Storm Proxies vs. Smartproxy: Performance & Feature Comparison
Storm Proxies and Smartproxy are two popular vendors of rotating proxies. They both target hustlers and small businesses, offering simple services for an affordable price. But which would be a better pick for you?
The quick answer is: unless you’re running very simple projects and absolutely need unlimited traffic, it’s probably Smartproxy. Why? Let’s find out.
Storm Proxies vs Smartproxy: General Information
Storm Proxies and Smartproxy provide little company information, such as their country of origin. Despite this, we know that Storm Proxies was established a few years earlier and that it’s a popular provider in the US. Smartproxy claims to be a collection of international professionals. Might be so.
Both providers target hustlers and small businesses. So, if you’re a sneaker cook, social media account manager, or small-time scraper, they should be right up your alley. Smartproxy has the ability to supply bigger customers as well, since they do offer more features and tools.
We like Smartproxy, which is obvious looking at the awards we’ve given it. Storm Proxies has won one too, but that was in 2019. Since then, it’s had a hard time competing with other top residential proxy providers.
Storm Proxies vs Smartproxy: Services
Several options for rotating proxies on both sides.
| Storm Proxies | Smartproxy | |
| Datacenter proxies | Shared, dedicated | Shared, dedicated |
| Residential proxies | Rotating | Rotating |
| ISP proxies | ✖ | Shared, dedicated |
| Mobile proxies | ✖ | ✓ |
| Proxy APIs | ✖ | Search Engine Proxies |
| Web scraping tools | ✖ | Social Media Scraping API, SERP Scraping API, eCommerce SCRAPING API, Web Scraping API |
| Other tools | ✖ | X browser, browser extension, Site Unblocker, Proxy Checker |
| Special plans | Sneakers, social media, tickets | ✖ |
Storm Proxies sells three kinds of proxies: dedicated datacenter, rotating residential, and a mix of datacenter & residential IPs called backconnect proxies. The third type supports rotation every request, so it’s best for web scraping. There are also specialized plans for sneaker cooks, social media managers, and ticket scalpers. Just note that the sneaker proxies rotate every 5 minutes (too often) while the social media proxies use datacenter IPs (not working well these days).
Smartproxy has no specialized plans, but sells all types of proxies. It offers dedicated and shared datacenter proxies, and the latter can be either static or rotating. Smartproxy also has residential proxies. In addition, Smartproxy offers ISP and mobile IPs. The variety of proxy types allows more flexibility for a wider range of tasks.
Smartproxy can also offer more supporting tools. Its browser extension simplifies work with proxies on a browser, and X Browser works as a multi-profile web browser for managing multiple accounts (Instagram, eBay, etc.). Smartproxy also has several scraping APIs for data extraction from various sources, and a Site Unblocker – a proxy-like solution built to access various websites and scrape their public data. All these tools add value to the proxies at no additional cost.
Pricing
Both providers are affordable. But Storm Proxies costs less for low-scale use and doesn’t limit traffic.
| Storm Proxies | Smartproxy | |
| Model |
|
|
| Period | Monthly | Monthly, pay as you go |
| Unlockables | ✖ | ✖ |
| Trial/refund | 24-hr refund | 3-day refund (residential and mobile proxies); 14-day money-back guarantee (ISP, datacenter proxies, Site Unblocker, proxy-based APIs) |
| Starts from | $14 for 10 threads | $7 for 1 GB |
Storm Proxies and Smartproxy can be both considered value providers. However, while Smartproxy is very affordable compared to premium proxy sellers, it can’t really compare with Storm Proxies for small, one-off tasks. This stands especially true if you’re doing low-intensity web scraping that requires a lot of traffic, or simply browsing using proxies. However, Smartproxy’s features allow for more use cases while still remaining affordable and user friendly.
We’d normally include a price comparison table here, but it’s impossible when the providers have different pricing models. Unless you get the search proxies, Smartproxy usually charges by traffic, with a few exceptions. Storm Proxies, on the other hand, uses threads, ports, or IPs. By getting a smaller plan, you’ll be mostly sacrificing scalability. Here, it’s important to mention that Smartproxy allows paying as you go with most plans – you can try out the service without commitment before purchasing a plan.
Rotating Residential Proxies
Smartproxy performs better, has a much larger and higher quality IP pool.
Rotating residential proxies are Smartproxy’s main product. Storm Proxies highlights its backconnect proxies which combine datacenter and residential IPs. That’s what we had the chance to test.
Features
| Storm Proxies | Smartproxy | |
| Advertised monthly IPs | 700,000 | 55,000,000 |
| Locations | Global mix | 195+ locations worldwide |
| Filtering |
|
|
| Session control |
|
|
| Parallel requests | Limited by plan | Unlimited |
| Protocols | HTTP(S) | HTTP(S), SOCKS5 |
| Authentication | Whitelisted IPs | Credentials, whitelisted IPs |
| Sub-users | ✖ | ✔ |
Smartproxy beats Storm Proxies in features by a fair margin. You not only get a much bigger IP pool, but also more locations which you can actually target. Storm Proxies isn’t very good for working with hyper-localized content – continent level filtering just isn’t enough. Smartproxy has an upper hand here, since it has much better targeting options.
Storm Proxies also supports fewer authentication methods, and no sub-users. This makes sense considering that the plans target individual hustlers. Smartproxy limits sub-users, unless you buy a specialized and more expensive plan for resellers.
Pool Size
It’s slightly more difficult to give a representative description of the providers’ pool size – we haven’t tested Storm Proxies since 2021, as the service hadn’t had any major upgrades. Smartproxy was tested every year, and the latest tests and benchmarks can be found in Proxy Market Research. However, here’s a comparison table after 1M connection requests.
| Storm Proxies | Smartproxy | |
| Advertised numbers (residential IPs) | 700,000 | 55,000,000 |
| Unique IPs | 84,563* | 799,605 |
* Storm Proxies were tested in 2021. Current numbers might be different.
Smartproxy gave us a lot more unique IP addresses. And even though Storm Proxies claims to refresh the IP pool every week, its proxy network is still pretty small.
Success Rate
We targeted Cloudflare’s US server. It’s an unbiased target that shows how well the proxy server works. Again, Storm Proxies were last tested in 2021, and Smartproxy in 2024.
| Storm Proxies | Smartproxy | Market average | |
| Success rate | 68.11% | 99.68% | 98.34% |
Smartproxy had an amazing success rate, which shows that its proxy server works very well. On the other hand, nearly every third request made using Storm Proxies’ IPs failed.
Here are some results with real targets, using our own web scraping script. We ran 6,000 requests each:
| Storm Proxies | Smartproxy | Other providers | |
| Amazon | 37.35% | 97.98% | 80.45% |
| Booking | 68.12% | 98.08% | 93.45% |
| Craigslist | 62.01% | 95.82% | 91.69% |
| 48.31% | 97.13% | 90.60% | |
| 9.56% | 83.34% | 81.19% | |
| 43.54% | 98.31% | 94.15% |
Smartproxy had few issues accessing the targets. Storm Proxies struggled. It seems that the combination of a small IP pool, unlimited bandwidth, and mediocre proxy server performance doesn’t work well against protected websites.
Response Time
Once again, our target was located in the US.
| Storm Proxies | Smartproxy | Other providers | |
| Response time (avg.) | 2.66 s | 0.54 s | 1.27s |
Smartproxy’s IPs were super fast in the US – more than twice as fast as Storm Proxies. Performance in other locations might differ, depending on where the providers have their load balancing servers.
Load Test
We ran 500 connection requests per second to see how well the proxy servers handle load.
| Storm Proxies | Smartproxy | |
| Success rate | 18.24% | 99.68% |
| Response time (avg.) | 2.8 s | 0.54 s |
Smartproxy had no issues dealing with this much load. We had to limit the number of requests to Storm Proxies due to plan limits (400 requests/s). But even then, it killed the proxy server.
Server Stability
We ran a test to measure stability. The table below shows how much the proxy servers fluctuate during regular use (standard deviation), and how often they were above the instability threshold (3x standard deviation) throughout three weeks of constant monitoring:
| Storm Proxies | Smartproxy | |
| Standard deviation | 6% | 1.02% |
| Stability | 97.73% | 98.48% |
Even though Storm Proxies looks very stable, its success rate during regular use fluctuates by around 6%. That’s a lot. Smartproxy is both more consistent and predictable.
User Experience
Both providers are easy to use. Smartproxy has extra tools for resellers and controlling proxies on a browser.
| Storm Proxies | Smartproxy | |
| Self-service | ✔ | ✔ |
| Setup difficulty | Easy | Easy |
| Dashboard |
|
|
| API | ✖ | ✔ |
| Management tools | ✖ | Browser extension, Proxy Checker |
These are proxy providers for the average Joe, so they’re easy to pick up. There are no complicated doo-dahs and hoops that you’d get with Bright Data. Here, you tick a few boxes, copy a list of gateway addresses, and that’s that.
The dashboards are easy to understand, as well. Smartproxy provides helpful tutorials to get around the dashboard, and Storm Proxies is simple enough as is. The latter won’t give you usage stats, but why bother when your traffic’s not getting metered?
Smartproxy has some more tricks up its sleeve. You can use its extension to quickly set up proxies on the web browser. Or, if you’re managing multiple sub-users, there’s a neat API to save you from going to the dashboard every time. More options, more possibilities.
Customer Support
Slow support and conflicting documentation don’t reflect very well on Storm Proxies, while customer service is Smartproxy’s forte.
| Storm Proxies | Smartproxy | |
| 24/7 | ✖ | ✔ |
| Languages |
|
|
| Live chat | ✖ | ✔ |
| Account manager | ✖ | ✔ |
| Response time | 4 hours | Less than 1 min via chat |
| Documentation | Basic | Extensive |
This is where Storm Proxies hurts. You only get email support, and it’s pretty slow. Our experience is roughly four hours for a reply; Storm Proxies advertises two and a half hours as the average – as if that was something to brag about.
Now Smartproxy – that’s a completely different category. Its support agents answer within several minutes at most, via live chat, all day round. Bigger clients get their own dedicated account manager, too.
Storm Proxies does a better job with documentation. Things are explained well, and most frequent issues covered. However, it lacks configuration instructions, and many articles are pretty outdated: when the website says one thing, and the documentation another, which one should you believe? Now there’s a dilemma you (or at least we) didn’t want to have.
Once again, Smarproxy one-ups its opponent. You’ll find a detailed FAQ, configuration instructions, tech documentation, and even tips to help you use the proxies more efficiently.
Storm Proxies vs Smartproxy: Conclusion
So, which proxy provider should you choose?
Storm Proxies can be a good choice if you need the unlimited traffic to scrape unprotected websites. It isn’t the best provider for sneakers, social media, or tasks that require precise location targeting. Still, if you don’t need much, Storm Proxies can be a fine entry-level provider.
Smartproxy is better at every aspect, save for the price. If paying slightly more isn’t a deal-breaker, go with this provider. You won’t be disappointed.
