Combot has been around long enough that "just install Combot" is still the default answer in half the Telegram admin chats on the internet. It earned that. What it does not do is anything about the 400 accounts that joined your channel overnight, because a channel is not a group and there is nothing there for a message filter to read.
So this is less a fight than a map of two territories that people assume are one. If you came here looking for a Combot alternative — or, more precisely, a Combot Telegram alternative for a channel rather than a group chat — the useful question is which territory your problem sits in.
Looking for a Combot alternative? Start here
Its dashboard is the real product. Group statistics, user insights, a trigger system that chains actions — add a warning, mute for 600 seconds, reply with a random line from a list — plus customizable filters, restriction policies, scheduled announcements and a reputation module where members upvote each other. For a busy chat with human moderators, that toolset removes a lot of tedious work, and Combot does not publish a price list because the parts most groups use cost nothing.
If your problem is one person pasting referral links and a co-admin who keeps forgetting the mute command, install Combot and stop reading. We would rather say that than pretend otherwise.
CAS is the piece worth understanding properly
CAS — Combot Anti-Spam — is a shared ban list. An account caught spamming gets a permanent record, every CAS-protected group blocks it the moment it tries to join, and the whole list is downloadable through a free API that third-party bots pull from at roughly two requests a second. Group admins cannot add someone to CAS themselves, which is exactly why it is trustworthy: no revenge bans.
TGuard runs the same idea from a different angle. Our network watches 15,000+ protected channels, and an account gets flagged as a known abuser once it has been banned across five or more of them. Fifteen million accounts sit in that database today. The list is not the interesting part, though — the interesting part is that TGuard acts on the flag in three places at once: at the join, at the first message, and retroactively, when you scan a channel that already has bots inside it.
A shared ban list answers "have we seen this account before". It does not answer "why did forty accounts arrive in the last ninety seconds" — and that is the question most channel owners are actually asking.
The message layer and the account layer
Every classic moderation feature reacts to a message. Someone posts, a rule reads the text, the bot acts. That loop is the right answer to text spam and a useless one against accounts that have not said anything — which is most of them, because inflating your member count was the entire job.
TGuard now runs both layers, which was not true a year ago. On the message side there are six rules you configure per chat from a settings page: stop words with substring or whole-word matching (whole-word keeps "cast" from firing on "podcast"), a link filter covering http://, bare domains and t.me / telegra.ph, a frequency rule that defaults to five messages in ten seconds, separate media and audio rules for chats where attachments are not welcome, and the known-abuser rule, which needs no keyword at all.
Each rule carries its own action — record, delete, or delete and ban — and new rules start in record-only mode deliberately. You watch what a rule would have deleted for a day before you let it delete anything, because the fastest way to kill a healthy chat is one careless stop word firing on ordinary conversation. There is also a hard cap on how often a single rule can fire in one chat per window: a rule that goes berserk pauses itself and writes a warning instead of clearing the room.
On the account side: a captcha at entry, a join-rate limit you set yourself (more than ten joins in thirty seconds, say, and the whole burst gets kicked or banned), and the abuser list described above.
Where the comparison actually lands
| Job | Combot | TGuard |
|---|---|---|
| Word and link filtering in a group | Yes | Yes |
| Shared spammer database | CAS, public API | Own network, 15M+ accounts |
| Chat analytics, triggers, scheduled posts | Yes — the main product | No |
| Join-rate limit against raids | No | Yes, configurable |
| Bulk cleanup of bots already inside | No | Yes, by join date |
| Channel subscriber audit, ERR, fake views | No | Yes |
The rows that matter are the last three, and they are all the same row underneath: Combot is a group-chat tool, and a channel is not a group chat. A channel has subscribers, boosts, views, an ad rate and a scam label it can pick up. None of that is a message anyone posted, so none of it is visible to a filter that reads messages.
The one place both tools genuinely stand in the same room is comments. Comments under channel posts do not live in the channel — Telegram puts them in a separate linked discussion group with its own members and its own admin list. Combot can be added there and will moderate it fine. Most owners simply never do, which is why in one ordinary 28-minute window on our production engine, 561 of the 1,749 messages flagged from already-banned accounts were sitting in comment threads rather than in group chats.
What TGuard does not do
No welcome messages. No custom commands, no trigger chains, no reputation points, no scheduled announcements, no engagement leaderboard for your chat. If those are why you installed Combot, nothing here replaces it, and running both is a perfectly sensible setup — with one rule: give delete rights to one bot only. Two bots racing to delete the same message produces confusing logs and the occasional survivor, because each one assumed the other had taken it.
Picking one
- A group of humans who mostly behave, with an occasional link spammer — Combot, free tier, CAS on. Done.
- A channel with subscribers you sell ads against, or one that has been raided — TGuard, and start with a subscriber audit before you change any settings.
- A channel plus its comment thread, which is most of Telegram in 2026 — TGuard in both the channel and the linked discussion group, rules on record-only for the first day.
- A large community that needs both moderation comfort and account defence — run both, delete rights to TGuard.
If you are still mapping the landscape rather than choosing, the companion pieces cover the ChatKeeper comparison, what free anti-spam bots cover and where they run out and how the moderation and protection layers split.
Frequently Asked Questions
For spam and bot defence, yes — TGuard runs stop words, a link filter, a message-frequency rule and a shared abuser list, so a group using Combot purely as a filter can drop to one bot. For chat analytics, triggers, custom commands and scheduled announcements, no. TGuard has none of those and does not plan to.
CAS is Combot's Anti-Spam list: accounts caught spamming get a permanent ban record, any CAS-protected group blocks them on join, and the list is published through a free API. TGuard keeps its own network list built from 15,000+ protected channels, and flags an account once it has been banned in five or more of them. The difference is what happens next — TGuard also acts on join bursts and on accounts that never posted at all.
It moderates group chats, including the discussion group where a channel's comments live if you add it there. A channel itself has no message stream to filter — the risk is in who subscribed, how fast, and what that does to your reach, boosts and ad rates. That is the part TGuard was built for.