Smartproxy vs. Luminati: Performance & Feature Comparison

This one is an interesting comparison – you see, Smartproxy is relatively new in the proxy provider market, and Luminati is an old wolf in this field. However, in our best residential proxy provider list, Smartproxy takes place as the third best residential proxy provider, whereas Luminati comes in fourth.
How did this happen? Let’s take a look at this comparison we made of Luminati and Smartproxy and find out.
Smartproxy 8.7 vs Luminati 8.5
Smartproxy | Luminati | |
Rating | 8.7 | 8.5 |
Bandwidth | Limited | Limited |
Pool size | 10M residential IPs | 35M residential IPs |
Locations | 195 | 223 |
Authorization method | Credentials and whitelisted IPs | Credentials and whitelisted IPs |
Session control | ✔ | ✔ |
Number of users | Limited | Depends |
Filters | ||
| ✔ | ✔ |
| ✖ | ✔ |
| ✖ | ✔ |
Protocols | HTTP, HTTPS | HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS5 |
Dashboard | ||
| ✔ | ✔ |
| ✔ | ✔ |
| ✔ | ✔ |
Customer Support | ||
| ✔ | ✔ |
| ✖ | ✔ |
If we go through the comparison table, you will see that Smartproxy has over 10 million residential proxies – that’s a lot less than Luminati which has 35 million. Smartproxy’s Country number is also a bit smaller (195). Yet, we mentioned this before, even if Luminati claims to have 223 country’s – this number is highly unlikely, especially because there are 195 countries in the world. So Smartproxy seems to be the realistic one.
When it comes to the number of users, Smartproxy has a limited number, whereas for Luminati it depends, as if you add a session parameter to your username with a randomly generated ID, you will be able to use that IP until you use the same ID (or if that IP is available).
Luminati also is better with the filtering section – it has location, proxy type, and ASN/ Provider/ Carrier filtering. Smartproxy has only location.
Smartproxy has HTTP and HTTPS protocols, and Luminati has both of those as well as SOCKS5. Everything else looks similar between Luminati and Smartproxy, except Smartproxy does not support tickets.
Having said all this, we gave Smartproxy 8.7 and Luminati an 8.5. How come? Well, you can see their functionalities in their full reviews (Smartproxy, Luminati), but we made it a little easier for you to see why with a comparison down below.
Smartproxy vs. Luminati: Performance Comparison
In the table above you can clearly see that Smartproxy has a better overall look to it. It has much less blocked IPs and a smaller amount of timeouts. However, it is very clear that Luminati has little to no connection errors.
Comparing Smartproxy and Luminati to Other Proxy Providers
Smartproxy | Luminati | Other Proxy Providers | |
Success rate | 84.21% | 74.64% | 70.20% |
Connection errors | 7.03% | 1.14% | 10.76% |
Timeouts | 4.67% | 12.39% | 9.22% |
Blocked IPs | 3.97% | 11.84% | 9.27% |
As you can see, Smartproxy not only wins in nearly every category over Luminati, it also goes over the industry’s average.
Requests to the Most Popular Targets
Now, let’s take a closer look at the success rates.
Target | Smartproxy | Luminati | Other Proxy Providers |
www.aliexpress.com | 83.70% | 89.44% | 82.62% |
www.amazon.com | 84.10% | 89.77% | 70.77% |
www.booking.com | 89.42% | 90.46% | 79.12% |
www.facebook.com | 85.15% | 92.33% | 77.85% |
www.google.com | 73.52% | 31.28% | 44.33% |
www.instagram.com | 88.54% | 93.95% | 82.60% |
www.wayfair.com | 89.12% | 76.42% | 72.05% |
yandex.com | 80.12% | 38.80% | 52.27% |
In most cases, Luminati is a little bit better than Smartproxy, however when it comes to Google, Wayfair, and Yandex – Smartproxy wins by a significant number, making it better than Luminati. Smartproxy also goes over the industry’s average in every single case.
Performance by Concurrent Connections
During the concurrent connection test, we gradually increased the number of concurrent connections and put the proxies on a huge load.
Here you can clearly see that Smartproxy does a better job than Luminati, as when we increased the concurrent sessions, Smartproxy remained almost the same. Luminati went down from the very beginning and continued to drop very slightly till the end.
Speed
Smartproxy | Luminati | Other Proxy Providers | |
Avg. response time | 4.85 s | 6.82 s | 7.78 s |
Both did well compared to the industry’s average, however, Smartproxy was quicker by almost 2 seconds. And in the proxy world, that can mean a lot, especially if you’re using such proxies for copping sneakers.
Pricing
Smartproxy has clear seven pricing plans that show what will you get – and they are also relatively cheap – especially if you compare the quality to value ratio.
Luminati has a lot messier pricing plan, where you need to choose from different plans by country and by plan depending on the amount of data you require. And the biggest drawback? The cheapest plan costs $500 a month. That’s steep.
Why Smartproxy is Better Than Luminati?
Luminati has a lot of benefits, but when you go into detail, you’ll see that Smartproxy is better than Luminati, being faster, cheaper, and more reliable.
Thank you, I’ve recently been searching for information approximately this subject for a while and yours is the best I’ve found out till now.
But, what in regards to the conclusion? Are you positive about the source?
Actually i would have to disagree with the success rate on Google you stated above. We tried both Luminati and Smartproxy, and luminati always came out on top when it comes to google. I don’t have exact percentages but what i can say is that the difference was considerable.
One thing i would like to ask. You stated that Smartproxy came in as third and Luminati as forth. Then who are the first and second best residential proxy providers? You didn’t mention them in this article.
Hey, that’s interesting. Could you maybe share how you performed your tests? We have used our standard 300 concurrent connections benchmark with Luminati’s residential proxies and only got a success rate of 31.28% as you can see here. Meanwhile, Smartproxy achieved %73.52. All of the blocks from Google while using Luminati were 503 errors (RECAPTCHAs).
Hi, great article.
I am looking for a proxy provider to use with Ghost Browser to create and cultivate a number of Facebook profiles to be used in running ads. I am not scraping any content, and my major concern is that my profiles have the highest possible chance of being accepted by FB.
Luminati has a good reputation in this regard, but their pricing is inflexible and there is a high entry threshold for residential IPs ($500/month). Smart Proxy’s pricing is much more flexible and residential IPs start at $75/month.
So my question is, which provider is most likely to enable me to maintain FB profiles without getting them blocked?
Thanks in advance.