Short answer: Mastros if the groups are private and you are in them, the data is personal, and a person is around to start the run. Apify if the channels are public, the job is scheduled and large, and the results belong in a warehouse. The two tools fail at opposite things, which makes this one of the rare comparisons with a genuinely split verdict rather than a winner. Mastros here means the Mastros Telegram extension, which exports group members, chat messages and recent contacts from Telegram Web to CSV, JSON or JSONL.
We make one of these. That is exactly why the section on where Apify wins is the longest one in this post. A comparison where the author's tool wins every row is a comparison nobody should believe.
The architectural difference, which decides everything else
Mastros is a Chrome extension. It runs inside your browser on web.telegram.org and reads Telegram's own structured data through the session you are already signed into. No credentials, no server in the data path, and the rows land on your disk.
Apify is a cloud platform. You configure an actor (a hosted scraper) and it runs on Apify's infrastructure, on a schedule if you want, writing results into a dataset you export. Nothing runs on your machine, and nothing needs your machine to be on.
Everything below follows from those two sentences.
| Mastros | Apify actors | |
|---|---|---|
| Runs on | Your browser | Apify's cloud |
| Private groups you have joined | Yes | Generally no |
| Public channels at scale | Limited by a browser tab | Built for it |
| Scheduling / unattended runs | No | Yes |
| Where personal data is processed | Your machine | Apify's servers |
| Credentials needed | None | Apify account; actor may need Telegram credentials |
| Output | CSV, JSON, JSONL, ZIP | Dataset → JSON, CSV, Excel |
| Pricing model | Flat: $0 / $9 / $18 a month | Usage-based: free plan with $5 of monthly usage, Starter $19 a month, Scale $199 |
| Setup time | Install and go | Configure an actor, then a pipeline |
Apify platform prices read from its pricing page on 5 September 2026; unused prepaid usage expires at the end of each month, and each actor's own price comes on top of, or out of, that usage depending on how its author bills.
Where Apify genuinely wins
Scheduled, unattended runs. Mastros has no headless mode. A person opens a tab and starts a run. If your requirement is "every morning at 6am, without anyone present", that is not a limitation to work around. It is a different product category, and Apify is that category.
Public channels at scale. Crawling hundreds of public channels is what cloud infrastructure is for. Concurrency, retries, proxy rotation and queueing are the platform's whole reason to exist, and reimplementing them inside a browser tab would be a worse version of something that already exists.
Pipeline integration. Datasets, webhooks, API access and integrations mean results land where your stack expects them without a human moving a file. A browser extension produces a download; that is the right artefact for a person and the wrong one for an orchestrator.
Spiky workloads. Usage-based billing means an idle month costs nothing. If you run one enormous job a quarter, paying per run beats paying monthly for capacity you are not using.
Multi-source scraping. If Telegram is one of eight sources you collect, one platform covering all eight beats eight separate tools, even where each specialist tool is individually better.
Where Mastros wins
Private groups. This is the decisive one for most people who search for a Telegram scraper. A cloud actor has no session of yours, so a private group is out of reach. Mastros inherits exactly the access your account already has: join the group, open it, export it. Nothing more, and importantly nothing less.
Personal data staying local. Member lists are personal data. Processing them in your own browser means no copy exists on a vendor's infrastructure, which removes a processor relationship and the paperwork attached to it. For a community manager handling their members' names and handles, this is usually the whole argument.
No credentials, no setup. No api_id, no api_hash, no actor configuration, no account with a third platform. Install, open Telegram Web, run. For someone who needs a member list this afternoon, minutes-to-first-export is the metric that matters.
Telegram-native extraction. The extension knows what a Telegram group member is, so it returns handles, bios and phone numbers the interface does not display, does mutual-group lookup, and falls back to collecting everyone who has posted when a group hides its member list. A general-purpose actor reading a page cannot do any of that.
Predictable cost. $9 or $18 a month, same in a heavy month as a light one. Nobody has to estimate compute units before deciding whether to run something.
By persona
Community manager
Mastros. The groups are private, you are an admin, the members are people whose data you are responsible for, and you export monthly rather than hourly. Every one of those points at local extraction. The Telegram scraper covers member lists, message history and mutual groups in the same panel, and the free tier is enough to see whether it fits before paying anything.
Data engineer
Apify, or Telethon. If the output is a table in a warehouse refreshed on a schedule, you need something that runs without a browser, and neither of those is a browser extension. Do not fight the tool: a scheduled cloud job is the correct architecture, and our own API versus browser extension post says the same thing.
Researcher or journalist
It depends on what you are studying. Public channels at scale, mapping a discourse across hundreds of sources: Apify. A specific community you have access to, where provenance and keeping sensitive data off third-party infrastructure matter: Mastros. Many research projects want both, at different stages.
Agency running client work
Usually Mastros, occasionally both. Client data on your own machine is easier to explain in a DPA than client data on a platform you have introduced into the chain. The exception is a client whose job genuinely is large-scale public monitoring, where you should bill the cloud cost through rather than pretend a browser tab scales.
The honest verdict
Neither tool is the better tool. They are shaped for different halves of the problem, and the split falls almost exactly along two lines: is the source private or public, and does a human start the run.
Private and human-started → Mastros. Public and scheduled → Apify. If you are somewhere in between (a public channel you check weekly, say), either works, and you should pick on whether you would rather pay a flat fee or a usage bill, and whether you would rather the rows sat on your disk or in a dataset.
What would be dishonest is claiming a browser extension scales like cloud infrastructure, or that a cloud platform can read a private group it was never invited to. Both claims get made in this category. Neither is true.
FAQ
Can Apify scrape private Telegram groups?
Generally no. An actor runs on Apify's servers with no session of yours, so a private group it has not been given access to is unreachable. Tools that operate through your own signed-in session (browser extensions, or a Telethon script using your credentials) are the ones that reach private groups you belong to.
Is Mastros an Apify alternative?
For some jobs. If you were using an actor to pull member lists out of groups you are in, Mastros does that with less setup and without your data leaving your machine. If you were using Apify to crawl hundreds of public channels on a schedule, Mastros is not a replacement and we would not pitch it as one.
Which is cheaper, Mastros or Apify?
It depends entirely on volume and shape. Mastros is flat: $9 or $18 a month regardless of usage inside the allowance. Apify bills for what a run consumes, so light or occasional use can cost less and heavy scheduled use can cost more. The workload comparison is in Telegram scraper pricing compared.
Can I use both?
Yes, and several teams do. Apify for public monitoring at scale, Mastros for the private communities that monitoring cannot reach. They do not conflict: different sources, different access model.
Does either one risk my Telegram account?
Mastros only reads and honours Telegram's own rate-limit responses, adding no messaging activity to the account. Any tool's risk profile depends on what it does: automated sending and mass joining are what Telegram acts on, and neither tool's extraction features are the thing to worry about.
Related reading
- Best Telegram Scrapers in 2026: these two plus five more.
- Telegram Scraper Pricing Compared: flat versus usage-based, with worked examples.
- Telegram API vs Browser Extension: the architectural choice underneath both.
- Telegram Scraper: the tool on one side of this comparison.