Best online video downloaders

Cobalt.tools. It's the only one with zero ads, zero fake buttons and no redirect chain, plus it's open source and auditable and it ships a public API.

The one thing to know is that its YouTube support comes and goes in cycles. So the practical setup is: Cobalt for the social platforms, meaning X, TikTok and Instagram, and a local tool for YouTube.

One rule of thumb worth remembering: the real link is usually a small button or a plain text link inside the results list, not the biggest, brightest colored button on the page.

Also, close the tab immediately if any of these show up: a redirect to a domain you don't recognize, a prompt to install a download accelerator or a browser extension, a request to allow notifications, or a form asking for your email or phone number.

To dodge all of it, use Cobalt.tools, which has no ads at all.

Depends on the implementation. Most services cache the transcoded result on the server for a short while. Cobalt.tools tries to have your browser pull the file straight from the platform so it never touches it, and when merging is unavoidable it streams without storing. Because it's open source, you can actually check that.

With a closed-source web tool you can't verify any of it. If your material is sensitive, use a local tool(yt-dlp, Stacher), where parsing and downloading both happen on your own machine.

You can, but it's not great: mobile browsers handle pop-ups and download management more awkwardly, and you're likelier to fat-finger an ad.

On Android the better answer is Seal— native app, open source, built on yt-dlp. On iOS there's no native option thanks to platform rules, and running Cobalt.tools in Safari is the cleanest route. More in What actually works on iOS.