Telegram Channel Scraper (No Login)

Scrape public Telegram channel messages without API credentials. No API key, no phone number, no Telegram account needed.

Extracts messages, views, reactions, media URLs, forwarded-from info, and channel metadata from t.me/s/{channel} server-rendered preview pages.

Features

• No credentials required -- works on any public Telegram channel via server-rendered HTML
• Full message data -- text, HTML, date, view count, author signature, direct link
• Media extraction -- photo URLs and video URLs from each message
• Reactions -- emoji reactions with counts (e.g., thumbs_up 1.26K)
• Forwarded messages -- source channel name and URL for forwarded posts
• Channel metadata -- title, description, subscriber count, profile photo URL
• Pagination -- automatically loads older messages page by page
• Multi-channel -- scrape multiple channels in a single run

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
channelUsernames	string[]	["durov"]	Channel usernames to scrape (without @)
maxItems	integer	50	Max messages per channel (0 = no limit)
includeChannelInfo	boolean	true	Include channel metadata in each record

Output Fields

Each record contains:

Field	Description
channelUsername	Channel username (e.g., durov)
channelTitle	Channel display title
channelDescription	Channel description text
channelPhotoUrl	Channel profile photo URL
channelSubscribers	Subscriber count (e.g., 10.2M)
messageId	Numeric message ID
messageDate	ISO 8601 date (e.g., 2026-04-09T14:09:27+00:00)
messageText	Plain text content
messageHtml	HTML-formatted content
messageViews	View count (e.g., 3.69M)
messageAuthor	Post author signature (if enabled on channel)
messageLink	Direct t.me link to the message
messageMediaType	photo, video, or none
messageMediaUrl	URL of attached media
messageReactions	Array of reaction strings (e.g., ["thumbs_up 1.26K", "heart 106"])
messageForwardedFrom	Source channel name (if forwarded)
messageForwardedFromUrl	Original message URL (if forwarded)

Example Output

{
  "channelUsername": "durov",
  "channelTitle": "Pavel Durov",
  "channelSubscribers": "10.2M",
  "messageId": 482,
  "messageDate": "2026-04-09T14:09:27+00:00",
  "messageText": "Telegram has reached a milestone...",
  "messageViews": "2.25M",
  "messageAuthor": "Pavel Durov",
  "messageLink": "https://t.me/durov/482",
  "messageMediaType": "none",
  "messageMediaUrl": "",
  "messageReactions": ["thumbs_up 3.77K", "heart 380"],
  "messageForwardedFrom": "",
  "messageForwardedFromUrl": ""
}

How It Works

1. Fetches https://t.me/s/{channel} which returns the latest ~20 messages as server-rendered HTML
2. Extracts message data using CSS selectors (Cheerio)
3. Paginates backwards using ?before={message_id} to load older messages
4. Stops when maxItems is reached or no more messages are available

Limitations

• Public channels only -- private channels and groups are not accessible via t.me/s/
• View counts -- displayed as formatted strings (e.g., "3.69M"), not raw numbers
• Media -- extracts URLs but does not download media files
• Reactions -- returned as formatted strings, not structured objects (per Apify dataset schema rules)
• Rate limiting -- t.me rate-limits by IP; for large-scale scraping (1000+ messages), consider using proxy rotation

Cost

Pay-per-event pricing: $0.10 per actor start + $0.001 per message scraped.

Need More Features?

If you need additional fields, date range filtering, or a custom scraper for another platform, file an issue or get in touch. We customize scrapers to suit your needs.