📨 Telegram Channel Scraper

🚀 Archive entire Telegram channels in seconds. Pull messages, photos, videos, link previews, reactions, view counts, and channel stats from any public channel. No login, no MTProto, no API key.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-09 · 📊 35 fields per record · No auth required · Pagination back to message #1 · Multi-channel batches

Telegram is one of the largest open broadcast networks on the internet, with public channels covering crypto markets, breaking news, government communications, fan communities, and developer announcements. The platform's web preview at t.me/s/{channel} exposes a full archive of any channel that has enabled public preview, but it is paginated, HTML-rendered, and rate-sensitive. Pulling a clean dataset out of it by hand means stitching dozens of pages, parsing fragile DOM, and handling every media type Telegram supports.

This actor handles all of that. Point it at one channel or a hundred, set a maximum, and it walks the public preview newest-first, parses every supported message type (text, photo, video, voice, document, sticker, poll, location, forwarded, reply, service), normalizes view counts and reaction tallies, and ships 35 structured fields per message. Every record includes the source channel's title, description, subscriber count, and verified status, so single records stand on their own without needing a join. Channels that do not expose a public preview are flagged with an error record rather than failing the whole run.

👥 Target Audience	🎯 Primary Use Cases
Crypto researchers tracking project announcements	Build longitudinal datasets of token launch posts and community sentiment
Compliance and risk teams archiving public chatter	Snapshot regulated entities' public messaging for retention requirements
Investigative journalists documenting sources	Capture an immutable copy of public channel posts before they are edited
OSINT and threat-intel analysts	Monitor activity, view counts, and reaction signals at scale
Academic researchers studying online communities	Collect reproducible corpora of public channel discourse

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📋 What the Telegram Channel Scraper does

• 📡 Multi-channel input. Accepts channel usernames, @handles, or full https://t.me/... URLs. Each channel is paginated independently with its own per-channel cap.
• 🧾 Full message body. Returns both plain text and Telegram's original HTML, including emoji, formatting, and outbound <a> links.
• 🖼️ Every media type. Photos, videos (including round videos), voice notes, documents, stickers, polls, locations, plus link preview cards.
• 🔁 Forwards and replies. Captures the original channel name and link for forwards, the parent message for replies, and the snippet of the message being replied to.
• 📈 Engagement signals. View counts and full reaction tallies (including paid Star reactions) parsed into clean integers (no 1.2K strings).
• 🗓️ Date-bounded archival. Optional fromDate / toDate filters stop pagination at the right point so you do not pay to scrape outside the window.

Each record carries channelTitle, channelDescription, channelSubscribers, and channelVerified from the channel's profile page so a single message can be analyzed without joining a separate channels table. Reaction blocks include both the unicode emoji (when standard) and the Telegram custom-emoji ID for branded reactions, and paid Star reactions are flagged with isPaid: true.

💡 Why it matters: Telegram's MTProto API requires a registered application, a phone number, and a session that can be flagged or banned. The public preview is anonymous and rate-friendly. This actor turns it into a clean dataset without any of that overhead.

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🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon: a 3-minute walkthrough showing how to scrape multiple channels, filter by date, and route results to a Google Sheet via integrations.

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⚙️ Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
channels	array of strings	yes	Channel usernames, @handles, or https://t.me/... URLs. Channel must have public preview enabled.
maxItems	integer	no	Total cap across all channels. Free plan: 10. Paid plan: up to 1,000,000.
maxItemsPerChannel	integer	no	Per-channel cap. Useful when scraping many channels but you only want recent activity from each.
fromDate	date string	no	ISO 8601 date. Pagination stops once the page's oldest message is older than this.
toDate	date string	no	ISO 8601 date. Messages newer than this are skipped.
messageTypes	array	no	Restrict to selected types: text, photo, video, voice, document, sticker, poll, location, service, forwarded, reply.
onlyWithMedia	boolean	no	Skip text-only messages.
includeChannelMetadata	boolean	no	Attach channel title, description, subscriber count, and verified flag to every record. Default true.
includeReactions	boolean	no	Include the reactions array. Default true.
includeLinkPreview	boolean	no	Include link preview metadata when present. Default true.
outputFormat	string	no	text, html, or both. Controls whether the message body returns plain text, original Telegram HTML, or both.
proxyConfiguration	object	no	Standard Apify proxy configuration object.

Example: scrape the latest 100 posts from one channel.

{
    "channels": ["durov"],
    "maxItems": 100
}

Example: scrape three channels, last 30 days, photos and videos only.

{
    "channels": ["cointelegraph", "crypto", "tginfo"],
    "maxItems": 5000,
    "maxItemsPerChannel": 2000,
    "fromDate": "2026-04-09",
    "messageTypes": ["photo", "video"]
}

⚠️ Good to Know: Only channels with a public web preview are scrapeable. Private channels and groups, and channels whose owners have disabled the preview, return an error record. Telegram's public preview is anonymous; we do not authenticate, do not impersonate a user, and do not access any non-public data.

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📊 Output

Each record represents one message and carries channel-level fields for joinless analysis.

🧾 Schema

Field	Type	Example
🖼️ imageUrl	string	https://cdn4.telesco.pe/file/K9wOaBteN...
📛 channel	string	cointelegraph
🔗 channelUrl	string	https://t.me/cointelegraph
🏷️ channelTitle	string	Cointelegraph
📝 channelDescription	string	The Future of Money. Trusted crypto & Web3 media since 2013.
✅ channelVerified	boolean	true
👥 channelSubscribers	integer	374535
🆔 messageId	integer	69568
🔗 url	string	https://t.me/cointelegraph/69568
📅 date	string	2026-05-08T18:16:01+00:00
✏️ edited	boolean	false
👤 author	string	Cointelegraph
💬 text	string	🔥 LATEST: $TON now ranks as the highest yielding...
🧱 htmlText	string	<b>🔥 LATEST: </b>$TON now ranks as...
👁️ views	integer	4670
💰 isPaid	boolean	false
🏷️ type	string	photo
↩️ forwardedFrom	string	Pavel Durov
👤 forwardedFromAuthor	string	Pavel Durov
🔗 forwardedFromUrl	string	https://t.me/durov/503
🔁 replyTo	string	tginfo/4282
🔗 replyToUrl	string	https://t.me/tginfo/4282
👤 replyToAuthor	string	Telegram Info
💬 replyToText	string	Telegram разместил облигации на $1.7 млрд
🖼️ photos	array	[{url, aspectRatio}]
🎬 videos	array	[{url, thumbnailUrl, duration, durationSeconds}]
🎙️ voice	object	{url, duration, durationSeconds}
📎 documents	array	[{url, title, extra}]
🌟 sticker	object	{url}
📊 poll	object	{question, type}
📍 location	object	{url}
🪟 linkPreview	object	{url, siteName, title, description, image}
🎉 reactions	array	[{emoji, isPaid, count}]
🔢 totalReactions	integer	55
🕒 scrapedAt	string	2026-05-09T00:23:38.901Z

📦 Sample records

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✨ Why choose this Actor

	Capability
🪪	No authentication. No phone number, no MTProto, no app registration. Anonymous scraping of public previews only.
🧱	Schema stability. 35 documented fields, every one named in the output schema, with consistent typing across runs.
🎬	Full media coverage. Photos, videos, round videos, voice notes, documents, stickers, polls, locations, link previews, paid media flags.
🔁	Provenance preserved. Forwards keep the original channel name and link; replies keep the parent ID, author, and snippet.
📅	Date-bounded pagination. fromDate stops the crawl at the right point so big channels do not run forever.
📈	Numeric engagement. 1.2K and 2.6M parsed to 1200 and 2600000; reactions summed into totalReactions.
🛰️	Apify Proxy ready. Works direct or through Apify residential / datacenter proxy groups for hardened runs.

📊 In sample crawls across durov, cointelegraph, crypto, and tginfo, the actor pulled 50 messages in 4 seconds with zero retries.

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📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Cost	Coverage	Refresh	Filters	Setup
⭐ Telegram Channel Scraper (this Actor)	Pay per usage	Any public channel with web preview	On-demand	channels, dates, types, media	Paste channels and click run
MTProto API clients	Free, but requires phone + session	Full Telegram surface (private chats too)	Real-time	Custom code	App registration, phone, session management
Browser automation against Telegram Web	High (browser cost)	Anything you can see logged in	Real-time	Custom code	Headless setup, login, anti-bot handling
Generic web crawlers	Low	Whatever HTML they parse	Periodic	Limited	DOM selectors break each Telegram update
Manual copy and paste	Free	A handful of messages	Whenever you bother	None	Free time

This actor sits between "free but operationally heavy" (MTProto) and "shallow web crawlers": authenticated-quality data, anonymous-grade simplicity.

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🚀 How to use

1. ✨ Sign up. Create an Apify account at console.apify.com/sign-up. Free tier covers 10 messages so you can preview the output before upgrading.
2. 📋 Open the actor. Find Telegram Channel Scraper in the ParseForge collection and click Try for free.
3. 🎯 Pick channels. Paste channel usernames or t.me/... URLs into the Telegram Channels field. Add as many as you like.
4. 🎚️ Tune limits and filters. Set maxItems, maxItemsPerChannel, optional date window, and message types. Defaults pull the latest 10 messages per channel.
5. 💾 Run and download. Click Start. Stream results to JSON, CSV, Excel, RSS, or pipe directly into Google Sheets, S3, or your warehouse via Apify integrations.

⏱️ Total time: under 60 seconds from sign-up to first dataset row.

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💼 Business use cases

🪙 Crypto research desks Track token announcements from project channels Detect coordinated promotion via reaction spike anomalies Build sentiment datasets across the top crypto channels Capture pump-and-dump signals before they are deleted	📰 Newsrooms and media monitoring Archive primary-source channels (officials, agencies, NGOs) Document edits and message deletions over time Snapshot breaking news threads for citation Build searchable Telegram archives by topic
🛡️ Compliance and regulated industries Retain public messaging from supervised entities Monitor regulated communities for policy violations Generate audit trails of public corporate communications Feed risk-rating models with engagement signals	🔍 OSINT and threat intel Track adversary channel activity at scale Map cross-channel forward graphs to identify networks Score channel growth and engagement programmatically Deliver structured Telegram feeds to SIEM and TIP tools

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🌟 Beyond business use cases

Data like this powers more than commercial workflows. The same structured records support research, education, civic projects, and personal initiatives.

🎓 Research and academia Empirical datasets for papers, thesis work, and coursework Longitudinal studies tracking changes across snapshots Reproducible research with cited, versioned data pulls Classroom exercises on data analysis and ethical scraping	🎨 Personal and creative Side projects, portfolio demos, and indie app launches Data visualizations, dashboards, and infographics Content research for bloggers, YouTubers, and podcasters Hobbyist collections and personal trackers
🤝 Non-profit and civic Transparency reporting and accountability projects Advocacy campaigns backed by public-interest data Community-run databases for local issues Investigative journalism on public records	🧪 Experimentation Prototype AI and machine-learning pipelines with real data Validate product-market hypotheses before engineering spend Train small domain-specific models on niche corpora Test dashboard concepts with live input

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🔌 Automating Telegram Channel Scraper

Run the scraper from your own code or pipelines using the Apify API or SDKs.

• Node.js client for triggering runs and streaming dataset items.
• Python client for notebooks, ETL jobs, and ML pipelines.
• Apify API reference for raw HTTP integration in any language.

For recurring archival jobs, use Apify Schedules to run the actor on a cadence (hourly, daily, weekly) and write the dataset to your destination. Each scheduled run captures the messages added since the previous run, so storage stays bounded.

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❓ Frequently Asked Questions

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🔌 Integrate with any app

• Zapier - trigger downstream automations from each new dataset row.
• Make - visual workflow builder for routing scraped messages.
• n8n - self-hosted automation for sensitive Telegram archives.
• Google Sheets - one-click export of the dataset to a sheet.
• Airbyte - ELT pipeline into Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Postgres.
• Apify API - direct HTTP integration in any language.

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🔗 Recommended Actors

• 📨 Reddit Posts Scraper - companion archive tool for Reddit communities.
• 🐦 X.com (Twitter) Post Scraper - the Twitter equivalent of this actor, no auth required.
• 📸 Instagram Posts Scraper - structured Instagram post archives.
• 🎬 YouTube Scraper - channel and video metadata at scale.
• 💬 Youtube Comments Scraper - comment threads with replies and AI sentiment.

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more social, marketplace, and public-records scrapers.

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🆘 Need Help?

Open our contact form and we will respond within one business day.

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⚖️ Disclaimer: This actor only accesses public Telegram channel previews exposed by Telegram itself. It does not authenticate, impersonate users, or access private chats, groups, or content. Users are responsible for compliance with Telegram's terms of service and applicable law in their jurisdiction.