The 9 Best Rotating Proxies of 2023
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.
The Best Rotating Proxy Providers of 2023
- Smartproxy – the best balance between features and price.
- Oxylabs – the best premium rotating proxy provider.
- Bright Data – every kind of rotating proxies with many features.
- SOAX – very flexible rotating residential & mobile IPs.
- Infatica – reasonably priced residential proxies for business.
- IPRoyal – cheap credit-based plans and highly customizable rotation.
- NetNut – rotating ISP proxies for high-volume scraping.
- Webshare – very customizable subscriptions and complete self-service.
- PacketStream – cheap proxies but no custom rotation.
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 2023
Smartproxy is a rare provider that combines worldwide locations (which you can target), reliable proxies, and affordable pricing plans. You can choose from rotating residential, mobile or shared datacenter IPs. Either option gives you access to the full proxy pool with any plan. Smartproxy lets you run unlimited connections, has an API and extensive help docs for major integrations. We’ve awarded it as the best value provider for three years in a row.
Smartproxy’s residential IPs rotate with every connection request, or you can hold sticky sessions up to 30 minutes. During our tests, the proxies showed an almost perfect success rate (99.43%), and they were the fastest (0.57 s).
On the downside, the traffic-based pricing plans always remind you to mind your expenses.
- Proxy types: residential, shared datacenter, and mobile
- 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 $8.5 for 1 GB. 3-day refund available.
Read the Smartproxy review for more information and performance tests.
Oxylabs is primarily a residential proxy provider, though it also has rotating datacenter, ISP, and mobile proxy services. 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 network (which, as we’ve confirmed, works very well). The provider showed impeccable performance (success rate: 99.61%) and the fastest response time of 0.57 s compared to other providers we’ve tested.
It also means that Oxylabs might be a little pricey for individuals or those who have small needs.
- Proxy types: residential, datacenter, ISP, and mobile
- Number of IPs: Over 100 million
- Rotation settings: every request, 10, 30 mins
- Targeting options: every country & city, ASN
- Concurrent connections: unlimited
Pricing:
Residential proxies start from $15 for 1 GB. Business can take a 7-day free trial, others get a 3-day refund.
Bright Data is a market leader with many features and tools. Beside regular residential proxies, you can get ISP proxies, rotating datacenter IPs, and even mobile addresses. The proxies are very performant and highly scalable. 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 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 $10.50 for 1 GB. Businesses get a 7-day trial, others a 3-day refund.
SOAX offers premium residential and mobile proxies. 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: with every connection request, or from 1, 5, 10, and 60 mins (with custom options).
The performance of SOAX proxies is very good, and they cost a bit less than premium providers like Oxylabs or Bright Data. 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.
- Proxy types: residential and mobile
- Number of IPs: 5 million residential IPs
- Rotation settings: with every request, sticky sessions 1, 5, 10, and 60 mins (with custom options)
- Targeting options: 150+ with country, city, ASN targeting
- Concurrent connections: 300-600 ports
Pricing:
Starts from $99 for 15 GB ($6.60/GB) and 300 ports. 3-day trial available for $1.99.
Infatica sells rotating residential proxies, which are pretty affordable for its target clients – businesses. The IPs have good location coverage (around 100 locations), and the proxy servers are pretty robust as far as we’ve tried it. Infatica also tries hard to ensure ethical IP sourcing and use. You can get features like city and ASN targeting (available upon request), and rotation between 5 and 60 minutes.
As a relatively new provider, Infatica has made some eyebrow-raising decisions. The IPs use SOCKS5 but only work with website traffic. But overall, you can get 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 $96 for 8GB ($12/GB). 7-day free trial available.
Read the Infatica review for more information and performance tests.
IPRoyal’s residential 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 $7/GB. The more you buy, the cheaper it gets.
On the downside, IPRoyal’s proxy pool is still small. This translates to fewer 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
- Number of IPs: 250,000
- Rotation settings: every request to 24 hours
- Targeting options: city
- Concurrent connections: unlimited
Pricing:
From $7 for 1GB. No free trial.
Read the IPRoyal review for more information and performance tests.
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, ISP & shared datacenter
- Number of IPs: over 20 million
- Rotation settings: every request
- Targeting options: 150+ countries
- Concurrent connections: unlimited
Pricing:
Residential proxies start from $20 for 1 GB, with an option for a 7-day free trial.
Read the NetNut review for more information and performance tests.
- Proxy types: datacenter, ISP & residential
- Number of IPs: 30 million
- Rotation settings: every request
- Targeting options: Country
- Concurrent connections: Unlimited
Pricing:
Residential proxies start from $15 for 1 GB. No free trial for residential IPs
PacketStream buys bandwidth directly from people and resells to its customers. This allows the provider to keep low prices. The residential proxies are very basic – you get rotation with every request and sticky sessions for as long as available, over 150 countries that you can target, and customer support via email.
Our tests showed that the actual size of PacketStream’s pool is very small compared to the alternatives, so you’ll most likely get duplicate IPs. Also, there’s no SOCKS5 support, custom rotation, or more targeting options. And even though on paper the provider sells 1GB for as little as $1, its system overcounts traffic use by 8-10 times.
- Proxy types: residential
- Number of IPs: 7 million
- Rotation settings: every request, sticky sessions for as long as available
- Targeting options: country
- Concurrent connections: unlimited
Pricing:
Starts from $1 for 1 GB. No free trial.
Read the PacketStream review for more information and performance tests.
When should you try to use rotating proxies instead of lists? Great content, by the way!
Eman, rotating proxies are great when you need to make a lot of connection requests. So, for example, in web scraping. They simplify things a lot. Also, if you buy residential or mobile IPs, they’ll likely be rotating, whether you want it or not. That’s just the way they work.
cheapest rotating proxy that works well with google?
It depends on your experience and the number of requests you’ll be making. Crawlera is great for scraping Google due to its proxy management features; Smartproxy is among the cheaper resi providers to help you avoid blocks; Blazing SEO is very inexpensive in general, but it sells datacenter IPs.
Is it better to use sticky or rotating proxies, if the website is not really protected? I don’t get captchas or blocks.
For web scraping, rotating proxies are better because even weakly protected websites will start rate limiting you if you make too many requests from the same IP.
Maybe you can suggest decent budget-friendly rotating proxies for cracking?
Hi Dominic. Sorry, cracking isn’t really a use case we condone.
Hi, Adam. Thank you for a very informative article.
I have one questionnaire. You may know which of the proxy providers you has ipv6 rotating proxy in its pool?
Hi there. Do you mean IPv6 proxies in their pool or separate pools for IPv6? If it’s the former, then all providers have some IPv6 proxies, usually a small ratio compared to IPv4.