The 9 Best Rotating Proxy Providers of 2021

If your web scraping project is struggling with blocks – or you’re tired of managing proxy lists – rotating proxies are just what you need. They automatically fetch new IPs from a large pool of addresses. No blocks, no hassle.

This page will help you choose the best rotating proxy network for your needs. It features a variety of providers for diverse budgets and tasks. We’ve tested each and outlined their main characteristics to make your choice easier. So, you’ll be sure to find something, no matter how large or hard your project is.

Here are our top picks:

Key Points about Rotating Proxies

• Rotating proxies automatically give you new IP addresses to avoid rate limiting, CAPTCHAs, and IP blocks.
• You usually receive access to a backconnect gateway server that connects you to a provider’s IP pool.
• The rotation settings can range from each connection request to 30 minutes and longer.
• Rotating proxies can be datacenter, residential, or mobile IP addresses. Residential proxies are the most popular option.
• You usually buy them by traffic, sometimes by threads or ports.

To learn more, you can read our guide on rotating proxies.

Main Criteria to Consider

We gave particular attention to the following criteria to make sure the provider’s service is fit for scraping the web:

• Proxy type. You have several options to choose from, and you might not always need the best one. Rotating datacenter proxies work perfectly well with less popular or less protected websites, while residential rotating proxies are more effective with sites like Google and flight aggregators.
• Number of IPs. You have to share rotating proxies with others. A pool with a million IP addresses will likely have cleaner addresses than one with a thousand IPs.
• Rotation settings. You should be able to select rotation every request or create sticky sessions for tasks that require multiple steps.
• Targeting options. Being able to choose a particular country, city, or even ASN really helps with accessing location-sensitive data. However, precise targeting is not always necessary.
• Concurrent connections. The more parallel connection requests you can make, the faster you’ll scrape. Rotating proxies are best for high-volume scraping.

The Best Rotating Proxy Services of 2021

1. Smartproxy

The best balance between features and price. 

Smartproxy is a rare provider that combines worldwide locations (which you can target), fast and reliable proxies, and affordable pricing plans. You can choose from rotating residential or shared datacenter IPs. Either option gives you access to the full proxy pool with any plan. Smartproxy lets you make unlimited connections, has an API and extensive help docs for major integrations. We’ve awarded its customer support as the best in 2020.

On the downside, the traffic-based pricing plans always remind you to mind your expenses.

• Proxy types: residential & shared datacenter
• Number of IPs: 40M residential proxies
• Rotation settings: every request, 1, 10, 30 mins
• Targeting options: every country, US states, 8 cities
• Concurrent connections: unlimited

Pricing:

Residential proxy plans start from $75/5GB ($15/GB). 3-day refund available.

Read the Smartproxy review for more information and performance tests.

2. Oxylabs

The best premium rotating proxy provider.

Oxylabs is primarily a residential proxy provider. It also has a large pool of datacenter IPs – they don’t rotate by default, but the company offers a special add-on called Proxy Rotator. Oxylabs caters to businesses, meaning that it assigns dedicated account managers to clients, has extensive know-how about web scraping, and takes care of its IP pool (which, as we’ve confirmed, works very well).

It also means that Oxylabs might be a little pricey for individuals or those who have small needs.

• Proxy types: residential & private datacenter (with an add-on)
• Number of IPs: 102M residential proxies
• Rotation settings: every request, 10, 30 mins
• Targeting options: every country & city, ASN
• Concurrent connections: unlimited

Pricing:

Starts from $300/20GB ($15/GB). Business can take a 7-day free trial, others get a 3-day refund. 

Read the Oxylabs review for more information and performance tests.

3. Bright Data

Every kind of rotating proxies with many features.

Bright Data is a market leader with many features and tools. Besides regular residential proxies, you can get ISP proxies, rotating datacenter IPs, and even mobile addresses. Bright Data offers powerful control tools like its open source Proxy Manager. Overall, it’s a fine choice for businesses that want all the bells and whistles they can get. You can pay as you go or fine-tune a pricing plan for your needs – some like it, others find it confusing.

Bright Data has very strict proxy usage and KYC policies, so you might need to defend your use case. It’s not the easiest provider to use, and extra features cost a premium.

• Proxy types: shared datacenter, residential, ISP, mobile
• Number of IPs: 70M residential proxies
• Rotation settings: highly customizable
• Targeting options: every country & city, carrier, ASN
• Concurrent connections: unlimited

Pricing: 

Residential proxies start from $500/40GB ($12.5/GB). Businesses get a 7-day trial, others a 3-day refund.

4. NetNut

Rotating ISP proxies for high-volume scraping.

NetNut offers datacenter & residential proxies for search intelligence, price comparison, and general web scraping. The provider recently introduced peer-to-peer residential IPs and a wider variety of pricing plans. Still, it primarily targets clients that really need to scrape at scale. To illustrate: the pricing plans have a request-based option, which starts from $7,500.

NetNut isn’t an easy squirrel to tame, owing to an absence of documentation and a lacking dashboard (good for stats, no good for everything else). Another downside is that the smaller plans lack features, such as a dedicated account manager or IP whitelisting.

• Proxy types: residential & shared datacenter
• Number of IPs: 20M residential proxies
• Rotation settings: every request
• Targeting options: 150+ countries
• Concurrent connections: unlimited

Pricing:

Starts from $20/1 GB ($20/GB), with an option for a 7-day free trial.

5. Zyte Smart Proxy Manager (formerly Crawlera)

 Smart rotating IPs that charge by requests.

Zyte’s proxies might be datacenter, but you won’t even notice it. The service works like an API via proxy integration: it takes care of things like headers, cookies, and auto retries to retrieve data with a 100% success rate. We’ve found these proxies to perform very well, especially with e-commerce sites. You can learn a lot about them from the provider’s extensive documentation.

That said, while smart, the service is also opinionated. It dictates when to rotate and how long to wait before trying again. There are limited locations (though you can order more), and cheaper plans lock features (capped concurrent requests, no support on weekends).

• Proxy types: shared datacenter
• Number of IPs: ?
• Rotation settings: automatic rotation
• Targeting options: 12 countries + more on demand
• Concurrent connections: 50-200 based on the plan.

Pricing:

Starts from $29 for 50k requests. 14-day free trial available (10,000 requests).

6. SOAX

Very flexible rotating residential & mobile IPs.

SOAX offers residential and mobile proxies for small to medium businesses. They cover most of the world and form a respectable pool of IPs. What we liked about this provider the most is that you can specify locations up to a city & ASN level; and that you have many rotation settings to choose from. The lowest is 90 seconds, but you can increase the frequency by paying extra. The highest lets you keep the IP until it becomes unavailable.

What we didn’t like is that the pricing plans give you limited ports; that you have to whitelist IPs to use them; and that the user experience is still incomplete. The actual performance is okay, though the response time could be faster.

• Proxy types: shared residential and mobile
• Number of IPs: 5M residential proxies
• Rotation settings: 90 seconds to as long as available
• Targeting options: 100+ countries, city & ASN targeting
• Concurrent connections: 300-600 ports

Pricing:

The residential plans start from $75 for 5GB ($15/GB). 3-day trial available for $1.99.

7. Infatica

Reasonably priced rotating residential proxies for business.

Infatica sells rotating residential proxies, which are pretty affordable for its target clients – businesses. The IPs have good location coverage, and the proxy server is pretty robust as far as we’ve tried it. Infatica also tries hard to ensure ethical IP sourcing and use.

As a relatively new provider, Infatica has made some eyebrow-raising decisions. The IPs use SOCKS5 but only work with website traffic, and the rotation time is fixed at 1 hour, which is a bit too long for our liking. But if you can swallow this and some UX issues, Infatica can get you premium proxies for less.

• Proxy types: residential
• Number of IPs: 10M residential proxies
• Rotation settings: 1 hour (+ manual rotation)
• Targeting options: 100+ countries, city targeting (custom)
• Concurrent connections: unlimited

Pricing:

Starts from $360/40GB ($9/GB). 7-day free trial available.

8. IPRoyal

Cheap credit-based plans and highly customizable rotation.  

IPRoyal offers mobile and two residential plans: one is larger and reuses IPs from other providers, the second is home-grown. IPRoyal’s own IP pool has three main strengths: flexible rotation, cheap prices, and credit-based pricing. You can specify (actually enter) any rotation time in the widget up to 24 hours. There are no monthly plans; instead, you buy as much traffic as you need, for $3/GB. The more you buy, the cheaper it gets.

On the downside, IPRoyal’s proxy pool is still small (25,000 monthly IPs). This translates to hundreds on IPs in European and other major locations. The performance is okay, but it can’t compare to the premium providers yet. We’d use IPRoyal for small projects or as a secondary provider, keeping an eye for improvements.

• Proxy types: residential, mobile
• Number of IPs: 25,000
• Rotation settings: every request to 24 hours
• Targeting options: city
• Concurrent connections: unlimited

Pricing:

From $3/GB for residential proxies.

9. Storm Proxies

Unlimited bandwidth rotating proxies with limited features.

Storm Proxies sells rotating datacenter and residential proxies. It’s been long known as an affordable option for personal or small business use, which remains true to this day. By going with Storm Proxies, you can expect a simple service at prices starting from $14. Another drawing point is that every plan comes with unlimited bandwidth, even for the residential IPs.

For the benefits, you’ll be paying in features and performance. The targeting options are very broad, the proxy pool limited, and the plans cap how many connections you can make. The IPs perform okay, though they can’t always keep up with those of premium providers.

• Proxy types: shared datacenter and residential
• Number of IPs: 200,000 residential proxies
• Rotation settings: every request, 3, 15 mins
• Targeting options: US, EU, worldwide
• Concurrent connections: up to 400 ports

Pricing:

Residential proxies start from $19 for 1 port. 24-hour refund available.