Telegram Public Channel Monitor

Monitor recent messages from a public Telegram channel and send clean, structured results into n8n, AI-agent, and data workflows.

This Actor reads Telegram's public t.me/s/ web preview. It does not log in to Telegram, use an account session, join channels, access private channels, scrape members, or collect contact lists.

What it returns

Each message is one dataset item with:

• channel username and public preview URL
• message ID, direct public URL, and publication date
• message text and visible view count
• forwarded-from label when shown publicly
• photo, video, and link-preview flags
• scrape timestamp

Results are deduplicated by message ID and ordered newest first. A separate RUN-SUMMARY record reports pages fetched, messages parsed, duplicates removed, output count, ordering, and the expected number of billable dataset items.

Input

{
  "channel": "telegram",
  "limit": 50
}

channel must be a public Telegram username without @ or a URL. The channel must be visible at https://t.me/s/USERNAME. limit accepts 1 to 500 messages.

Monitor-first workflows

Use a saved Actor task with an Apify schedule when you need repeatable monitoring. Downstream workflows can read the default dataset through Apify's API or integrations.

Typical flow:

1. Schedule this Actor for the public channel you monitor.
2. Pull the newest-first dataset into n8n, Make, an AI agent, or your own API client.
3. Filter on message ID or publication date in your workflow to act only on new records.
4. Check RUN-SUMMARY to catch empty output, markup changes, or unusual duplicate counts.

This Actor returns public source data. Alerting, summarization, classification, and notification logic stay in your downstream workflow.

Ready-made n8n monitoring workflow

This Actor is stateless and fetches one public channel per run. For continuous, hands-off monitoring, an optional ready-made n8n workflow orchestrates this Actor on a schedule and adds the stateful layer on top.

The n8n workflow (not the Actor) provides:

• Multi-channel monitoring — loops your channel list, calling this Actor once per channel.
• Persistent new-post detection — remembers what it has already seen across runs (n8n workflow static data), so already-seen posts are not alerted again across runs.
• Keyword filtering — alert on any / all keywords, or off; case-sensitive or not.
• Cross-run duplicate prevention — per-channel message-ID tracking (the Actor only deduplicates within a single run).
• Telegram alerts — sends new matching posts to a Telegram chat via your own bot.
• Scheduled monitoring — runs on an interval (default every 15 minutes).

Get it:

• Setup guide
• Workflow JSON
• Direct import (raw JSON)

Import the JSON into n8n, add your own Apify and Telegram credentials, edit the channel list and filters, then activate. Full steps are in the setup guide.

The Actor itself remains stateless, reads only public t.me/s/ previews, takes one channel per run, and uses no Telegram login or session — all monitoring state, filtering, and alerting live in the n8n workflow, not in the Actor.

Output example

{
  "channel": "telegram",
  "source_url": "https://t.me/s/telegram",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-21T12:00:00+00:00",
  "id": 1234,
  "url": "https://t.me/telegram/1234",
  "date": "2026-07-21T11:30:00+00:00",
  "text": "Public message text",
  "views": 12500,
  "forwarded_from": null,
  "has_photo": false,
  "has_video": false,
  "has_link_preview": true
}

Billing

The intended pricing model is pay per event using Apify's synthetic apify-default-dataset-item event. One dataset message equals one billable result. RUN-SUMMARY is stored in the default key-value store, so it does not create an extra dataset-item event.

Monitoring behavior and limitations

• Each run returns the requested recent messages and does not remember the results of previous runs.
• To process only newly published messages, downstream workflows must filter by message ID or publication date.
• Each run accepts one public Telegram channel.
• This Actor does not provide Telegram-wide search or guarantee a complete historical archive.
• It does not access private or invite-only channels, user profiles, member lists, contacts, or Telegram account sessions.
• It does not bypass CAPTCHAs, authentication, access controls, or unavailable public previews.
• Telegram can change or restrict its public web-preview pages, which may require parser maintenance.

Limits and responsible use

• Public t.me/s/ channel previews only.
• No private channels, invite-only content, member lists, contacts, profiles, account sessions, or access-control bypasses.
• Telegram can change its public preview markup or restrict preview availability.
• Use the data in line with applicable law, Telegram's terms, and the public channel's rights.