The Best Social Media Proxy Providers of 2023
Social media proxies can do wonders for your social media project. You can create and manage multiple profiles without worrying about getting an IP or account ban, scrape public data to gain market insights, find influencers or new business opportunities.
If you’re looking to buy proxies for social media automation, you’ve come to the right place. This page will list the five best social media proxy providers. We’ve tested and analyzed each service to make your choice easier. Let’s dive in and match you with a provider that exceeds your needs.
The Best Social Media Proxy Providers of 2023 – Quick Summary:
- Smartproxy – best value social media proxies.
- SOAX – quality mobile proxies for social media account management.
- Bright Data – feature-rich proxy service for most social media use cases.
- Webshare – affordable ISP proxies for social media scraping.
- NetNut – social media proxies for large businesses.
Key Points about Social Media Proxies
- Social media proxies are optimized for platforms like Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok.
- Nowadays, social media proxies are mostly mobile and ISP (static residential) – they’re the hardest to block. You can also use residential proxies; they’re cheaper but much slower.
- The main use cases include multiple account management and creation, unblocking, and scraping.
- Don’t use free proxies with social media – they’ll likely be blocked on popular platforms.
Learn more: What Are Social Media Proxies?
Tips and Tricks for Using Proxies for Social Media
- Consider your needs. Before sticking to a proxy service subscription, choose the right proxy type. Some proxies are more expensive than others and work with different use cases. For example, mobile IPs are the hardest to block but are costly.
- Search for a reliable proxy service. If you don’t want to damage your reputation or get into legal trouble, do your research before acquiring proxies. Legitimate proxy providers are transparent about how their proxies are sourced. A reliable service vets its customers and monitors proxy use.
- Respect the website’s guidelines. There are three critical guidelines you should know before automating your actions. Every website has instructions (a robots.txt file) to manage bot traffic. This is especially relevant for scraping – it shows what pages you can scrape. You should also read platforms’ terms of service, which sometimes include policies that prohibit you from certain automated activities. And most importantly, don’t scrape data behind a login. This can get you into legal trouble.
- Use an antidetect browser for multiple account management. If you’re a social media marketer and need to manage (or create) multiple accounts for your clients without a risk of blocking them, pair your proxies with an antidetect browser. It will spoof your digital fingerprint. This isn’t the fastest approach but definitely the safest.
- Don’t use too many IPs with one account. A good practice is up to 5-8 accounts per mobile IP.
How We Chose the Best Social Media Proxy Providers
To make a list of the best social media proxy providers, we tested a dozen services for the latest Proxy Market Research. We dwelled into the size and quality of each provider’s proxy pool, among other aspects. Here are the results of the top five social media proxy providers.
Where to Buy the Best Social Media Proxies
Smartproxy offers great value for anyone who needs social media proxies. Over the years, we’ve recognized its services to have the best overall user experience: 24/7 customer support via most communication means, an extensive backlog of guides on social media automation, and an easy-to-use dashboard.
Smartproxy’s mobile IP network is one of the fastest. The proxy pool has 10 million IPs from 130 locations worldwide and over 700 ASNs. It also offers 40 million rotating residential IPs from 195 different locations worldwide that you can target up to the city level. The static proxy pool spans 16,000 addresses in the US.
The rotation options for residential and mobile proxies include every connection request and 1, 10, and 30-minute thresholds. With Smartproxy’s ISP addresses, you can create static sessions that don’t expire.
All of Smartproxy’s plans come with X-Browser, a free antidetect browser that’s a great addition for multiple social media account management and creation.
However, despite all the praises, we seem to find downsides in every service. And Smartproxy is not an exception. Its mobile proxies don’t support city-level targeting.
Features:
- Locations: 130 (mobile), 195 (residential), US (ISP)
- Rotation: every request, 10, 30 minutes (mobile), unlimited sticky sessions (ISP)
- Support: award-winning 24/7 support via chat or email
- Extras: API, browser extension, anti-detect browser, extensive documentation
- Free trial: 3-day refund available
Pricing:
- Mobile: $21 for 1 GB
- ISP: $28 for 2 GB ($14/GB)
- Residential: $8.5 for 1 GB
SOAX’s proxy services have been gradually improving yearly – today, the provider can easily compare to other premium services. It has a user-friendly dashboard with an onboarding wizard for newbies. Customer support is available via live chat, email, phone, and Telegram, and typically responds within five minutes.
SOAX offers a pool of 3.5 mobile and 5 million residential proxies in over 100 countries. You can filter IPs by country, region, city, and ASN. The provider also offers 100,000 ISP addresses in the US with no option to choose particular cities.
The rotation ranges from 90 to 600 seconds with SOAX’s mobile and residential proxy plans. The ISP addresses can hold sessions for up to 24 hours.
However, there are a few limitations to remember: SOAX offers a fixed number of ports with all plans, you’ll have to whitelist your IP address, and there’s no pay-as-you-go.
Features:
- Locations: 100+ (mobile), US (ISP), 150+ (residential)
- Rotation: every request, 90-600 seconds with custom options (residential and mobile), sessions up to 24 hours (ISP)
- Support: 24/7 live chat and tickets
- Extras: API (limited), customer success manager
- Free trial: 3-day trial for $1.99 available
Pricing:
Starts from $99 for 15 GB ($6.6/GB) and 300 ports.
Bright Data mainly targets large businesses. Over the years, the provider managed to keep premium quality and features. The dashboard is comprehensive, the customer service is available via email, and a ticket system, and you’ll get a dedicated account manager.
Bright Data has one of the largest proxy networks: 7 million mobile, 72 residential IPs, and 700,000 thousand ISP proxies. The mobile and residential IPs cover all countries and thousands of cities with up to carrier targeting. The ISP proxies include 50 locations that you can filter by cities.
In terms of rotation, all Bright Data’s services include an open-source proxy manager, which allows you to rotate proxies however you like.
But the problems come down to money and difficulty setting up. Bright Data’s premium features cost a lot, and since it targets large-sized businesses, individuals or small businesses might find the service overpriced.
Features:
- Locations: every country (mobile, residential), 50 countries (ISP)
- Rotation: customizable with Proxy Manager
- Support: 24/7 via live chat, tickets, dedicated account manager
- Extras: API, browser extension, Proxy Manager, extensive documentation
- Free trial: 7-day free trial for businesses, 3-day refund for individuals.
Pricing:
- Mobile: $24 for 1 GB
- ISP: $15/GB + $0.50/IP
- Residential: $10.50 for 1 GB
Webshare is a newcomer in the industry but has robust social media proxies. The provider offers complete self-service and customizable subscriptions for both residential and ISP products.
Webshare offers 100,000 ISP proxies in 5 locations. These addresses are very fast and have a high success rate. The residential service has a pool of 30 million monthly IPs that you can filter by 195 individual locations. They’re one of the cheaper proxies in the market.
In terms of rotation, residential proxies rotate with every request, and there are no custom options. ISP proxies, on the other hand, come in a list of static addresses, but you can rotate them for free. Additionally, Webshare has a feature where you can replace individual IPs or the whole list at an extra cost.
The drawbacks? There’s no city or ASN targeting, and the services won’t come cheap if you need extra features like network priority or IP refreshes.
Features:
- Locations: 5 (ISP), 190+ (residential)
- Rotation: every request
- Support: Monday to Friday (6am-6pm PST) support via email
- Extras: API, basic documentation
- Free trial: –
Pricing:
- ISP: $6 for 20 shared IPs ($0.30/IP)
- Residential: $7 for 1 GB
NetNut is after the bigger fish in the sea – it’s a feature-rich service once you subscribe to a larger plan.
Despite advertising only one million mobile addresses, our tests showed that NetNut boasts more unique IPs than some of the larger competition. The provider also holds an aggregate of 52 million residential IPs and one million static residential proxies.
All three types rotate with every request, but you can hold sticky sessions by slightly modifying your proxy username. This way, you can keep the same ISP proxies indefinitely, while the residential and mobile IPs will remain available until the proxy source goes offline.
Having said that, NetNut’s mobile proxy pool had many addresses that an IP database didn’t consider mobile – to be precise, up to three out of four depending on the location. In addition, the proxies were slower compared to premium competitors and failed to connect more.
Features:
- Locations: 150+ (ISP, residential)
- Rotation: every request , as long as the IP is available
- Support: 24/7 via email, Skype (larger plans)
- Extras: API (for resellers), extensive documentation Free trial: 7-day free trial for companies.
Pricing:
- Mobile: $300 for 10 GBs ($30/GB)
- ISP: $350 for 20 GBs ($17.50/GB)
- Residential: $100 for 5 GBs ($20/GB)