Telegram Channel Scraper

Telegram Channel Scraper

Telegram Channel Scraper extracts posts from any public Telegram channel without a Telegram account, phone number, bot token or API key. It reads the same web preview pages that Telegram serves at https://t.me/s/<channel>, walks back through the channel history page by page, and returns one clean JSON record per message: text, publication date, view count, author signature, forwarded-from source, reply quote, links, hashtags, mentions and media (photos, videos, documents, audio, polls, stickers).

Typical uses: monitoring crypto, finance or news channels, building datasets for research or NLP, feeding channel posts into an AI agent or n8n/Make automation, archiving a channel, or tracking competitor announcements.

The scraper cannot read private channels, invite-link groups, user profiles or channels whose owner disabled the web preview. For those it returns a status record (not_found, no_preview) instead of failing the run.

How to scrape a Telegram channel

1. Open the Actor in Apify Console and click Try for free.
2. In Channels, add one or more public channels. Any of these forms work: durov, @telegram, https://t.me/durov, t.me/s/telegram.
3. Set Max posts per channel (default 20, newest first). Optionally set Since date to stop at a date, turn off Include media to get lighter records, or turn on Include raw HTML to keep Telegram's formatting.
4. Click Start. Results appear in the Output tab within seconds and can be downloaded as JSON, CSV, Excel or XML, or fetched through the API.

Each t.me page holds about 20 messages, so the default of 20 posts is a single page load and 100 posts means roughly five page loads per channel. Channels are processed in parallel (up to five at once) with a one-second delay between requests to the same host.

How pagination works

Telegram's preview page renders the 20 most recent messages and a "load more" link of the form https://t.me/s/<channel>?before=<messageId>. The Actor follows that link until it has collected the requested number of posts, reaches the sinceDate cutoff, or arrives at the beginning of the channel's history. Only strictly older message ids are accepted from each new page, so messages are never duplicated even if a run migrates between servers.

Telegram Channel Scraper pricing

This Actor uses Apify's pay-per-event model. There is no subscription and no per-result platform fee on top:

• Actor start: a flat fee of $0.00005 per run.
• Message scraped: $0.002 per message pushed to your dataset (that is $2 per 1,000 messages).

Status records for channels that do not exist or have no preview are free. You can cap spending with Maximum cost per run; when the cap is reached the Actor stops cleanly and keeps everything scraped so far. Apify's free plan credit is enough to scrape thousands of messages for evaluation.

Input example

{
    "channels": ["durov", "@telegram", "https://t.me/cointelegraph"],
    "maxPostsPerChannel": 100,
    "sinceDate": "2026-01-01",
    "includeMedia": true,
    "includeHtml": false,
    "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true }
}

Input fields

Field	Type	Default	Description
channels	array of strings	required	Usernames, @usernames or t.me links of public channels.
maxPostsPerChannel	integer	20	Newest N messages to collect per channel.
sinceDate	ISO date string	none	Stop once messages are older than this date.
includeMedia	boolean	true	Include the media array.
includeHtml	boolean	false	Include textHtml with Telegram's original markup.
proxyConfiguration	object	Apify Proxy	Standard Apify proxy settings.

Output example

One dataset item per message:

{
    "channel": "durov",
    "channelTitle": "Pavel Durov",
    "channelDescription": "Founder of Telegram.",
    "channelStatus": "ok",
    "messageId": 536,
    "url": "https://t.me/durov/536",
    "date": "2026-08-21T13:02:11.000Z",
    "text": "🚫 India’s IT ministry banned Telegram for one week because some users shared leaked exam questions.\n\nThis punishes 150 million ordinary Telegram users in India...",
    "views": 1550000,
    "author": "Pavel Durov",
    "forwardedFrom": null,
    "replyTo": null,
    "links": ["https://telegram.org/safety"],
    "hashtags": [],
    "mentions": [],
    "media": [
        {
            "type": "photo",
            "url": "https://cdn4.telesco.pe/file/....jpg",
            "thumbUrl": null,
            "duration": null,
            "name": null
        }
    ],
    "isService": false,
    "scrapedAt": "2026-10-10T18:51:57.947Z"
}

forwardedFrom is { "name", "url" } when the post was forwarded, replyTo is { "messageId", "text" } when it quotes another post, and media.type is one of photo, video, document, audio, poll, sticker. Channels that could not be scraped produce a single record with channelStatus set to not_found, no_preview, empty or error and a human-readable message.

Integrations

• API: start runs and read results with the Apify API or the JavaScript and Python clients. Run the Actor synchronously with run-sync-get-dataset-items to get messages in one call.
• MCP / AI agents: the Actor is exposed through the Apify MCP server, so Claude, ChatGPT and other agents can call it as a tool with the same input.
• n8n and Make: use the Apify node or module, pick this Actor, pass the input JSON above and map the dataset items into your workflow.
• Schedules and webhooks: run it hourly or daily from Apify Schedules and let a webhook push new messages to Slack, Google Sheets, a database or a CRM.

Telegram Channel Scraper FAQ

Does it work for private channels or groups?

No. Only channels with a public username and an enabled web preview can be read. Private channels, invite-link groups and user profiles return a no_preview or not_found status record.

Why are some videos or documents missing a direct URL?

Telegram's preview exposes direct CDN links for photos and short videos, but documents and large files are only linked through the message URL. The media entry still tells you the type and name.

Can I get comments, reactions or subscriber counts?

Not in this version. The web preview shows reactions and subscriber counts, and they may be added on request; comments live in linked discussion groups and are not available without the Telegram API.

How fresh is the data?

Every run fetches the live preview page, so results are as current as Telegram's own website. View counts are the rounded values Telegram shows ("1.5M" becomes 1500000).

Can I scrape many channels at once?

Yes. Add as many channels as you like; they are processed in parallel with built-in rate limiting and automatic retries.

Related actors

Same author, same pay-per-event model and the same no-login approach. They combine well in one pipeline (for example calendar events plus prediction odds plus channel chatter around a release):

• Substack Scraper - posts, authors, likes, restacks and comments from public Substack publications, custom domains included.
• Economic Calendar Scraper - Forex Factory and Investing.com macro events with UTC times, impact, actual, forecast and previous values.
• Prediction Market Odds Scraper - Polymarket and Kalshi markets with 0-1 prices, implied probabilities, bid/ask, volume and orderbooks.
• Product Hunt Scraper - daily, weekly and monthly leaderboards, topic pages, search and product launches with votes, makers and website URLs.

Legal and compliance

This Actor only reads publicly available pages that Telegram serves to anyone without logging in, and it does not bypass any access control. You are responsible for using the data in line with Telegram's Terms of Service, applicable law and, where personal data is involved, GDPR or other privacy regulations. Please read Apify's article on the legality of web scraping if you are unsure.

Support

Found a channel that does not parse correctly, or need an extra field? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab in Apify Console or contact the author through the Actor page. Bug reports that include the channel username are usually fixed within days.