Junction bot has been the default answer for Telegram forwarding since 2017, with 20,000+ users and a feature list longer than anyone else's. It's also not the only option, and for a lot of people it isn't the cheapest one.
Here's the field as of July 2026, with prices read off each tool's own site. We make one of these, so read the Junction row first and judge whether we're being fair about it.
| Tool | Free tier | Entry paid | Private/protected sources | Setup style |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Junction bot | No (7-day trial) | €3/mo | €12/mo and up | Chat + web, technical |
| EzForwardBot | Yes — 4 connections | £9.99/mo | All plans, including free | Visual app |
| TeleFeed | Yes — free forwarding | Not published | Yes | Visual app |
| tgcf | Free (self-hosted) | Your server costs | Yes | Config file |
| Bot-only forwarders | Usually | Varies | No | Varies |
Price: Economy €3, Express €6, Direct €12, Expert €18, Business €142+ per month. 7-day trial, 7-day money-back. Annual billing knocks about 30% off.
What's good: it's been running since 2017, which in this category counts for a lot. The feature set is genuinely broad — AI digests, feed aggregation, history copying, watermarking, topic mapping, folder forwarding, manual moderation. Their €3 Economy tier is cheaper than anything anyone else charges.
What to check before you buy: the cheap tiers are more limited than the price suggests.
So the honest read: Junction's headline price is €3, but the plan most people actually need is €12–€18.
Pick it if: you want the deepest feature set, you're mirroring public channels on a budget, or you want a tool with nine years of history behind it.
Price: Free (4 connections), Pro £9.99/mo, Business £39/mo.
What's different: the free plan isn't a trial — it's permanent, delivers instantly, and reads private and protected sources, none of which Junction's paid entry tiers do. Paid plans don't meter anything: AI translation, summaries, rewrites and compilation digests have no per-use counter.
The other difference is vocabulary. Junction exposes settings like forward_then_copy_client. We use plain-language labels with an explainer on anything that needs one, because most people setting up a channel mirror are not engineers.
What we don't have: nine years of track record, 20,000 users, watermarking, or a €3 tier. If your budget is €3 and an hour's delay is fine, Junction Economy beats us and we'd rather say so.
Pick it if: you want to try before paying, you read protected or private channels, or you've bounced off a more technical tool.
Full comparison: EzForwardBot vs Junction bot.
Price: its site says "forwarding free, forever". Premium features exist; the pricing isn't published.
What's good: a real free tier with no connection limit advertised — its site says "forwarding free, forever" — nine composable features (redirection, clone, filtering, transformation, cleaner, translation in 90+ languages, action, scheduler, delay), and claimed 10M+ messages a day. Setup is a chat picker, same as ours.
What to check: the premium price isn't published anywhere on the site, delivery is Telegram-only, and no operating company is named. On free volume it beats us outright.
Pick it if: free forwarding covers what you need and Telegram-only delivery is fine.
Comparison: EzForwardBot vs TeleFeed.
Price: free software, plus whatever your server costs.
What's good: it's yours. You can read the code, change the behaviour, and your session file never leaves your machine — which is a real privacy argument, not a small one.
What to check: you're the operator. Python environment, deployment, updates when Telegram changes something, and you're the one debugging a stalled session at 1am.
Pick it if: you self-host happily and want to modify the forwarder itself.
Comparison: EzForwardBot vs tgcf.
There are many small bots that forward between channels using only the Bot API. They're often free and fine for simple public-to-public mirroring.
The limitation is structural: a bot can only read a chat it's been added to. If you can't add a bot to the source — which is usually the case for someone else's channel — it cannot read it, and no pricing tier changes that. Anything that reads a channel you don't control needs a logged-in user account.
If a bot claims to read arbitrary private channels, be suspicious about how.
You're responsible for what you republish. Copying someone else's original work into your own channel without permission is a copyright problem regardless of which tool did the copying, and mass-copying gets Telegram accounts limited. Mirroring your own channels, consolidating channels you run, or carrying a feed you've licensed — all fine. Our terms spell out where we draw that line.
Prices verified from each tool's own site on 27 July 2026, with EUR converted at that day's ECB rate. Things change — if a figure here is stale, tell us and we'll correct it.