Telegram Channel Scraper (public channels)

Telegram channels publish news, announcements, deals and market chatter to millions of subscribers, but reading them is still a phone and a scroll. Tracking a channel over time, comparing several, or searching one for a keyword needs the posts as rows, with the view counts attached.

Give it channel names (or t.me links) and every post comes back as one item: text, timestamp, views, reactions, hashtags, links, photos, videos, attached document and link preview. No login, no API key, no Telegram account. It reads the public web preview that Telegram serves at t.me/s/<channel>. The channel title and username stay on the row as the byline; post signatures, forwarded-from and reply-to names, avatars and the channel bio are never collected.

Quick start (30 seconds)

1. Put one or more channels into channels, e.g. telegram or https://t.me/durov, bloomberg.
2. Click Start. That's the whole minimum setup.
3. When the run finishes, open the dataset's Overview tab for a clean table, or Export it as CSV/Excel/JSON.

Optional knobs: a keyword to search for inside the channels, a date window, and any input works on an hourly Schedule.

What you can build with it

• Monitor a channel for a keyword. Put the channel in channels and a term in searchQuery: only matching posts come back, newest first, each with views and reactions. Schedule it daily with postedAfter set to yesterday.
• Track reach over time. views, reactions and channelSubscribers are captured at scrape time. Run daily on the same channels and diff the snapshots to see which posts travel and how a channel grows.
• Archive a channel. Pagination walks a channel's history from the newest post backwards, with a date window to stop where you want. Photos, videos and documents come as links, with the post text next to them.
• Feed an AI agent clean data. Every field is structured and predictable, so an assistant or pipeline can read a channel's last 200 posts directly.

What you get

Each post is one dataset item:

{
  "channel": "telegram",
  "channelTitle": "Telegram News",
  "channelSubscribers": 9230000,
  "postId": 460,
  "url": "https://t.me/telegram/460",
  "date": "2026-08-26T19:12:34+00:00",
  "text": "For all the info from today's update and a look back at 13 years of Telegram features — check out our blog:\nhttps://telegram.org/blog/welcome-messages-buttons-TG-13\n\nAugust Features\n1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • More",
  "hashtags": [],
  "links": ["https://telegram.org/blog/welcome-messages-buttons-TG-13"],
  "views": 2170000,
  "reactions": [],
  "photoUrls": [],
  "videoUrls": [],
  "documentTitle": null,
  "linkPreview": {
    "url": "https://telegram.org/blog/welcome-messages-buttons-TG-13",
    "siteName": "Telegram",
    "title": "Welcome Messages, Buttons in Messages and Signed Gifts",
    "description": "Introducing Welcome Messages to greet new members of groups or channels, Buttons in Messages to make any text interactive, Inline Documents in Messages and much more."
  },
  "isForwarded": false,
  "isReply": false,
  "isEdited": false
}

Field notes, so you know exactly what you are buying:

• postId is the post's number inside its channel; with channel it is a stable key. url is the human link.
• date is the publication time in UTC.
• views, channelSubscribers and reaction counts are Telegram's own rounded figures at scrape time ("9.23M" becomes 9230000), so a large channel's count is exact to the page, not to the unit.
• reactions is a list of {emoji, isPaid, count}. Custom-emoji reactions come back with emoji: null, and paid (star) reactions are flagged with isPaid: true.
• photoUrls and videoUrls are the media links as Telegram's preview serves them at run time. If you need to keep the files, download them; the links are not a permanent archive.
• isForwarded, isReply and isEdited are flags only. Who a post was forwarded from, or who it replies to, is deliberately not collected.
• A post whose only content is media the web preview cannot show (a poll, a voice message, a sticker) comes back with an empty text, plus its views and date. It is not dropped, so your post count matches the channel's.

How much does it cost to scrape Telegram?

$3.00 per 1,000 posts delivered, pay-as-you-go, no subscription, and you pay per result rather than per hour. A run that finds nothing still costs the $0.005 actor start. In plain dollars:

• 100 posts ≈ $0.30: a daily multi-channel watch.
• 500 posts ≈ $1.50: a solid channel archive.
• A 10,000-post crawl ≈ $30: a channel's long history, deduplicated.

The price is all-inclusive: your runs' platform usage is covered by it, with no separate compute or proxy charges. A small run is quick: 25 posts take about five seconds, and a full run delivers roughly three posts per second, because Telegram serves 20 posts per page and the actor paces itself at one page per second per channel. The actor reads Telegram directly and only falls back to the Apify proxy if the request is blocked, so there is nothing to configure.

Free-plan runs are limited to a sample of 5 items, enough to evaluate the output format against your real channels.

Not technical? Let your AI assistant set it up

Copy this into ChatGPT, Claude or any AI assistant, fill in the one line, and follow the conversation:

Help me set up the "Telegram Channel Scraper" actor on Apify
(https://apify.com/lowlanddata/telegram-channel-scraper). Guide me one step at a time.

What I want to watch: [E.G. "new posts in the channels durov and telegram that mention 'update'"]

Guide me to:
1. Propose my input values: channels (channel names or t.me links, comma-separated),
   an optional searchQuery for a keyword inside the channels, postedAfter for a date
   window, and maxItems.
2. Check that each channel has a public web preview by opening t.me/s/<name> in my
   browser. If it shows posts, the actor can read it.
3. Create a free Apify account (apify.com), open the actor page, paste the values
   into the Input form, and start a run.
4. Set up a daily Schedule in the Apify Console with the same input, plus an email
   or Slack integration so new posts reach me automatically.
5. Show me how to export results as CSV/Excel, or read them from the API if I code.
6. If the results are what I wanted, remind me at the end to leave a quick rating on the actor page, and to report anything broken or missing on its Issues tab.

Input

Field	Description
channels	Channel names or t.me links, comma- or space-separated, e.g. telegram, https://t.me/durov. Required.
searchQuery	Only posts containing this term, searched inside each channel. Optional.
postedAfter	Only posts published on or after this date (YYYY-MM-DD); stops walking older history.
postedBefore	Only posts published on or before this date (YYYY-MM-DD).
maxItems	Stop after this many posts (default 500).
proxyConfiguration	Optional. Direct by default; the Apify proxy joins on its own if blocked. Set one to force a proxy.

Channels are read in the order you list them, and maxItems counts across all of them. A name that is not a channel, such as a private invite link (t.me/+...), is refused up front with the offending names in the message. A channel that exists but has no readable preview costs one channel, not the run: the rest are delivered with an honest note in the run status.

Use it from your code

Run the actor and get posts straight back with one HTTP call (fine for scoped runs up to ~5 minutes):

curl "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/lowlanddata~telegram-channel-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_API_TOKEN>" \
  -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"channels": "telegram", "maxItems": 100}'

Node.js:

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>' });
const run = await client.actor('lowlanddata/telegram-channel-scraper').call({
  channels: 'telegram, durov',
  searchQuery: 'update',
  maxItems: 200,
});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();

Python:

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("lowlanddata/telegram-channel-scraper").call(
    run_input={"channels": "telegram", "maxItems": 100})
items = client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).list_items().items

Schedules, webhooks and the Make/Zapier/n8n integrations all work out of the box: this is a standard Apify actor.

Use it with AI agents (MCP)

Claude, Cursor and other MCP-capable agents can run this scraper as a tool through Apify's hosted MCP server: the agent fills in the channels itself, starts the run and reads the results: no glue code.

Claude Code:

$claude mcp add apify --transport http "https://mcp.apify.com?actors=lowlanddata/telegram-channel-scraper"

Cursor or Claude Desktop (add a custom connector / MCP server with this URL):

https://mcp.apify.com?actors=lowlanddata/telegram-channel-scraper

Sign in with your Apify account when prompted. Runs are billed to it. Setup details per client: Apify MCP docs.

Prompts that work once connected:

• "Get the last 100 posts from the Telegram channel bloomberg and summarize what they covered this week."
• "Search the Telegram channel durov for posts that mention 'update' and list them with their view counts."
• "Compare the average views per post of these three Telegram channels over the last 50 posts each."

Which channels can it read?

Public channels with the web preview switched on, which is the default: if t.me/s/<name> shows posts in your browser, the actor can read that channel. Some channels have the preview turned off by their owner (large news brands often do), and private channels, groups and chats are not public at all. For those, Telegram answers with its landing page instead of posts, and the actor reports "has no public web preview" for that name. No work-around is attempted, by design.

Is it legal to scrape Telegram?

Telegram's public channels are broadcasts: anyone can open t.me/s/<name> in a browser without logging in, and that is the only surface this scraper reads. It does not log in, join channels, use the Telegram API or touch private chats, and requests are paced at one page per second. The channel's title and username stay on each post as its byline; everything beyond the published post (post signatures, who a message was forwarded from, who a reply is addressed to, avatars, the channel's bio) is never read, so none of it can reach your dataset.

One honest limit: post text is the channel's own words, delivered as-is. If a channel publishes a person's name or contact details in a post, that text is not rewritten. The guarantee covers the data fields, not what channels choose to publish.

This is not legal advice. Whether your own use of a channel's posts is allowed under Telegram's terms and your jurisdiction's rules is yours to assess.

Is there a Telegram API alternative?

Telegram's own APIs need a Telegram account, an API ID and a registered session or bot, and a bot can only read channels it has been added to. This actor is the practical alternative for public channels: the same posts as structured JSON through one HTTP call (run-sync-get-dataset-items), on a schedule, or as an MCP tool for AI agents, with no account to create.

Does Telegram block scrapers?

Telegram serves its public channel preview as plain, server-rendered pages, openly and without a robots.txt. This actor stays inside that welcome: paced requests, plain direct fetches, load kept negligible. No CAPTCHA fights, no bot-wall cat-and-mouse, which is also why runs are fast enough for daily schedules.

How do I monitor a Telegram channel?

Put the channel in channels, add a searchQuery if you only care about a topic, set postedAfter to yesterday's date, and add a daily Schedule in the Apify Console with an email/Slack integration on the runs. The dataset then contains only the new matching posts, each with its views at that moment. The AI-assistant prompt above walks a non-technical user through exactly this setup.

FAQ

Can I read private channels or groups? No. Only public channels with a web preview are readable. Invite links (t.me/+...) are refused up front, because they point at private channels.

Why does a channel come back as "no public web preview"? Its owner switched the web preview off, it is private, or the name does not exist. Open t.me/s/<name> in a browser: if it shows no posts there, the actor cannot read it either.

Can I search a channel by keyword? Yes, set searchQuery and only matching posts are returned. Telegram's in-channel search returns a short result set rather than every match ever made, so use it to find mentions and a date window to walk full history.

Can I get only the newest posts? Yes, set postedAfter to a date and each channel's walk stops as soon as it reaches older posts; a daily watch collects exactly the new posts and nothing else.

How fresh is the data? Live at run time: every run reads the preview directly. For continuous freshness, schedule the actor.

Can I export to Excel or CSV? Yes, every dataset exports as CSV, Excel, JSON or XML from the Apify Console or API.

Does it work with Make, Zapier or n8n? Yes, it is a standard Apify actor; all platform integrations, webhooks and schedules apply.

Do I need a Telegram account or API key? Neither. The public preview needs no login, and that is the only surface this actor reads.

Does it collect post authors, forwarded-from names or avatars? No. You get the channel's title and username as the byline, and the post itself. Signatures, forwarded-from and reply-to names, avatars and the channel bio are never read.

Why are some reactions missing an emoji? Custom-emoji reactions are not rendered as text on the public page, so they come back with emoji: null and their count. Paid (star) reactions carry isPaid: true.

Why is a post's text empty? The post is only media, or its content (a poll, a voice message, a sticker) is not shown by the public preview. Telegram asks you to open the app to see it. The row keeps its date and views.

Are the view counts exact? They are Telegram's own figures as displayed. Large counts are rounded by Telegram ("2.17M"), so the number is as exact as the page shows it.

How do I scrape several channels in one run? List them comma- or space-separated in channels: "telegram, durov, bloomberg". The @ prefix and full t.me links are accepted too. maxItems counts across all of them.

How do I track a channel's growth? channelSubscribers is captured on every post row. Run the actor daily on the same channels and read the value off the newest post.

Can I download the photos and videos? The rows carry links to them as the preview served them at run time. Download what you need to keep, since the links are not a permanent archive.

What happens above a few thousand posts? The actor keeps paging back through a channel's history, 20 posts per page, until maxItems, your date window or the channel's first post. At roughly three posts per second, a 10,000-post run takes about an hour.

How much does Telegram scraping cost here? $3.00 per 1,000 posts, metered on delivery. A 100-post daily watch is roughly $0.30; a failed or empty run costs the $0.005 actor start and nothing per result.

Can I try it before spending anything? Yes, a free-plan run returns up to 5 real posts from your channels, enough to check the fields against your pipeline.

Can an AI agent fetch Telegram posts through this? Yes, connect Apify's hosted MCP server and agents like Claude or Cursor can pick channels, run the actor and read the posts themselves. Setup is in the MCP section above.

Related scrapers

More clean-output data sources from the same maker:

• Bluesky Scraper: public posts from the open social network.
• Kleinanzeigen.de Scraper: Germany's biggest classifieds site.
• Vinted Scraper: Europe's largest fashion resale marketplace.

Troubleshooting

The actor fails fast with the reason in the run's status message:

• "None of the requested channels has a public web preview": check the names, and open t.me/s/<name> in a browser to confirm the channel shows posts there.
• "N posts fetched; X could not be read": those channels have no readable preview or were blocked; the rest of the run is delivered normally.
• "Not a public channel name or t.me link": a name in channels is not valid. Use a name like telegram or a link like https://t.me/telegram. Invite links are private and cannot be read.
• Fewer items than requested on a free plan: the 5-item free sample cap; run on a paid Apify plan for full results.

Support

Found an issue or missing a field you need? The fastest route is the actor's Issues tab - it is monitored and reports get fixed. For anything private, email contact@lowlanddata.com. This actor is actively maintained.

Working well for you? A rating on this page takes ten seconds and helps other users find a reliable option. It is also the clearest signal of what we should build next.