment analysis.
What to do with the comment data
Sentiment analysis. Drop the comment column into ChatGPT or Claude: "Cluster these into themes. For each, give me a sentiment score (-1 to +1), a count, and three representative quotes." On Messi's post you'll see joy, national-pride mentions, football-rivalry sniping. On a giveaway you'll see almost nothing semantic — it's all tagged usernames and entry phrases — which is itself useful information about the type of engagement.
Language pivots. Most exports include a detected language code per comment. Pivot on it. Messi's post skews Spanish and Portuguese; the World Record Egg skews English; Selena Gomez's wedding photos drew comments in dozens of languages within the first hour. The distribution tells you which audiences a post actually reached, regardless of the creator's home market.
Repeat-commenter detection. Group by username and count. On a giveaway, the top commenter often has hundreds of entries. On an organic viral post, the top commenter usually has 1–3. The shape of that distribution is your fastest tell for whether a post is real engagement or campaign mechanics — before you read a single comment.
Time-of-day curves. Plot comment count by timestamp. Real virality has a sharp ramp in the first 4–6 hours and a long decay. Tribute posts (XXXTentacion's final post is canonical) show a flat baseline that doesn't decay. Giveaways show a perfect cliff at the deadline.
The honest caveats
Instagram caps how many comments are visible per request. The platform doesn't let anyone walk every comment on a 40-million-comment giveaway in one shot. What you get is an ordered sample bounded by your plan's per-export cap. For statistical work that's fine; for "I need every single comment," Instagram is not the platform.
Repeat-commenter inflation is real. A single user's 30 entry comments all count toward the public total — which is why a Greek giveaway outranks Messi by six to one. If you're using comment count as a proxy for audience size, divide by the median comments-per-user; otherwise you're measuring contest design.
Deleted-account zombies are everywhere. On older posts (2018–2020) a meaningful share of comments are attributed to accounts that no longer exist. Instagram leaves the text in place but the username links to a 404. Noise for ranking; fine for sentiment; dead end for outreach.
Plan limits & API access
The free tier returns up to 100 comments per export — enough to sanity-check a leaderboard entry. Paid tiers raise the cap: Personal returns 5,000, Premium 50,000, and Business 250,000. See /pricing for the full breakdown.
If you're building a research pipeline, the REST API exposes the same exporter as a single POST call with webhook delivery on completion. Reference at docs.exportcomments.com.
FAQ
- Can I export comments from private Instagram accounts?
No. ExportComments only pulls public posts — the same comments any signed-in viewer can see. Private accounts and stories are not accessible. - How accurate is the most-commented Instagram posts leaderboard?
It's a curated research surface based on public counts. Instagram doesn't publish an official ranking, so treat the leaderboard as a starting point and re-verify any specific number against the live post before citing it. - Why does my export return fewer comments than the post's public total?
Two reasons: Instagram caps how many comments are reachable per request, and your plan has a per-export cap. You'll receive an ordered sample bounded by your tier limit, which is enough for almost all analytical work. - Will the export include deleted comments or comments from deleted accounts?
Deleted comments are not in the export — they're not on the page either. Comments from deleted accounts may still appear (the text remains visible), but the username will link to a 404. - Can I schedule a re-export to track new comments on a viral post over time?
Yes. On Premium and Business plans you can schedule the same export to re-run hourly, daily, or weekly — the cleanest way to study comment-arrival curves on long-tail posts. - Does the Telegram bot trigger Instagram exports?
No. The Telegram integration is notifications-only — it pings you when a scheduled or API-triggered export completes. Exports themselves are started from the web app, the Chrome extension, or the REST API.