Proxy Provider Reviews - Proxyway

ScraperAPI Review

Adam Dubois — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 08:41:33 +0000

ScraperAPI Review

Competent web scraping API for small to medium businesses.

ScraperAPI offers a polished self-service experience and an efficient way to scrape semi-protected websites.

Use the code x to get y discount.

ScraperAPI is a well-known web scraping API. It competes with a host of brands named after dogs, fish, bees, and other creatures. It also features a surprisingly capable no-code platform that bears resemblance to Apify.

The market is pretty crowded nowadays, even if you’re not into animals. So, what sets this provider apart? To find the answer, we’ll give you a comprehensive overview of ScraperAPI’s background, functionality, scraping performance, and user experience. Let’s go!

General Information

Country: US
Founded: 2018
Employees (LinkedIn): 25-50
Services: Web scraping API, no-code scraper
Price segment: Cheap to premium, depending on the website type
Payment methods: Credit card, PayPal
Trial: 5K requests for 7 days, 7-day refund

ScraperAPI is a US-based company that’s been in the market for more than seven years now. Its original and still the main product is an API for scraping the web (which admittedly makes the brand name ingenious).

The provider was founded by Daniel Ni; after three years, it got acquired by saas.group, a hands-off fund that buys companies with revenues between two and ten million dollars. Currently, it employs over 30 people and generates over $7M per year, making ScraperAPI one of the larger APIs outside of market leaders like Oxylabs, Bright Data, and Zyte.

As a business, ScraperAPI seems to target individual developers and small to medium businesses. This is evident looking at the pricing plans, focus on the self-service experience, and credit-based pricing.

Like most established web scraping companies, in late 2025 ScraperAPI was rallying to catch up with the new crop of US-based providers like Firecrawl by introducing crawling, AI parsing, and similar features. As it stands, we see ScraperAPI as a solid and active – though not quite the most trailblazing – choice.

News about ScraperAPI

December 31, 2025

New Research: Internet Sharing SDKs as an Emerging App Monetization Model

We overviewed internet sharing SDKs and their role in app monetization.

By Adam Dubois

December 30, 2025

Google Sues SerpApi

The lawsuit involves avoidance of Google’s anti-bot measures and copyright infringement.

By Adam Dubois

Provider News

December 3, 2025

New Report: Web Scraping APIs in 2025

We benchmarked 11 companies and overviewed AI’s impact on the market.

By Adam Dubois

Web Scraping API

General-purpose unblocking: ✅
Structured data: Website-specific endpoints, LLM-friendly output formats
Discovery: Crawler, website-specific endpoints

At its core, ScraperAPI is a general-purpose unblocker, meant to bypass website protection systems. However, it also includes structured data endpoints for Google and some other, primarily e-commerce websites, as well as a crawler (which was in beta when we wrote this in late 2025).

Integration Methods

Real-time API	curl “http://api.scraperapi.com?api_key=APIKEY&url=https://example.com&render=true&country_code=us”
Batch API	curl -X POST -H “Content-Type: application/json” -d ‘{“apiKey”: “xxxxxx”, “urls”: [ “https://example.com/page1”, “https://example.com/page2” ]}’ “https://async.scraperapi.com/batchjobs”
Proxy	curl -x “http://scraperapi.render=true.country_code=true:[email protected]:8001” -k “https://example.com”
SDK	from scraperapi_sdk import ScraperAPIClient client = ScraperAPIClient(‘APIKEY’) result = client.get(url = ‘https://example.com’, params={‘render’: True, ‘premium’: True})
MCP server	Please scrape this . If you receive a 500 server error, identify the website’s geo-targeting and add the corresponding country_code to overcome geo-restrictions. If errors continue, upgrade the request to use premium proxies by adding premium=true.

ScraperAPI offers plenty of integration options. The main one is probably the real-time API where you send GET requests and receive data over an open connection. To customize requests, you append parameters to the URL; some can also be passed as headers.

In addition, the API supports batch requests, where you send an array of URLs and wait for the job to finish. This method accepts huge inputs – up to 50K per batch. ScraperAPI provides endpoints for checking the status and downloading the output; results are stored for up to 72 hours (with guaranteed storage of 24 hours).

It’s also possible to use the API as a proxy server. This way, you append request parameters to the username.

The fourth method is using ScraperAPI through an SDK. When we wrote this, the provider had libraries in five programming languages (Python, NodeJS, PHP, Ruby, and Java), so most developers should be able to use them.

Finally, ScraperAPI can communicate with large language models through an MCP server. Its main function is to unblock content, leaving data extraction to the model.

API Parameters

Geolocation	US or EU for entry plans ~70 countries for large plans US ZIP code for Amazon
Request customization	Custom headers & cookies Device type (desktop/mobile) Sessions POST/PUT requests
Browsers	JavaScript rendering (manual toggle) Browser actions (click, input, loop, scroll, wait)
Anti-bot	Premium proxies Ultra premium proxies
Other	Request caching (ultra premium proxies)

ScraperAPI offers various options to customize requests. You can choose the device type, send your own headers, and establish sessions.

Geo-targeting is also available, but it’s relatively limited compared to the competition. To specify a country outside of the US, you’ll need to spend at least $300. Even then, the list includes only around 70 locations, with no option for more granular (e.g. city-level) targeting. As such, ScraperAPI isn’t fit for scraping local data, unless the target is Amazon.

The provider allows sending requests through a browser. This is done through a manual toggle. You can give basic instructions, though no more than three or four actions per request. For complex scenarios, it’s better to use tools like unblocking browsers that can be controlled with Playwright and similar libraries.

For protected websites that refuse to open normally, ScraperAPI has two extra bypassing tiers: premium and super premium proxies. They improve the success rate at the expense of your wallet. The ultra premium option caches results automatically, though the freshness window is rather small (10 minutes), and the feature can be disabled.

Website-Specific Endpoints

Availability (Dec ‘25)

Amazon: Search, product, offers
eBay: Search, product
Google: SERP, news, jobs, shopping, maps
Walmart: Search, category, product, reviews
Redfin: Agent details, sale & rent listings, listing search

At the end of 2025, ScraperAPI had over a dozen specialized endpoints for five websites. Compared to the general-purpose API, they provide structured data and accept special parameters. For example, Amazon Search lets you enter a search query directly instead of the full URL, while Product retrieves data based on ASINs.

Output & Delivery

Methods: Open connection, webhook
Data parsing: Available for website-specific endpoints, manual selectors
Output formats: HTML, Markdown, Text, JSON*, CSV*
Screenshots: ✅(PNG)

* structured data endpoints only

ScraperAPI returns results over an open connection or webhook. Alternatives like Oxylabs or Nimble offer direct integration with cloud storage platforms; it’s not available here.

Outside of specialized endpoints, you’ll have to make do with raw output. However, the provider can transform the HTML to LLM-friendly formats, namely Markdown and plain text. A request can return only one format at a time.

One missing feature is the ability to retrieve XHR requests, which are invaluable when scraping internal website APIs.

Because the API supports headless browsing, it can also fetch a screenshot of a page. The output is always a PNG of a full page. You can’t choose, for example, to only get the viewport or a specific selector.

Pricing Plans

Model: Subscription
Format: Credits (up to 75 per request)
Starting price: $49 for 100k credits & 20 concurrency
Upsells: More locations, concurrency, longer retention of statistics
Trial: 5,000 requests for 7 days

ScraperAPI bases its pricing model on subscription plans. The default duration is a month; yearly contracts fetch a 10% discount.

There are only four public pricing plans that range from $49 to $475. Without paying as you go, the entry price is a bit steep. The biggest plan, on the other hand, is too small for enterprise needs, putting ScraperAPI in the range of small to medium businesses.

Aside from unlocking better rates, the plans differ in available features. One is concurrency; the starting rate is 20 threads, which some may find too low. Another differentiator is geo-targeting; the two entry plans let you choose between the US or EU. The third is data retention: it jumps from two weeks to six months once you commit $300 or more.

ScraperAPI uses a system of credits. A credit’s price is very affordable compared to most alternatives; however, each premium option – such as enabling JavaScript rendering, premium proxies, or even targeting specific websites – imposes a multiplier. On one hand, all these toggles can be confusing to master; on the other hand, it’s good to have options: for example, whether to use simpler settings and retry more, or just go for the ultimate configuration.

The cost between two requests can differ by up to 75 times. Even with enterprise plans, ultra-premium domains will never charge under $3/1K requests. As such, ScraperAPI isn’t the most economical option for websites like G2 or Shein, which require much effort to unblock.

General rates	Special websites
Normal request: 1 credit Rendered request: 10 credits Premium proxies: 10 credits Rendered + premium: 25 credits Ultra premium proxies: 30 credits Rendered + ultra: 75 credits	Amazon: 5 credits Google, Bing: 25 credits LinkedIn: 30 credits Cloudflare: 10 credits DataDome: 10 credits PerimeterX: 10 credits

Fortunately, the provider has implemented several safeguards to keep spend manageable. For one, the API playground on the dashboard shows how much you’ll spend for every request. Then, you can force a spend limit per scrape. We’re not sure how the latter option really works, as you configure all the credit-multiplying parameters manually.

Here’s how ScraperAPI compares with other web scraping APIs in its market segment at $500 spend:

	ScraperAPI	Decodo	ScrapingBee	Zenrows
Cheapest CPM*	$0.1	$0.77	$0.08	$0.08
Costliest CPM	$7.13	$0.77	$6.23	$2.08

* price per thousand requests

For those who want to try out the service, ScraperAPI offers a free plan with 5,000 credits. There’s also a generous no-questions-asked refund that you can claim within seven days.

Performance Benchmarks

We last tested ScraperAPI in October-November 2025, for our annual report on web scraping APIs. We scraped 6,000 URLs from each of 15 protected websites, sending two and then ten requests per second.

Note that ScraperAPI limits both concurrent threads and the number of rendered requests you can make. The former depends on your pricing plan; the latter is set at 10 req/s.

Average success rate

Website	2 req/s	10 req/s
Allegro (products)	61.13%	43.18%
Amazon (products)	96.03%	95.56%
ChatGPT (prompt replies)	84.07%	61.60%
G2 (reviews)	99.97%	99.85%
Google (SERP)	99.97%	98.50%
Hyatt (search)	0%	0%
Immobilienscout24 (listings)	91.59%	93.82%
Instagram (profiles)	35.00%	51.16%
Leboncoin (listings)	71.11%	0%
Lowe’s (products)	0%	0%
Nordstrom (categories)	96.70%	97.40%
Shein (products)	22.26%	0%
Walmart (products)	89.67%	99.24%
YouTube (transcripts)	94.88%	95.44%
Zillow (listings)	91.90%	97.26%
Average	68.95%	62.20%

Comparison with other providers

Considering how protected some of these websites are, ScraperAPI did well. It couldn’t unblock Hyatt, Lowe’s, or Shein well – but then again, neither could the majority of our tested scraping APIs. The Instagram performance was a little weak too, at least when downloading the HTML pages of public profiles.

Some of the most popular web scraping targets like Google or Amazon didn’t pose an issue. And at least in our test, ScraperAPI did a stellar job with G2, which is a fickle and problematic target. All in all, the provider came out strong.

Average response time of the fastest run

Website	Successful requests	Failed requests
Allegro (products)	18.79 s	53.02 s
Amazon (products)	4.99 s	2.27 s
G2 (reviews)	2.85 s	56.77 s
Google (SERP)	3.72 s	56.25 s
Hyatt (search)	–	–
Immobilienscout24 (listings)	13.48 s	44.64 s
Instagram (profiles)	30.30 s	50.44 s
Leboncoin (listings)	11.37 s	32.25 s
Lowe’s (products)	–	–
Nordstrom (categories)	3.27 s	8.92 s
Shein (products)	21.13 s	50.53 s
Walmart (products)	10.60 s	11.92 s
YouTube (transcripts)	2.13 s
Zillow (listings)	9.96 s	54.64 s
Average

Comparison with other providers (successful requests)

Judging purely by the response time of successful requests, ScraperAPI looked good compared to its peers. However, it opened popular e-commerce websites like Allegro, Amazon, and Walmart slower than average. It’s also evident the provider retries requests multiple times before ultimately giving up.

Number of consecutive results per hour

What if we combined the success rate and response time metrics to see how many pages we could open per hour, making one request after another? This scenario puts ScraperAPI in the middle of the pack, which is still a decent result.

User Experience

If there’s one thing that ScraperAPI has got down, it’s user experience. Let’s have a look at its dashboard, API playground, and documentation.

Registration

To register with ScraperAPI, you’ll need an email address and a password. The registration wizard will then ask you about your role, use case, and similar basic information, but it’s not necessary to entertain it. Alternatively, you can use a Google or GitHub account.

It’s interesting that ScraperAPI requires ticking a checkbox where you agree to “scrape in compliance with the Terms and Conditions of the website you intend to scrape”. The process of web scraping inherently doesn’t go well with the wishes of webmasters, so it sounds more like a legal cop-out.

Dashboard

ScraperAPI has a lovely dashboard. It lets you buy and manage plans, test the API, get detailed usage statistics, and reach the documentation. The dashboard is available in English only.

The dashboard’s home page gives a quick view of the relevant information: credit usage, the API key, product news, and links to the documentation. There’s also a neat “recently viewed” widget that surfaces and lets you pin the pages you frequently open.

Everything else is behind various tabs in the side navigation. The top half is for interacting with the platform, and the bottom half is for getting help. Everything’s clear and neat.

Perhaps the only thing that’s missing is the separate profile page. You can change the password and get a new API key through a pop-up in the navigation. But, for example, billing details and even the option to delete the account are hidden under Billing.

ScraperAPI has a separate tab for all billing-related information. There, you’ll be able to see your current plan (along with its usage and expiration dates), edit your payment and billing details, fetch invoices, downgrade or upgrade the subscription.

The provider lets you manually upgrade the subscription or set up automatic renewal at 95% or 100% usage. In addition, you can enable paying as you go at a fixed rate, with the option to set spending caps.

All in all, the subscription management here is well thought out. Some of the options can be hard to notice due to their tiny font, but that’s a minor issue.

The dashboard includes a playground for testing API requests before integrating them into your code.

It’s a straightforward affair: step one involves selecting the scraping method (real-time, async, etc.), entering the URL, and enabling optional parameters. Step two generates a code sample in six programming languages.

The playground lets you run requests directly. You get to see the response code, HTML output, and cost per request. This part isn’t as convenient as it could be – it lacks browser preview, and it’s never fun to wade through spaghetti HTML. Another headscratcher is that you can opt to use your own headers, but there’s no input field to actually add them.

ScraperAPI rebuilt its observability tools in mid-2025, giving them big improvements.

The Analytics hub graphs successful and failed requests, as well as concurrent threads. Below it, you get the main metrics, including the total number of requests made, success rate, response time, average concurrency, number of scraped domains, and average credit cost.

For those who want to dig deeper, ScraperAPI provides analytics per domain, which also show how many of the requests required rendering, premium, or ultra premium proxies. There are also per-request error logs showing the status code, internal number of retries, and severity of the error. They’re tagged with IDs, so you can reference the error to ScraperAPI’s support.

The provider lets you select from time frames starting with the last hour and going back to six months. You’re free to specify a custom range, too.

Finally, there’s an option to filter statistics by product type, parameters, domains, and locations. However, it didn’t work when we last tried it in late 2025.

No-Code Platform

If you don’t want – or know how to – use the API, ScraperAPI offers a no-code interface on the dashboard. It goes by the name of DataPipelines and is actually a powerful tool that allows building full-fledged web scraping pipelines.

DataPipelines covers ScraperAPI’s website-specific templates, or you can scrape any target in raw HTML or LLM-friendly formats. Here’s how it works:

Select a data source (for example, Amazon product pages),
enter desired inputs, either as a list, a text file with up to 10K entries, or a webhook,
choose whether to download the results directly, or get a webhook link,
select the scraping frequency: hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, cron job, now, or later,
and opt in for notifications, if relevant.

The platform will then run your data job, letting you know once it’s finished and giving a detailed report on how the job went. Compared to some other options, ScraperAPI’s no-code interface is surprisingly capable for the code-averse.

Scraping with DataPipelines costs more than using the regular API – the request price starts from six credits instead of one.

Documentation

ScraperAPI’s documentation is a treat. It spans cURL and five programming languages, including Python, NodeJS, and Java. You select your preferred language first, and the docs provide examples only in it.

The documentation hub is divided into broad sections: making requests, handling and processing responses, dashboard & billing, credit costs, and general information. Each section expands into smaller units that address individual topics, such as geo-targeting. We never felt lost or lacking information.

However good it already is, the documentation could be further improved by automatically adding our API key to the code samples (Crawlbase does this). In addition, some of the newer features, like integration with n8n or the MCP server, appear as pinned buttons outside the general structure. As such, they feel tacked on.

Hands-On Support

All but enterprise customers receive customer support over email. The former can also get help over Slack.

ScraperAPI has an internal ticketing system that allows referencing to individual issues by their ID. The customer support agents work Monday to Friday 8AM to 8PM CET and strive to respond to new tickets within 24 hours. For a global business with an inherently brittle product, this is rather unimpressive.

We tried creating a support request during the morning in Europe. The reply came within an hour, answering our questions. So, at least during their shift, ScraperAPI’s agents react decently fast.

Conclusion

To wrap things up, we found ScraperAPI to be a competently made – sometimes you could even say, crafted – service. We were particularly fond of the user experience, both when it came to the dashboard and documentation. The API performed well, too, failing to beat only a few challenging targets like Shein.

At the same time, ScraperAPI works best for self-service customers: individual developers, small businesses, or teams with limited data needs. The support coverage is a little limited, especially if you live outside of Europe. And the laddered pricing can get steep once advanced unblocking mechanisms get involved.

But overall, our experience was positive. Unless you’re an enterprise, need precise control over headless browsers, or exclusively scrape protected websites, you’ll likely find ScraperAPI a good choice.

Recommended for:

Small to medium businesses that want to simplify their web scraping operations.

Adam Dubois

Proxy geek and developer.

December 15, 2025

The post ScraperAPI Review appeared first on Proxyway.

Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) Review

Adam Dubois — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 10:30:56 +0000

Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) Review

The best balance between features and price.

Great proxies, affordable pricing plans, and fantastic 24/7 customer support make Decodo an attractive choice for most tasks.

Rating 9.3 / 10

★★★★★ 4.7/5

Try Decodo Residential Proxies for free.

Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) often appears among the top choices in our proxy lists. Historically, it was a stripped down version of the premium providers like Oxylabs and Bright Data – similarly performant but missing a feature here and there.

In 2025, Decodo is able to stand head-to-head with them, while still managing to compete with cheaper services like IPRoyal. This is no small feat – and one of the reasons why the company received our Best Value Provider award, four years in a row.

In this review, I’ll try to show what makes Decodo one of the best proxy services today – and whether you should choose it over the competition. Let’s go!

News about Decodo

April 22, 2025

Smartproxy Rebrands, Becomes Decodo

The new brand draws from hacker culture, represents the next phase in the company’s journey.

By Adam Dubois

Provider News

August 29, 2024

Smartproxy Publishes an E-Commerce Maturity Index

The report investigates 120 stores across 40 countries.

By Adam Dubois

Provider News

June 28, 2024

Smartproxy Adds Shared ISP Proxies, Cuts Mobile Proxy Rates

With a quick one-two, the provider exerts even more pressure on the competition.

By Adam Dubois

Provider News

General Information

Country: Lithuania
Founded: 2018
Employees (LinkedIn): 100-150
Proxy networks: Datacenter, ISP, residential, mobile
Web scrapers: APIs for general unblocking, search engines, e-commerce & social media
Supporting tools: Antidetect browser, proxy checker, Chrome & Firefox extensions
Price segment: Mid-market
Payment methods: Credit card, PayPal, Bitcoin, Apple Pay, Google Pay
Trial: Available for most products

Decodo was founded in 2018 under the name of Smartproxy. It rebranded in April 2025.

The company first resold IP addresses from others. Nowadays, it has a diverse pool that combines proxies from various sources. According to Decodo, they’re carefully vetted, but the provider doesn’t go into much detail about the topic.

Decodo started out in reaction to premium proxy providers like Luminati (now Bright Data) and GeoSurf (now shut down), which were only accessible to business customers and had cumbersome onboarding procedures.

At the time, Decodo’s IPs performed well while costing less than the high-end counterparts. This, along with some targeted marketing efforts, allowed Decodo to quickly sweep up many of the sneakerheads, Instagram managers, and small-time scrapers that were looking for affordable residential addresses.

It also helped that the company heavily invested into customer experience: quality documentation, responsive support, and user-friendly interface. These qualities have remained Decodo’s forte throughout the years.

Today, Decodo can be considered one of the largest proxy providers, probably in the top five by size. Rotating proxies remain the backbone of its service, but there are now more products to choose from, including several web scrapers.

Decodo Proxy Networks

Decodo sells access to all major types of proxy servers:

Residential proxies with global country coverage.
Mobile proxies from real people’s devices around the world.
Datacenter proxies from around 15 countries in shared, dedicated, and pool-based formats.
ISP proxies, which are very similar to the datacenter proxies.

This review covers all four proxy networks. Expand the drop-down to learn more about them:

Residential

Oxylabs Review

Adam Dubois — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 11:53:02 +0000

Oxylabs Review

The best enterprise proxy provider on the market

The sheer scale and performance of Oxylabs’ proxy networks have few equals. Coupled with advanced web scraping tools and professional customer service, it can meet the data collection needs of any business.

Rating 9.3 / 10

★★★★★ 4.6/5

Use the code proxyway35 to get 35% off your first purchase.

Oxylabs is a major proxy provider that competes with services like Bright Data and NetNut for business clients. It’s currently the highest-rated company on this website, and one that received our Best Enterprise Provider award multiple times, most recently in 2025. These two details indicate that we consider it to be a very strong pick – maybe even for smaller projects that require quality infrastructure.

In this review, we’ll go through Oxylabs’ main products to see how they fare against the alternatives. Aside from general information, you’ll find detailed performance benchmarks based on multiple weeks of testing. Let’s go!

News about Oxylabs

October 9, 2025

OxyCon 2025: A Recap

Our virtual impressions from Oxylabs' annual conference on web scraping.

By Adam Dubois

Conferences

August 14, 2025

Oxylabs Invalidates Four of Bright Data’s Patents in Court

Bright Data’s grip on residential proxy technology is slipping.

By Adam Dubois

Provider News

August 6, 2025

Oxylabs Reveals 2025 OxyCon’s Agenda

The conference will feature five presentations and two panel discussions.

By Adam Dubois

Conferences

General Information

Country: Lithuania
Founded: 2015
Employees (LinkedIn): 300-400
Proxy networks: Datacenter, ISP, residential, mobile, high-bandwidth proxies
Other services: scraping APIs (general purpose, SERP, e-comm, video), scraping browser, datasets
Supporting tools: Chrome extension, Android app
Price segment: Premium
Payment methods: Credit card, PayPal, AliPay, Google & Apple Pay, wire transfer
Trial: Available for companies

Oxylabs is a Lithuanian proxy provider running since 2015. It’s one of the biggest companies in the field, offering all kinds of proxy services and data collection tools that can help you extract data from just about any target.

Oxylabs primarily targets business clients. This reflects everywhere: from a prim and tidy website, to a list of certifications on the homepage and a dedicated account manager. Heck, its products even have insurance! – that’s a first for a proxy company. However, that also means you’ll be paying above-average prices.

This orientation toward enterprises means that Oxylabs would like to lock you into a long-term contract and foster the relationship through account managers. But lately, the provider has been opening up its platform, putting increasing emphasis on self-service and cheaper entry plans.

As a company, Oxylabs invests much effort into business ethics. The provider has made a framework for ethical proxy acquisition and that it’s a member of the Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative (you can read our interviews on proxy ethicality and KYC guidelines). In addition, Oxylabs partners with governmental and non-profit organizations through projects like 4beta.

Oxylabs Proxy Networks

Oxylabs offers all four kinds of proxy servers:

Datacenter proxies, which you can get in shared or dedicated lists from up to 188 countries, or in a rotating pool covering ~25 locations.
ISP (static residential) proxies, available in shared or dedicated lists in ~20 countries.
Residential proxies from any country around the world.
Mobile proxies that borrow the resources of real devices.

We cover individual proxy types in the expandable drop-downs below:

Residential

Bright Data Review

Adam Dubois — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 13:06:31 +0000

Bright Data Review

The jack of all trades.

Bright Data has many features and an impressive data collection infrastructure. However, its prices and usage terms are not for everyone.

Rating 9.3 / 10

★★★★★ 4.7/5

Add up to $500 to your account, and Bright Data will double the amount.

When it comes to proxies, Bright Data is one of those default options that you compare others against. It has everything for everyone (minus the shadier use cases), a proven history, and strong brand visibility. The company also offers robust management tools for enterprise clients, constantly reinforcing them with novel features. For this, it received our Most Innovative Provider award in 2023 and Best Platform for Proxies in 2024.

So, is Bright Data a no-brainer? Not necessarily. Despite all it offers, the company can’t be the best in all scenarios. That’s where cheaper or more specialized providers find their opportunity to slip through. And in recent years, the competition has only become tougher, especially in Bright Data’s prized enterprise segment.

Today, we’ll try to identify those cracks and how they can impact your decision. The review includes general information, as well as in-depth performance benchmarks based on weeks of testing. Let’s begin!

News about Bright Data

July 3, 2025

Bright Data Launches a Lineup of Tools for AI

Deep Lookup transforms search queries into datasets, while Browser.AI and MCP server enable AI to roam the internet uninterrupted.

By Adam Dubois

Provider News

January 9, 2025

Bright Data Changes Scraper Prices, Calls Web Unlocker an API

The provider’s products now cost either 50% more or 50% less, depending on which you use.

By Adam Dubois

Provider News

April 26, 2024

Bright Data Equalizes Residential and Mobile Proxy Rates

In essence, the provider’s mobile proxies just got 65% cheaper.

By Adam Dubois

Provider News

General Information

Country: Israel
Founded: 2014
Employees (LinkedIn): 400+
Proxy networks: Datacenter, ISP, residential, mobile
Web scrapers: General-purpose API, specialized APIs for 200+ websites, web scraping IDE, cloud browsers
Other services: Datasets, e-commerce insights, no-code AI tool for building datasets
Supporting tools: Browser extension, open source proxy manager
Price range: Premium
Starting price: $1
Payment methods: Credit card, PayPal, wire transfer, Alipay, Payoneer
Trial: 7 days for companies

Bright Data is an Israeli provider of data collection infrastructure. It’s currently owned by a UK-based equity firm called EMK Capital. The company offers access to every kind of proxy server, multiple data collection APIs, a cloud-based tool for developing scrapers on Bright Data’s infrastructure, and even pre-collected data sets.

Most old-timers remember Bright Data by a different name, Luminati. The company rebranded in early 2021, citing negative connotations associated with the name. (To be fair, Luminati does sound awfully familiar to a certain organization.)

Being a general-purpose provider, Bright Data tries to serve every use case it deems acceptable. The list includes many forms of web scraping for price comparison, SEO, and other purposes – even sneaker copping is on the table. But as far as proxy providers go, Bright Data is considered very strict, and it won’t hesitate to deny questionable uses.

Bright Data was one of the first services to introduce residential proxies – IPs borrowed from computers and phones of real people. At the time when most competitors still sold datacenter IPs, this gave the company a big advantage and allowed it to grow into a leading proxy provider. Despite tightening competition, Bright Data remains one to this day, boasting top universities and Fortune 500 companies among its clients.

Bright Data also cares deeply about the ethical aspect of sourcing and using proxies. It was among the first to openly talk about how it acquires residential IPs. What’s more, it has strict procedures for vetting customers and preventing abuse (you can watch our video interview on ethics with Bright Data’s CEO here). The company even went as far as to reduce its proxy pool by 10% to cut off unethical partners. Despite this, Bright Data has had its share of controversy over the years, such as with Hola VPN or piracy app Mobdro.

For the last few years, Bright Data has been expanding its scope of services. While proxies remain important, they now have to share focus with other tools. Bright Data’s end goal is to become the go-to source for web data, whether you’re a developer or a company with no web scraping experience. Beginning with 2025, Bright Data became laser focused on AI clients and use cases, addressing them above everything else.

Bright Data Proxy Networks

Bright Data offers all four kinds of proxy servers:

Datacenter proxies from cloud hosting providers. They’re available in around 100 locations in shared, dedicated lists, or a pool of IPs.
ISP (static residential) proxies which are hosted in data centers but associated with residential ISPs. They come from around 50 locations in the same formats as the datacenter service.
Residential proxies from every country in the world. One of Bright Data’s unique selling points is dedicated residential IPs – they ensure exclusive access to a group of proxies with the same parameters.
Mobile proxies of the peer-to-peer variety, also available worldwide.

In brief, whatever you may need, Bright Data has it. We explore the provider’s proxies below:

🌎 Pool Size & Coverage

	Residential	Mobile	Datacenter	ISP
Advertised pool	150 million	7 million	1.3 million	1.3 million
Formats	Shared or dedicated pool	Shared pool	Pool with 40k IPs, shared or dedicated list	Pool with 40k IPs, shared or dedicated list
Locations	Global	Global	~100	~50
Filtering	Global, country, state, city, ASN, ZIP, OS	Global, country, state, city, ASN, carrier	Global, country, state, city	Global, country, state, city
Other filters	IPv4 only, IPv4+IPv6, IPv6 only

Bright Data advertises impressively-sized proxy networks, no matter the proxy type. As such, they cover a large chunk of the globe, even when talking about datacenter IPs. Furthermore, you get precise filtering options – in some cases, they include ZIP codes and even operating systems.

The provider’s datacenter and ISP proxies can be shared, dedicated, or accessible as a pool, based on your preferences. Interestingly, it’s possible to get a group of residential IPs with identical parameters for your exclusive use with certain domains.

With Bright Data’s residential proxy network, you can also choose which IP protocol to use. According to the docs, the IPv6-only pool includes roughly 150,000 proxies and has a fallback mechanism for websites that don’t support this protocol.

📋 Features

Connection method: Gateway address
Rotation: Every request, as long as available (customizable with Proxy Manager)
Protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS5 (with UDP)
Concurrency: Unlimited threads & ports
Authentication: Credentials, IP whitelist, API key
Other: Request caching, whitelisting/blacklisting domains, DNS resolution

All four of Bright Data’s proxy types use gateway servers to connect you to proxies. They’re strategically placed in dozens of locations to ensure efficient routing. You can actually specify which load balancer to use, but this is rarely needed in practice.

Bright Data’s proxy networks are stacked with features. The rotation options, while basic using only the dashboard, become highly customizable once you fire up the provider’s proxy manager. There are no concurrency limits, as long as you have enough balance in your account.

Bright Data offers other unique functionality. For example, you can choose to receive cached pages if someone had opened those URLs within several hours. This will return results faster and reduce your expenditure by 5%. Then, you can configure the proxy networks to only open certain domains. And there’s even an option to choose where the DNS gets resolved – at the gateway or the proxy server.

In addition to HTTP, you can connect using the HTTPS and SOCKS5 protocols. Aside from the standard 80 and 443 ports, Bright Data supports any port over 1024 for its datacenter and ISP proxies, and ports 8080, 8443, 5678, 1962, 2000, 4443, 4433, 4430, 4444, and 1969 (their number may change over time) for the other two proxy networks.

⚙️ Integration Examples

Basic request: brd.superproxy.io:33335@brd-customer-ID-zone-NAME:PASSWORD
Using filters: brd.superproxy.io:33335@brd-customer-ID-zone-NAME-country-us-city-sanfrancisco-asn-56386-os-windows:PASSWORD
Establishing a session: brd.superproxy.io:33335@brd-customer-ID-zone-NAME-session-ID:PASSWORD
Using IP whitelisting: For account security purposes only
Selecting a particular datacenter/ISP proxy: brd.superproxy.io:[email protected]:PASSWORD

Bright Data uses one address to access all proxy servers, and two ports: one for HTTP(S) requests and the second for SOCKS traffic.

All modifications, such as location filtering, sessions, and even selection of proxy types, are done by modifying the username. IP whitelisting is mostly meant for securing the account, and it doesn’t come with its own configuration.

If you need to select a specific IP with datacenter and ISP proxy plans, this too can be achieved by appending the IP address as parameter.

💵 Pricing Plans

	Residential	Mobile	Datacenter	ISP
Model	Pay as you go, subscription
Format	Traffic	Traffic	Traffic or IPs	Traffic or IPs
Modifiers	Dedicated IPs
Starting price	$4 for 1 GB	$8 for 1 GB	$0.6 for 1 GB / $14 for 10 shared IPs / $22 for 10 dedicated IPs	$15 for 1 GB / $18 for 10 shared IPs / $35 for 10 dedicated IPs
Trial	7 days for companies

Bright Data offers both subscription and usage-based access. You start off paying as you go, and if your usage reaches $500 or more, you can choose to commit. There are three commitment levels ($500, $1,000, $2,000), each unlocking better rates. The plans aren’t fixed, meaning that you can freely use proxies over the commitment threshold.

The pay-per-IP datacenter and ISP proxy plans have their own scaling levels which fall outside Bright Data’s unified pricing scheme.

Bright Data is definitely a premium provider, meaning that it costs more than most alternatives. This stands especially true for its rotating ISP proxy network, which is a daylight robbery. The residential and datacenter proxies, while expensive, carry a more competitive price tag.

📊 Performance Benchmarks

We last tested Bright Data’s proxy networks in March 2024, for the annual Proxy Market Research.

#1: Pool size & composition

Requests: Global pool – 1.2M, 21 days; country pools – 560k, 14 days; Australia – 140k, 7 days
Residential percentage: IP2Location database, Usage type data point (ISP, ISP/MOB, MOB IPs)

Gateway	Unique IPs	Residential %
Global	885,512	98.59%
US	392,272	99.05%
UK	200,759	99.81%
EU*	266,882	98.79%
Brazil	175,464	97.58%
India	189,973	98.10%
Australia	13,775	99.36%

* Combines Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands.

Comparison with other providers

Bright Data had a large and balanced proxy pool. It should ensure enough proxies in any location, even with precise filtering enabled. There were especially many American IPs.

#2: IP quality (IPQualityScore data)

Global pool: 20,000 checks
US pool: 10,000 checks

	Avg. fraud score	Proxy %	Frequent abuser
Global	44.52	47.52%	1,412
US	71.76	75.81%	1,400

Bright Data’s proxies looked fairly well: better in the Global pool, and somewhat poorer when checking only US-based IPs. This shows that the proxy network is being used, but it’s not as abused as something like Infatica or IPRoyal.

#3: Infrastructure performance

Parameters: Same as the pool test
Target: Nearest server of a global CDN (<10 KB)
Our server locations: DE for Global & European pools, US for American & Brazil pools, Singapore for Indian & Australian pools

Gateway	Avg. success rate	Avg. response time
Global	98.96%	1.12 s
US	99.14%	1.00 s
UK	99.01%	0.75 s
EU	99.12%	0.80 s
Brazil	99.51%	1.04 s
India	98.69%	1.76 s
Australia	99.28%	1.73 s

Comparison with other providers

Bright Data’s infrastructure performed very well throughout the testing period. The success rate hovered around 99% in all locations, and the average response time was fast, as well.

On the other hand, Bright Data’s results have changed little in two years, while major competitors have been making significant improvements. There’s nothing exceptional about them anymore.

#4: Performance with popular targets

Requests: ~2,600 for each target
Script: Custom non-headless Python scraper; social media – Puppeteer Extra Stealth
Proxy location: US
Our server location: US

Website	Avg. success rate	Avg. response time
Amazon	96.75%	4.51 s
Google	Blocked
Instagram	72.50%	12.56 s
Total	84.63%	8.54 s

Bright Data displayed strong results with Amazon but for some reason struggled with the social media network. Unfortunately, we couldn’t test them with Google – the provider blocks this target, prompting customers to use SERP API instead.

#1: Pool size & composition

Requests: 280k, 14 days; Australia – 140k, 7 days
Mobile percentage: IP2Location database, Usage type data point (ISP/MOB, MOB IPs)

Gateway	Unique IPs	Mobile %
Global	102,671	98.21%
US	20,942	96.74%
UK	3,319	99.61%
EU*	24,516	98.23%
Brazil	4,962	97.74%
India	43,882	99.65%
Australia	546	94.51%

* Combines Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands.

To our surprise, Bright Data’s mobile proxy pool wasn’t all that large. Sure, 43,000 IPs in India are a lot; but we only found around 3,000 UK proxies, and fewer than 1,000 Australian addresses. Most competitors could muster more, even after excluding their not-quite-mobile IPs from the results.

#2: Infrastructure performance

Parameters: Same as the pool test
Target: Nearest server of a global CDN (<10 KB)
Our server locations: DE for Global & European pools, US for American & Brazil pools, Singapore for Indian & Australian pools

Gateway	Avg. success rate	Avg. response time
Global	98.21%	1.97 s
US	95.38%	1.47 s
UK	93.21%	1.36 s
EU	97.44%	1.28 s
Brazil	90.63%	2.27 s
India	97.68%	2.74 s
Australia	97.70%	2.06 s

Bright Data’s infrastructure performance was solid but not outstanding. Over 98% successful requests is about the standard for mobile IPs. The response time was on the slower end comparing to top alternatives (Oxylabs, Decodo, and SOAX).

#3: Performance with popular targets

Requests: ~2,600 for each target
Script: Custom non-headless Python scraper; social media – Puppeteer Extra Stealth
Proxy location: US
Our server location: US

Website	Avg. success rate	Avg. response time
Amazon	71.01%	7.15 s
Google	Blocked
Social Media	40.19%	17.58 s
Total	55.60%	12.37 s

The performance was barely acceptable, especially with the social media network: slow and failing more than succeeding. This is uncharacteristic of Bright Data and mobile proxies in general, but we saw similar issues last year.

We tested Bright Data’s 50,000 shared proxies in the US.

#1: Infrastructure performance (rotating proxies)

Requests: 50,000
Proxy location: US
Target: Nearest server of a global CDN (<10 KB)
Our computer’s location: US

Avg. success rate	Avg. response time
99.96%	0.26 s

The shared proxies worked effectively without fail, and the vast majority of our requests reached the target. They werely also extremely fast and managed to outrun most competitors.

#2: Download speed

IPs tested: 10
Target: Hetzner’s 100MB Ashburn benchmark

Avg. without proxies	Avg. download speed	Slowest IP
32.56 MB/s	9.72 MB/s	0.98 MB/s

The shared proxy servers were fast enough for most tasks including streaming, even taking into account the slowest IP’s throughput.

#3: Performance with popular targets

Requests: ~2,600 per target
Script: Custom non-headless Python scraper
Proxy location: US
Our server location: US

	Avg. success rate	Avg. response time
Amazon	5.83%	2.46 s
Google	Blocked
Homedepot	85.14%	0.64 s
Total	45.49%	1.55 s

Bright Data’s proxies kept their excellent speed, but they really struggled with Amazon – only one in 20 requests succeeded. For context, the second worst provider in our benchmark that year, NetNut, completed every third request successfully.

As with other proxy types, Google is blocked by default.

How to Use Bright Data

Bright Data has a complex but rich ecosystem of management tools – let’s have a look at them.

Registration

You can register with Bright Data by entering your first and last name, work email, and company size. If you have particularly large or custom needs, you can schedule a call. The login options include the credentials you’ve created, as well as Google and Okta SSO.

KYC & Usage Policies

Bright Data is known to be strict about compliance, especially if you use its peer-to-peer proxy networks.

The first step for all customers is to identify themselves with their preferred payment method. Bright Data will perform an authorization charge and add $5 to your account.

Then, there’s the KYC procedure. Bright Data has simplified the process – it now allows reaching over 200 websites via residential proxies without undergoing the full KYC. This severely limits their functionality, though: you have to install a certificate, folllow robots.txt, send only GET requests, and obey the provider’s imposed rate limits.

To get full access, you’ll be asked to present your personal details, add some money to the account, and wait up to three business days for verification.

In addition to that, freelancers will have to hop on a video call. Bright Data will only approve business related projects, and even then, scraping behind a login or account creation will be forbidden.

Dashboard

Bright Data’s dashboard will let you do everything from adding money to your account and getting a plan to setting up proxies, viewing usage statistics, and contacting support.

The dashboard used to be full of options and pretty overbearing. After several revamps, Bright Data simplified it to several sections for product categories, another for billing, and one more for account controls. The complexity is still there, but most of it is tucked away behind several levels of navigation.

The dashboard is available in six languages, including Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese.

Another unconventional decision is that Bright Data has no separate plans for each product. Instead, a plan applies to all services depending on how much money you commit. You can change the plan in the Billing section.

But that’s not all. The Billing section provides detailed information about your subscription and money use. You can find your current balance, active plan, invoices, and configure payment methods. The provider also includes a visual cost explorer and, in a nice gesture for accountants, allows specifying invoice recipients.

You can pay for each service manually or add money to Bright Data’s wallet and let the system deduct the required funds automatically.

Unlike most proxy providers, Bright Data uses a custom system for proxies called Zones. A zone works like a plan. It’s possible create multiple zones for each proxy type and even have separate zones with identical configurations. You can assign spending limits (based on traffic or money) for each zone, as well as track your expenditure throughout the month.

As an enterprise-first provider, Bright Data takes access management seriously. You can give different access levels to your team based on their roles (administrator, accountant, devops, etc.), set up 2-factor authentication, see a thorough event log, and receive automated notifications related to subscription and proxy use.

To do anything with proxies on Bright Data’s platform, you first have to create a zone. This involves selecting a proxy type and adding additional permissions, if any. The configuration wizard will show an estimated cost based on your choices. The final step is to name the zone and confirm its creation.

For example, suppose I wanted rotating residential proxies for a small project. I’d choose the Residential zone. Under Permissions, country targeting would be enough for me; otherwise, I could enable states, cities, ASNs, and ZIP codes as extras. Then, I’d choose shared IPs, as I don’t need them for my exclusive use. At last, I’d press Add Zone.

After creating a zone, you’ll want to integrate the proxies. Each zone includes a widget with integration pre-sets and code samples in multiple programming languages. The widget doesn’t cover elaborate scenarios; in those cases, you’ll need to consult with Bright Data’s documentation.

The provider gives you more ways to integrate proxies, namely using the browser extension or its open source proxy manager. The latter is especially useful, as it provides much more detailed usage logs, enables better rotation settings, and has the ability to route traffic through more advanced (and expensive) proxy networks if a request fails otherwise.

Bright Data has put a lot of effort into statistics, with several ways to reach them.

A quick toggle in the Zones page. It gives you a visual overview of your bandwidth and request use.
A tab with usage statistics per proxy network and a customizable graph.
Usage statistics and graphs for each zone in its settings.

Each way provides flexible filtering options. You can a time period ranging anywhere between one hour to two years. The metrics include not only bandwidth expenditure but also number of requests, and in some cases error rate.

If you use Proxy Manager, it’s possible to display its statistics on the dashboard, as well. Bright Data even provides a way to separate API and Proxy Manager traffic in some of the graphs.

One more useful feature is network status. It shows the uptime of each service in real time and can notify you via email if something goes down.

Public API

Bright Data offers an API for managing the proxy servers programmatically. It’s the most comprehensive and granular API I’ve seen in this industry, and you might have to get a degree to make full use of it.

Documentation

With such a complex service, Bright Data needs to have appropriate documentation to make sense of it. And it does. You’ll find answers and instructions both in text and video formats.

Perhaps your first resource should be Bright Data’s documentation hub. It answers all the basic questions about using the service, and then some. Then, there are webinars – they cover narrower concerns, such as reCAPTCHA avoidance and browser automation. Finally, there are Bright Data’s tutorials videos, though they look pretty much outdated and abandoned in comparison.

Hands-On Support

If, by any chance, you won’t find your answer – or simply get lost looking for one – there’s the hands-on support.

Bright Data offers a ticket system on the dashboard. Customers that commit to a plan also get an account manager. Else, you can contact the provider using WhatsApp, Telegram, and even a phone.

We found the answering time to be fast: we sent multiple email messages throughout the day, and a reply came in 14 minutes on average. Communication with account managers is even faster, but they don’t work round the clock.

However, the customer service isn’t equal for all. Bright Data has segmented and commercialized its functionality by introducing tiered support packages. The base one doesn’t even get 24/7 replies, unless serious technical issues occur.

Conclusion

Bright Data calls itself world’s #1 web data platform, and testing it gave us compelling reasons to believe the claim.

The proxy networks we’ve tried were excellent: fast, stable, and large. They come full of features, and Bright Data makes sure to provide the tools to make best use of them. Pound for pound, there are few providers that can compare.

However, the privilege comes at a cost. Some may be put off by how technically complex Bright Data is; others may find its compliance process too invasive; but most likely, the main showstopper – if any – will be the price. It’s hard to find a provider that’s more expensive.

But if you don’t find price an issue, Bright Data really is one of the best options you can get.

Bright Data Alternatives

Rating 9.3 / 10

★★★★★ 4.7/5

Bright Data’s closest competitor in the premium segment. It offers all the main proxy types and multiple APIs for web scraping, coupled with personalized customer service.

Read the review

Rating 9.3 / 10

★★★★★ 4.7/5

Decodo is a great choice if you want to save some money on rotating proxies. It offers multiple IP types, better prices, and is easier to use in exchange for fewer features.

Read the review

Rating 9.0 / 10

★★★★★ 4.5/5

SOAX can be a good option if you need precise locations but don’t want to pay Bright Data’s premium. It supports region, city, and ASN targeting out of the box.

Read the review

Want more? View the full list of the Bright Data alternatives.

Recommended for:

Enterprise customers or those who need advanced features.

Add up to $500 to your account and get double the amount.

Rating 9.3 / 10

★★★★★ 4.5/5

Add up to $500 to your account and get double the amount.

Adam Dubois

Proxy geek and developer.

January 6, 2026

The post Bright Data Review appeared first on Proxyway.

NetNut Review

Chris Becker — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 09:09:01 +0000

NetNut Review

Rotating proxies for high-volume use.

NetNut controls large proxy networks that can be very fast and perform decently. But they work best for experienced users or those who want proxies at scale.

Rating 9.0 / 10

★★★★★ 4.5/5

Use the code PWYNTNT to get a 30% discount.

NetNut is a premium provider of rotating proxy servers. It’s less popular than something like Smartproxy or Bright Data but still a well-known option among businesses. NetNut’s forte used to be ISP proxies, though nowadays it offers all major IP types.

In this review, I’ll take a close look at NetNut’s proxy services. We’ll see how it compares with other premium providers and whether NetNut really controls the fastest residential proxy network, as it likes to claim.

Here we go.

News about NetNut

February 27, 2025

NetNut Cuts Residential Proxy Prices by 50%

The provider's plans keep the same price but offer double the traffic.

By Adam Dubois

Provider News

August 27, 2024

NetNut Revises Static Residential Proxy Pricing

More accessible plans, cheaper rates, still no pay-as-you-go.

By Adam Dubois

Provider News

June 28, 2024

NetNut Decreases Residential & Mobile Proxy Prices

Cheaper entry plans, up to 60% better rates, still no pay-as-you-go.

By Adam Dubois

Provider News

General Information

Country: Israel
Founded: 2017
Employees (LinkedIn): 100-150
Proxy networks: Datacenter, ISP, residential, mobile
Other services: scraper APIs (general unblocking, SERP, B2B), professional datasets
Supporting tools: –
Price segment: Premium
Payment methods: PayPal, credit card
Trial: Available for companies

NetNut is an Israeli proxy provider established in 2017. It’s one of the larger proxy vendors, probably making it into top five by size. It’s also one of the few public companies in this market, so much information about it is public.

NetNut belongs to Alarum, which used to provide cybersec and privacy services but now focuses exclusively on web data. The main products are its rotating proxy networks. There are also several web scraping APIs and professional datasets you can try.

NetNut can safely be considered a premium provider with an eye to businesses with big needs. This reflects throughout the whole service: from customer support to pricing. The entry plans start high and you’ll get better experience – together with much better rates – paying $500 and up.

Aside from businesses, resellers are another focus. NetNut tries to lure them in with dedicated pools, elaborate usage statistics, and functionality like a proxy management API and sub-users.

Historically, ISP proxies have been NetNut’s highlight. The provider sources them via DiviNetworks, where the company pays internet service providers for sharing their unused bandwidth. This carries extra benefits compared to other ISP proxy services, namely that the IPs have real browsing history, and you might even use them in parallel with residential users.

The other networks came later, though residential proxies can be considered NetNut’s main product by now. The company isn’t open about how it sources end-user based addresses. In any case, they balance out the service and make NetNut a viable choice for most web scraping professionals.

NetNut Proxy Networks

NetNut offers access to all major types of proxy servers:

Residential proxies from various countries around the world.
Mobile proxies borrowing the resources of mobile phones and other devices on carrier networks.
Datacenter proxies in a rotating pool format.
ISP (static residential) proxies that also connect you to a large pool of IPs.

We cover individual proxy types in the expandable drop-downs below:

Residential

SOAX Review

Adam Dubois — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 13:38:02 +0000

SOAX Review

A flexible and feature-rich proxy provider.

With pricing plans that unlock all products, advanced proxy filters, and modern protocol support, SOAX’s platform puts you in control.

Rating 9.0 / 10

★★★★★ 4.5/5

Use the code PROXYWAY35% to get a 35% discount.

I remember first testing SOAX in 2021. Still a rookie provider, it already looked promising: the proxies rarely failed, offered city & ASN targeting out of the box, and had decent management tools. Though painfully slow and still unfinished, the overall service was surprisingly good.

SOAX is all grown up now. It’s become our Contender of the Year several times, most recently in 2025, proving that it can compete with major players like Decodo or Bright Data.

Lately, SOAX has been going through changes. Most notably, it introduced platform-based pricing that enables all products with one subscription. There’s also a new dashboard to play around with.

We’re going to explore these features and see how the company performs compared to the broader market. Let’s go!

News about SOAX

May 27, 2025

SOAX Acquires Rampage Proxies

The acquisition is set to expand and improve SOAX’s proxy server infrastructure.

By Adam Dubois

Provider News

May 23, 2025

SOAX Acquires ProxyWow

The acquisition will strengthen SOAX’s ISP proxy network.

By Adam Dubois

Provider News

May 14, 2025

SOAX (Re)Launches Web Unblocker

The web scraping API now performs better and supports more formats.

By Adam Dubois

Provider News

General Information

Country: UK
Founded: 2020
Employees (LinkedIn): 50-100
Proxy networks: Datacenter, residential, mobile
Web scrapers: General purpose, SERP, e-commerce APIs
Supporting tools: Proxy checker
Price segment: Mid-market
Starting price: $4 (all products)
Payment methods: Credit card, PayPal, cryptocurrencies
Trial: $1.99 to access all products

SOAX is a UK-registered company run by an international staff. Alongside proxy networks, the provider also sells web scraping APIs for various website groups.

SOAX started off as a mid-range provider, positioning itself in-between penny-pinching services with limited features like PacketStream and enterprise-facing behemoths, such as Bright Data or Oxylabs. After a foray into the premium territory, it’s returned to its original hunting grounds.

SOAX doesn’t disclose any concrete sources for its proxies, which is concerning. But we do know that it offers an SDK for developers to monetize their apps, such as free VPNs. The provider also supplies several bigger white labels with proxy servers.

Otherwise, SOAX conveys the impression of a solid company. It has ethical guidelines, partners up with The World Ethical Data Forum, and is striving for ISO and SOC certifications. (You can read or watch our interview on ethics with Stepan, SOAX’s CEO.) You can find its reviews on most review platforms like TrustPilot, G2, or Capterra, and employees on LinkedIn.

For a while, it looked like SOAX had gotten into a lull. But in the first half of 2025, the company made notable infrastructure improvements and announced acquisitions of two smaller proxy providers, ProxyWow and Rampage Proxies.

SOAX Proxy Networks

SOAX offers three types of proxy servers:

Residential proxies covering all countries in the world.
Mobile proxies that come from real user devices.
Datacenter proxies sold as a rotating pool.

The provider also used to sell a pool of US-based ISP proxies. This product was discontinued in late 2025.

We cover the following products. You can learn more about them by expanding the drop-downs:

Residential

Zyte Review

Adam Dubois — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 09:43:44 +0000

Zyte Review

Sophisticated API from the web scraping specialists.

Zyte wraps website unblocking, data parsing, and browser management into one all-encompassing tool.

Rating 8.8 / 10

★★★★★ 4.4/5

Zyte is a well-known name within web scraping circles, especially if you need e-commerce data. It used to offer a range of products which are now being consolidated into one API. Powered by dynamic pricing, machine learning, and over 100 engineers, the API is envisioned to become the only tool necessary for extracting data off the web.

In this review, we’ll take a closer look at Zyte API – what it can accomplish, how well, and whether you should use it in place of your own stack or one of the competing web scraping tools.

News about Zyte

November 17, 2025

Zyte Extract Summit 2025 (Dublin): A Recap

Our virtual impressions from the second edition of Zyte’s annual web scraping conference.

By Adam Dubois

Conferences

October 2, 2025

Zyte Extract Summit 2025 (Austin): A Recap

Our virtual impressions from the first edition of Zyte’s annual web scraping conference.

By Adam Dubois

Conferences

July 23, 2025

Kill Your Product – Why Sacrificing Your Cash Cow Can Be the Path to Growth

By Shane Evans, CEO of Zyte

By Shane Evans

Opinion Pieces

General Information

Country	Ireland
Founded	2007
Web scrapers	General-purpose API with data parsing functionality
Other services	Datasets
Price range	Cheap-premium
Starting price	$1
Payment methods	Credit card
Trial	$5 credit

Zyte is an Irish web scraping company with over 200 employees around the world. It offers web scraping products and data services, mostly focusing on the e-commerce vertical.

Launched in 2007, Zyte can be considered one of the oldest running players in the field. It used to be known as ScrapingHub until a rebrand in early 2021. The company targets a wide range of customers with an emphasis on developers. It also has a strong knowledge of the legal challenges surrounding data collection, which is reflected in some of its policies.

Commercial products aside, Zyte maintains popular open source tools, such as the data collection framework Scrapy, together with several sandboxes for practicing web scraping skills. In addition, it runs one of the biggest annual conferences on web scraping called Extract Summit.

Currently, Zyte’s focus is on perfecting its web scraping API. In 2023, it deprecated the long-running Crawlera (Smart Proxy Manager) and integrated the AI parsing capabilities of another product called Automatic Extraction.

All in all, Zyte can be considered a reputable and established web data company able to rival industry giants like Bright Data and Oxylabs in its focus areas.

Zyte API

Zyte API remains the company’s main product. Though the tool primarily targets developers, it also supports a no-code interface. An early implementation is available for use with e-commerce websites.

Integration

Multiple integration methods available.

API: ✅ (real-time)

Proxy: ✅

No code: ✅

Other: Python library, Scrapy plugin

Zyte’s tool primarily integrates as an HTTP API. There’s an endpoint where you POST the API key, URLs you want to scrape, and optional parameters like JavaScript rendering or custom headers. The API receives the request, scrapes the target, and returns the result.

Zyte has an API playground in the dashboard that automatically generates code snippets based on your chosen parameters. For advanced usage, it’s better to use the provider’s documentation.

Zyte has made a plug-in for Scrapy and an asyncio-based Python library as alternative integration methods. Scrapy seems to be the preferred option, considering how well it’s documented (and Zyte’s involvement in the project).

There’s also proxy-like integration that resembles the discontinued Smart Proxy Manager. The current version omits some features like browser rendering, data parsing, and ability to create sessions.

Finally, Zyte is experimenting with a no-code interface on the dashboard. It requires subscribing to a second product, Scrapy Cloud, and is able to scrape e-commerce product pages. You can select the number of requests, scraping strategy (HTTP library or headless), and geolocation. This method automatically crawls the website from the URL you provide.

The interface looks like an interesting foray into no-code scraping. Zyte will surely add new templates with time, and it’s made a smart decision to expose the scraper’s underlying code to engineers who want more customization. However, there’s room for improvements: I don’t really like the requirement for a second subscription, that there’s no easy way to schedule requests or specify which particular pages to scrape (save from one seed URL).

Features

A customizable tool that automates away most proxy management.

Targets: Universal

Locations: 150+ with automatic selection
JavaScript rendering: ✅ (with browser interactions)

Concurrency: 500 req/minute

Output formats: HTML, PNG, JSON
Customization: Headers, cookies, device type, sessions

Zyte API is a general-purpose scraper, meaning it will attempt to deliver any page you throw its way. This separates it from specialized tools like SERP APIs that focus on one category of websites.

Unlike the now-deprecated Smart Proxy Manager, this API fully manages proxy servers on your behalf. It automatically selects the necessary proxy type and even location based on the page if you don’t override the setting.

The API chooses request headers, device type, and other basic parameters by itself. However, you’re free to provide custom headers, pass on cookies, and create sessions for targets that require it.

In addition, Zyte API has the ability to render a page like a browser. At its basicmost, the feature works like a toggle. But Zyte goes a step further: it exposes interaction parameters like clicking on elements, waiting, and scrolling. One request gets 60 seconds of execution time. In addition, enterprise clients get access to a cloud-hosted Visual Studio Code environment to write full automation scripts.

Zyte limits the number of requests to 500 per minute. It may be possible to increase this threshold upon request.

Structured Data

Three types of structured data from any website.

Data parsing: ✅

Supported websites: AI parser for e-commerce, news & job listings

Zyte API can return structured data. Unlike similar tools that offer parsers for individual targets, Zyte’s AI parser is for all pages with a particular data type. In late 2023, you could extract product pages, news articles, and job postings.

You invoke the feature by including a parameter with the expected data type. Zyte’s machine learning engine processes the page and attempts to return structured data points based on the provider’s schema.

It’s a great approach if you need to process a wide range of websites, but it may not be as accurate as tailor-made parsers.

Pricing Plans

Dynamic pricing based on commitment.

Model: Subscription, pay as you go

Format: Successful requests
Upsells: Browser scripting

Self-service: ✅
Starting price: $1
Trial: $5 credits

Zyte API uses an interesting pricing model that calculates the request price dynamically based on multiple factors. It considers website difficulty, the use of residential proxies, headless browsers, data extraction, and compute time for browser actions.

You can influence the price by toggling JavaScript rendering, choosing whether to parse the URL, and configuring page interactions. But some factors will always remain outside your control. For example, the website may get harder to scrape for Zyte, which will increase the rate. In the same vein, it can also become cheaper.

The description can make Zyte’s pricing sound confusing and unpredictable. In some measure, it is. To bring more clarity, the provider has built a dynamic pricing calculator. It lets you enter any domain, tick a few feature toggles, and then it spits out the provisional price.

Zyte’s pricing is also dynamic in terms of plans. You can use the API freely for up to $25 per month and then pay once the billing period ends. Any more than that, and you’ll have to set a spending limit. This requires pre-paying half the limit’s amount at the beginning of the month. The more you choose, the bigger the volume discount you get, up to 70%. This effectively works as a monthly subscription.

Zyte gives $5 of free credit for all customers. If you’re scraping simple websites with no rendering, this translates to thousands of scrapes.

In general, Zyte’s model can be extremely price-efficient for simple websites, but the cost soars once you start enabling the premium features. Here’s an example. If you committed $100. at the end of 2023 this would have given you 715,000 requests to Amazon or 83,000 Nordstrom page scrapes. The latter target has tough protection and requires JavaScript.

Performance Benchmarks

Great results with all tested websites.

We last tested Zyte API in October 2023 for our proxy API research.

We made 1,800 requests to each of seven websites behind tough anti-bot systems like DataDome and Shape.

	Avg. success rate	Avg. response time
Amazon	95.64%	3.90 s
Google	100%	2.16 s
Photo-focused social media network (JS rendered)	99.61%	19.78 s
Kohls (Akamai, JS rendered)	99.10%	29.44 s
Nordstrom (Shape, JS rendered)	99.38%	20.42 s
Petco (DataDome, Cloudflare)	94.68%	3.49 s
Walmart (PerimeterX, ThreatMetrix)	96.53%	2.69 s
Overall	97.82%	11.70 s

Zyte API had excellent results with all targets: the success rate exceeded 95%, and it returned results in less than 30 seconds, even on websites that required rendering JavaScript.

In a broader context, Zyte’s performance beat all similar tools from major competitors.

How to Use Zyte

Zyte provides a mature platform with extensive documentation for managing its services. However, interactions can sometimes feel clunky, and the customer support’s availability leaves things to be desired.

Registration

To register with Zyte, you’ll need to enter your first and last name, email address, and password. Alternatively, it’s possible to sign up using Google or GitHub accounts.

Dashboard

Zyte has a dashboard for interacting with its two products: Zyte API and Scrapy Cloud. Each is contained in a separate section. The API part lets you view usage statistics, use the API playground and pricing calculator, and manage your key.

Furthermore, there’s a section for managing account and organization settings, as well as billing. It’s interesting that one account can be associated with multiple organizations, with their own product subscriptions and members. It goes the other way around, too – an organization can host several members with roles. The two roles are a regular member and an owner that can manage the billing details.

Subscription Management

To start using Zyte API, you’ll need to enter a payment method, which is invariably a credit card. Zyte will charge $1 to confirm the card, promptly refund it, and you’ll be able to start using the product.

Zyte supports self-service, meaning that no interactions with people are necessary. There is no wallet functionality; so even though Zyte API can function based on a pay-as-you-go model, you’ll still be paying at a monthly cadence.

Zyte allows viewing your billing history and ongoing expenditure on the dashboard. This information isn’t glanceable – rather, it’s hidden behind several navigation layers. Enterprise clients will also see their signed contracts.

Usage Tracking

Zyte provides detailed usage statistics on the dashboard. You can filter the data based on various metrics: website (all or up to five individual websites), features (such as headless and non-headless requests), request status, parsing type, and even request cost.

The output will be displayed in a graph that can be further filtered by price, request count, or response time. There’s also a table that shows results on an individual request level, including the full URL, response time, and request ID for troubleshooting.

However, the usage tracking isn’t perfect: some data points can be slow to load, and Zyte displays information no older than the last month or the current billing period. In addition, you can’t export the table for easier processing.

All in all, there’s a lot of granularity, but making full use of it isn’t always easy.

For more general information about infrastructure performance, Zyte has a page with uptime statistics.

Documentation

Zyte has detailed documentation for using Zyte API. It provides not only API reference information but also a detailed account of the main features, migration instructions from similar tools, and a step-by-step usage tutorial. You should be able to find everything you need to start scraping with the API.

Documentation aside, there’s also a knowledge base that the provider calls the Support Center. It’s evidently outdated – you’ll find nothing on Zyte API but will be able to read about products that are no longer available.

Finally, you can watch one of Zyte’s many webinars. They cover topics like legal compliance, data maturity, and the use of Zyte API in various scenarios.

Hands-On Support

Zyte’s support system uses tickets that you can submit via the dashboard. The provider gives an SLA of one hour – or eight hours on weekends. Enterprise customers get a special treatment.

This isn’t ideal – not only is the weekend support slow, but it’s also available only via an asynchronous contact method. In other words, you get no 24/7 support or live chat like with many proxy service providers.

That said, another way to get help is by creating a thread on Zyte’s Support Center. But here, receiving a timely response is even harder. One user whose access was removed failed to receive help in four days (!), pointing out that it becomes impossible to use the ticketing system after your subscription ends. The support experience – at least for the person whose woes we’re recounting – was really bad.

Conclusion

Zyte’s API is a powerful tool that works impressively well and offers a rich selection of features. Some, like AI parsing and browser actions, are hard to find in competing offerings.

Zyte’s dynamic pricing is currently another strong point if you’re scraping JavaScript-independent websites. Even then, it remains palatable, though the rates rise ten or more times. That said, expenses here can be harder to estimate than some companies would like.

From the user experience point of view, Zyte treats developers well, especially if you’re already invested in its Scrapy ecosystem. But the user experience can be clunky at times and the customer support was downright exasperating if you need urgent help during weekends or fall outside of the ticketing system.

I’m curious to see how the no-code interface will pan out. It holds great promise for less technically-minded users while still giving engineers access to the underlying code. For now, the implementation works but hasn’t been fleshed out yet.

In summary, I enjoyed using Zyte API and consider it to be a strong choice for anyone looking to simplify their web scraping operations.

Zyte Alternatives

Rating 9.3 / 10

★★★★★ 4.7/5

Oxylabs has several web scrapers with data parsing capabilities. They’re scalable, performance, and can structure many e-commerce stores automatically.

Read the review

Rating 9.1 / 10

★★★★★ 4.5/5

Bright Data offers excellent general-purpose and search engine scrapers that integrate as proxies. It also has an IDE where you can built a crawler by yourself.

Read the review

Rating 8.6 / 10

★★★★★ 4.3/5

ScraperAPI’s product is very cheap for simple websites and has developer-friendly documentation that covers multiple programming languages.

Review coming soon

Recommended for:

Engineers that want to simplify their web scraping operations.

Rating 8.8 / 10

★★★★★ 4.4/5

Adam Dubois

Proxy geek and developer.

February 17, 2025

The post Zyte Review appeared first on Proxyway.

Webshare Review

Adam Dubois — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 09:04:18 +0000

Webshare Review

A flexible provider of server-based proxies.

Easy to pick up, affordable, and extremely powerful for those who need it, Webshare is one of the best options for datacenter and ISP proxy servers.

Rating 8.8 / 10

★★★★★ 4.4/5

Webshare is the go-to choice for nearly 60,000 paying users and even Fortune 500 companies. It’s probably safe to say the provider knows what it’s doing.

What distinguishes it from other proxy companies? 10 free proxies for every registered user would be the obvious answer. Other than that, Webshare is cheap (though not always) and extremely customizable, with powerful self-service features.

But can this provider do what you need? Let’s find out!

News about Webshare

June 21, 2023

Webshare Cuts Prices, Increases Residential Proxy Network, Adds Enterprise plan

Three provider’s products get up to 70% cheaper, and the residential pool reaches 30 million IPs.

By Adam Dubois

Provider News

General Information

Country: United States
Founded: 2018
Employees (LinkedIn): 25-50
Proxy networks: Datacenter, ISP, residential
Supporting tools: Chrome extension
Price segment: Entry/mid-market
Payment methods: Credit card, Google Pay, Apple Pay
Trial: Free plan with 10 datacenter IPs

Webshare is a Silicon Valley-based proxy provider founded in 2018 by Utku Zihnioglu. In late 2022, it was acquired by Oxylabs, a major name in the field. The deal didn’t impact the way Webshare operates, and it still remains a separate entity.

Webshare began by selling datacenter proxies. To this day, they remain the driving force behind the service. According to our annual survey, ISP proxies have also grown to play a significant role in the company’s line-up.

Webshare positions itself as an affordable proxy vendor – especially if you’re looking for many server-based IPs. As such, it primarily targets entry to mid-level clients, drawing them in with the free plan. The provider manages datacenter proxies in-house and likely uses Oxylabs’ infrastructure for residential IPs.

As a company, Webshare can be considered mid-sized. It’s been growing fast and employed nearly 30 people in July 2025, or 69% more than the year before.

Webshare Proxy Networks

Webshare offers three kinds of proxy servers:

Datacenter proxies from around 35 countries in six continents. They come in lists of shared, semi-dedicated, or dedicated IPs.
ISP proxies that are located in around 10 countries and take the same formats.
Residential proxies from real user devices around the world.

We cover individual proxy types in the expandable drop-downs below:

Datacenter & ISP

Infatica Review

Adam Dubois — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 12:05:42 +0000

Infatica Review

A solid proxy provider with a sense of ethics.

Infatica offers all proxy types and advanced features to all clients.

Rating 8.7 / 10

★★★★★ 4.3/5

Infatica is one of the mid-market proxy providers with enterprise aspirations, competing with companies like Bright Data, SOAX, and Decodo. We revisit it in mid-2025 after first testing the company several years ago. Back then, it was already a decent service, but still very much in the making. What about now? Let’s find out!

The review will give you some context about Infatica as a company, its user experience, and proxy performance based on weeks of testing.

News about Infatica

November 6, 2025

Infatica Launches IPv6 Residential Proxies

The product includes IPv6-only IPs at a premium price.

By Adam Dubois

Provider News

April 11, 2025

Infatica Launches Rotating Datacenter Proxies

Every plan gives access to 500,000 proxies “around the world”.

By Adam Dubois

Provider News

February 27, 2025

Infatica Makes Its Residential Proxies Up to 50% Cheaper

The changes primarily impact lower-tier plans.

By Adam Dubois

Provider News

General Information

Country: Singapore
Founded: 2019
Employees (LinkedIn): 25-50
Proxy networks: Datacenter, ISP, residential, mobile
Other services: scraping APIs, datasets
Supporting tools: Proxy checker
Price segment: Mid-market
Payment methods: Credit card (Stripe), PayPal, Bitcoin, bank transfer
Trial: 3 days & 100 MB for $1.99

Infatica is a Singapore-based proxy provider established in early 2019. It initially sold premium residential proxies but has since expanded to all major proxy types and web scraping APIs. Despite having a HQ in Singapore, Infatica’s owners and large part of the staff are of Eastern European origin.

The provider’s main target seems to businesses: primarily small to medium, but lately Infatica has been moving toward enterprise clients. Among the use cases, you’ll find the usual suspects like web scraping, ad verification, social media automation, and business intelligence.

As a business-oriented provider, Infatica tries hard to present itself as a legitimate service. Its approach is laid out in the provider’s ethical code that mentions GDPR compliance, activity monitoring, and IP sourcing practices. It’s also achieved the ISO 27001 award, which basically assures that your information will be safe.

Infatica is straightforward about how it gets and governs proxies. It injects an SDK into apps and borrows traffic from people who install them. In return, devs get an unintrusive monetization method to replace ads and other annoyances. Infatica once caught heat for putting the SDK into Chrome extensions and has reduced reliance on this avenue.

All in all, Infatica is a standard mid-sized proxy server company. With a call for $2M investment in late 2022 (which was answered by the venture capital firm behind SOAX), Infatica looks ready to increase the pressure on its competitors.

Infatica Proxy Networks

Infatica sells four types of proxy servers:

Residential proxies with flexible targeting options around the world.
Mobile proxies that borrow the network connections of phones and other end-user devices.
Datacenter proxies, which come as a rotating pool with worldwide locations or a dedicated list with IPs in 45 countries.
ISP proxies in dedicated lists and over 15 countries to choose from.

This review covers the following proxy networks:

Residential

Evomi Review

Adam Dubois — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 13:04:02 +0000

Evomi Preview

An impressive newcomer.

Evomi’s performant proxy pools, polished brand image, and competitive prices make it a strong option for your next small to mid scale project.

Rating 8.7 / 10

★★★★★ 4.4/5

Nowadays, there’s no shortage of proxy providers. But we’ll always find a place for companies with their own proxy network. And that’s exactly what Evomi claims to offer.

Couple this with some competent brand building (Swiss company, ethics, clear communication), and maybe we’re looking at a winner for individual and small business use? Or perhaps it’s all smoke and mirrors, especially considering how young the provider still is?

Let’s find out! We had a chance to benchmark four of Evomi’s proxy products. These are our impressions.

News about Evomi

March 17, 2025

Evomi Adds New Filters to Residential Proxies

Latency, fraud score, device, and more parameters are now available – for a price.

By Adam Dubois

Provider News

November 13, 2024

Evomi Launches Core Residential Proxies

At $.49/GB, these may be the cheapest residential proxies out there.

By Adam Dubois

Provider News

November 4, 2024

New Review: Evomi

Evomi joins the ranks of our reviewed providers.

By Adam Dubois

Provider News

General Information

Country: Switzerland
Founded: 2024
Employees (LinkedIn): 5-10
Proxy networks: Datacenter, residential, mobile
Supporting tools: ❌
Price range: Lower mid-range
Starting price: $0.70
Payment methods: Credit card, PayPal. Pay as you go only: Google Pay, wire transfer, cryptocurrency, local payments through PayPro)
Trial: Trial & money-back guarantee

Evomi is one of the newer companies in the market. It sells access to multiple proxy networks, with plans to launch web scraper APIs in the future. The provider is located in Switzerland, and its website makes sure that you’re well aware of this fact.

Despite being around for a short while, Evomi has already done a lot of groundwork to present itself as a serious business. The website radiates solidity, there’s company information – even a phone number! – SLAs, and a page for ethical proxy sourcing practices. You can find most employees on LinkedIn.

Evomi has also had the time to do some brand building: startups can apply to get free traffic using the provider’s Startup Program. In addition, Evomi is a member of the Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative, which advocates for responsible businesses practices in the industry.

As such, the company tries to be transparent about how it acquires proxies. A good part (even datacenter IPs) is sourced via Earn.fm (a bandwidth sharing application) and an SDK. The rest are likely resold. Having an in-house proxy network is a strong value proposition if the provider manages to flesh it out well.

While Evomi itself is new, the people behind it have been around. They claim to have been selling proxies for more than six years. Specifically, we found links to InfiniteProxies, which was established in 2019. After bringing this up, we were told that the projects may have been but were no longer related.

All in all, Evomi creates the impression of a solid company, even if some efforts (like the AI-generated image of an idyllic looking Swiss landscape) go a tad too far.

Evomi Proxy Networks

Evomi sells access to four proxy networks: datacenter, residential, mobile, and ISP (also called static residential). The first three give you access to large pools of IPs with rotation and traffic-based pricing. The fourth product comes in shared or dedicated lists.

Evomi’s residential proxy network branches out into two further products. One is called Premium residential proxies, and it includes full functionality by default. The second is Core residential proxies – it starts off very cheap in a barebones configuration but gets more expensive as you enable features.

We’ll be looking at Evomi’s rotating proxy networks. Since they all use the same system, it makes sense to review all at once.

Pool Size & Coverage

	Datacenter	Residential	Mobile
Advertised pool size	Not specified	Not specified	Not specified
Locations	100+	150+	150+
Filtering	Random, continent, country	Random, continent, country, state, city, ASN, ISP, ZIP code	Random, continent, country, state, ISP
Other filters		Latency, fraud score, device, minimum uptime, response time, QUIC, UDP, extended pool, ad blocking

Evomi doesn’t really mention how many proxies it controls. You could try to gauge the numbers by visiting the website’s location pages: for example, the one for US proxies advertises nearly 10 million IPs. But this isn’t really convenient, and from our experience, such pages are rarely updated.

All three products have broad location coverage, especially the datacenter proxy network. However, these proxies too are likely sourced through Evomi’s bandwidth sharing app, so their availability is hard to predict. As a result, the datacenter IPs are best suited for web scraping and similar tasks.

The location filtering options depend on the product. For the most part, they’re in line with industry standards. The Core residential plans, however, includes an exceptional number of filters which range from more IPs and device type selection to specifying latency thresholds. For some reason, QUIC and UDP come as separate toggles, and you can’t enable any other filter if you choose to increase the proxy pool.

It’s nice that you’re allowed to select multiple countries at once. In this case, more granular location filters, such as state or city, become unavailable.

Features

Connection method: Gateway address
Rotation: Every request, 1-120 mins, long sessions
Protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS5
Concurrency: Unlimited threads & ports
Traffic: Plan based
Authentication: Credentials

Evomi’s proxy networks give you a backconnect gateway address that connects you to the proxy pool. The provider doesn’t specify the locations of its gateway servers.

The proxies rotate by default. The interval can be every connection request, which is convenient for web scraping. Or, you can create a session with an option to specify a lifetime between one and 120 minutes. The provider also offers an option to establish a hard session, which holds onto the same IP for as long as it remains online.

The number of ports and threads isn’t limited, so you can scrape to your heart’s content. However, if your software doesn’t have username and password authentication, you’ll be out of luck: IP whitelisting isn’t available. There are ways around this – but they require jumping through hoops, which we’d prefer to avoid.

Integration & Use

Basic request: USERNAME:PASSWORD@dcp.evomi.com:2000
Using filters: USERNAME:PASSWORD_country-US_region-california_city-san.francisco_isp-attenterprisesl@core-residential.evomi.com:1000
Establishing sessions: USERNAME:[email protected]:2000

With Evomi’s proxies, the gateway address doesn’t change, while filters and sticky sessions are added to the password. The port number generally remains the same as well – the only time you have to modify it is when you choose a different connection protocol.

Pricing Plans

	Datacenter	Premium residential	Core residential	Mobile
Model	Pay as you go, subscription
Format	Traffic
Modifiers	(Core residential) Proxy filters – up to 15x price multiplier
Starting price	$13.5 for 30 GB ($0.45/GB)	$16 for 4 GB ($4/GB)	$15 for 15 GB ($1/GB)	$16 for 4 GB ($4/GB)
Trial	Available

Evomi charges for traffic use. You can buy some and use it at your own pace or subscribe for better rates. The difference is small at first but increases significantly with scale.

Following the recent trend, Evomi’s Premium residential and mobile proxies cost the same. The datacenter product, on the other hand, is up to ten times cheaper per gigabyte.

In a broader context, Evomi’s Premium residential proxies cost more than direct alternatives like IPRoyal or Decodo, while the datacenter and mobile products are more competitive.

The Core residential product warrants a separate mention. Its base price is extremely cheap ($0.99/GB PAYG or $0.49/GB with a plan) if you’re happy with the included functionality. But enabling extra features multiplies traffic use, up to 15x in extreme scenarios.

For example, adding more IPs costs 6x, ASN targeting makes the service deplete traffic four times faster, and so on. Considering that the rates of this product don’t scale, Evomi quickly becomes more expensive than even premium providers if you’re not careful.

If, for some reason, the proxies fail to meet your needs, Evomi has a money-back guarantee. It applies if you’ve used less than 1 GB or 10% of the plan’s allowance.

Performance Benchmarks

We last tested Evomi’s proxy networks in April 2025, for the annual Proxy Market Research.

Pool size & composition

Gateway	Requests	Unique IPs (Core / Premium)	Residential %* (Core / Premium)
Global	1.2M over 21 days	733,405 / 807,763	95.09% / 95.60%
US	560k over 14 days	162,418 / 331,882	95.33% / 97.70%
UK	560k over 14 days	102,467 / 202,588	97.46% / 99.07%
EU**	1.2M over 14 days	260,031 / 449,250	95.06% / 96.97%
Brazil	560k over 14 days	250,425 / 268,078	96.06% / 96.38%
India	560k over 14 days	96,073 / 171,122	96.42% / 95.93%
Australia	140k over 7 days	12,853 / 29,124	97.11% / 98.46%

* IP2Location database, Usage type data point, ISP, ISP/MOB, MOB IPs.
** Combines Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands.

Comparison with other providers

Evomi’s proxy pools were respectably large and predominantly residential. The Premium residential network returned around twice as many IPs when targeting individual countries.

Infrastructure performance

Requests: Same as the pool test (140k to 1.2M per gateway)
Target: Nearest server of a global CDN (~6 KB response size)

Gateway	Our server location	Avg. success rate (Core / Premium)	Avg. response time (Core / Premium)
Global	DE	99.12% / 99.44%	0.98 s / 0.93 s
US	US	99.56% / 99.65%	0.77 s / 0.97 s
UK	DE	99.47% / 99.77%	0.43 s / 0.63 s
EU	DE	99.27% / 99.57%	0.49 s / 0.70 s
Brazil	US	99.83% / 99.70%	0.70 s / 1.22 s
India	SG	98.61% / 99.08%	2.24 s / 2.55 s
Australia	SG	98.33% / 99.30%	2.29 s / 2.42 s

Comparison with other providers

We can’t fault Evomi’s infrastructure performance – both the success rate and response time were competitive. There are two things to note, though. One, the provider doesn’t seem to have gateway servers in the Asia-Pacific region, hence the slow response times. And two, the Core pool was actually faster in most scenarios.

Response time with a 2 MB page (Premium residential)

Requests: 15,000 with the Global gateway, 5,000 with the US gateway
Target: Nearest server of a global CDN

Gateway	Our server location	Avg. response time
Global	DE	6.08 s
US	US	4.95 s

Comparison with other providers

When we scraped larger page sizes, Evomi found itself among the slower providers. This applied both to the unfiltered and US pools.

Performance with popular targets (Premium residential)

Requests: ~2,600 per target
Location: US (both the gateway and our server)

	Avg. success rate	Avg. response time
Amazon	93.36%	4.50 s
Google	62.08%	4.37 s
Instagram	79.35%	5.26 s
Total	78.26%	4.71 s

Comparison with other providers

Strong infrastructure performance didn’t help Evomi much when facing popular websites. We assume that these residential proxy servers had seen more abuse than most competing providers.

Pool size & composition

Gateway	Requests	Unique IPs	Mobile %*
Global	280k over 14 days	153,881	97.04%
US	280k over 14 days	27,439	99.17%
UK	280k over 14 days	13,053	98.97%
EU**	280k over 14 days	33,180	93.02%
Brazil	280k over 14 days	15,715	99.05%
India	280k over 14 days	41,285	99.86%
Australia	140k over 7 days	1,224	98.69%

* IP2Location database, Usage type data point ( ISP/MOB, MOB IPs)
** Combines Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands.

Evomi’s mobile proxy pool is still modest – for comparison, NetNut had fives times, while Oxylabs and DataImpulse nearly four times as many IPs in the US. Still, these were almost exclusively mobile devices on mobile networks.

Infrastructure performance

Requests: Same as the pool test (140k to 280k)
Target: Nearest server of a global CDN (~6 KB page size)

Gateway	Our server location	Avg. success rate	Avg. response time
Global	DE	99.79%	1.32 s
US	US	99.94%	0.61 s
UK	DE	99.81%	0.78 s
EU	DE	99.83%	0.73 s
Brazil	US	99.82%	0.91 s
India	SG	99.53%	2.48 s
Australia	SG	99.79%	2.28 s

Evomi performed very well in our synthetic benchmarks. Its weakest point was once again APAC countries like India and Australia, which had a slow response time.

Pool size & infrastructure performance

Target: Nearest server of a global CDN (~6 KB page size)
Our server location: US

Gateway	Requests	Unique IPs	Avg. success rate	Avg. response time
US	70k over 7 days	26,573	99.94%	0.31 s

For a peer-to-peer pool, Evomi’s datacenter proxies displayed strong infrastructure performance. What’s more, we found over 26,000 unique IPs throughout seven days, which resulted in 38% uniqueness – truly not a bad result.

Download speed

Target: Hetzner’s 100 MB Ashburn benchmark
Proxies tested: 10

Avg. without proxies	Average	Median	Slowest IP
52.93 MB/s	4.34 MB/s	1.50 MB/s	0.08 MB/s

Evomi’s datacenter proxies had very low throughput and high variance. The slowest of the 10 proxy servers was barely functional and completely unsuitable for any traffic-intensive task.

Performance with popular targets

Requests: ~2,600 per target
Location: US (both the gateway and our server)

	Avg. success rate	Avg. response time
Amazon	80.68%	3.17 s
Google	61.11%	4.37 s
Total	70.90%	3.77 s

The proxy pool did well with popular targets. It experienced some CAPTCHAs on Google, but this is to be expected with shared datacenter IPs.

How to Use Evomi

This section covers Evomi’s dashboard, proxy setup procedure, and customer service.

Registration

To register, you’ll need to enter your full name, email address, and password. Alternatively, there’s an option to sign up with a Google account.

KYC & Usage Policies

While Evomi doesn’t ask for KYC information during registration, you may still have to complete the KYC procedure later on. This depends on whether Evomi notices suspicious behavior. The verifier is Stripe – it will ask for a photo ID and selfie.

Evomi doesn’t have a list of blocked targets, but we do know that it prohibits access to financial, governmental domains, and mailing websites. They are unlockable with extra KYC.

Dashboard

Evomi has a dashboard for managing subscriptions, interacting with its products, tracking usage, and getting help.

The dashboard is clean, well-designed, and available in four languages: English, Russian, Chinese, and German.

We have few gripes about it. Well, maybe the main page could be more useful – now, it only serves to sell products, whether you have them already or not.

Evomi’s dashboard lets you add payment information (card or PayPal), manage subscriptions, and download generated invoices from Stripe. Subscriptions renew automatically, and it’s possible to buy extra traffic at the plan’s rate.

There was no wallet functionality when we last tested the provider, which unfortunately means that each action will require making a new transaction.

Evomi has a proxy generator widget. It lets you choose various configurations (protocol, filtering and rotation parameters, a pool mode), and then spits out a list of entry points in several formats. The widget is simple to work with.

Having said that, you can’t really change a username by yourself or even pick a custom password – the system generates it upon request. Regular customers also don’t get access to sub-users, which complicates work with proxies in a team setting.

Evomi’s usage statistics are separated by product. You get two graphs – one for traffic, the second for requests made – which can be filtered for today, last three, seven, 14, or 30 days. There’s also a table for statistics by domain, though it only shows aggregated requests made in the last 12 hours.

All in all, Evomi’s usage information is basic but competent. It may not always be fast to load, but that’s because the data is fetched live.

For more general information, the provider has a network status page that shows uptime statistics and outages for the last 180 days.

API Access

Evomi has a management API, but it’s only available to resellers that buy at least 5 TB of data.

Documentation

Evomi offers a documentation hub with information about each product and an FAQ to answer the main questions surrounding the service. Both are decently fleshed out.

In the middle of 2025, the integration instructions covered major operating systems and web scraping libraries. However, if you wanted to pair the proxies with an antidetect browser or another third-party tool, you’d have to look elsewhere.

Hands-On Support

Evomi’s customer support works 24/7, with the main channel being live chat. Powered by Intercom, the chat also has ticketing functionality, though it’s not obvious at first sight.

Large customers get more options: a dedicated account manager available through phone and assistance via Slack.

We tested the live chat during daytime in Europe. The agent responded within a few minutes and gave competent responses to the questions we had. While limited, this interaction left us satisfied with the service.

Conclusion

That was our detailed evaluation of Evomi. Overall, the provider’s polished brand image, competitive prices, and solid proxy network performance left us with a positive impression, especially compared to the many transient resellers out there.

At this point, Evomi still lacks the scale and features for enterprise use. However, it’s perfectly capable of powering many other tasks. This applies even more so if you’re looking to upgrade from entry-level providers like PacketStream, or if you need an alternative to mid-market vendors like SOAX or Rayobyte.

Evomi Alternatives

Rating 9.0 / 10

★★★★★ 4.5/5

SOAX’s pricing is less flexible. But you’ll get more proxies and way more control over how they work.

Read the review

Rating 9.3 / 10

★★★★★ 4.7/5

Decodo is the mid-market choice to beat. Once again, for slightly more money, you’ll get more IPs and even better performance.

Read the review

Rating 8.3 / 10

★★★★★ 4.2/5

DataImpulse offers the same three proxy networks with extremely affordable rates and non-expiring traffic.

Read the review

Recommended for:

Individuals or small to medium businesses looking for rotating proxies.

Rating 8.7 / 10

★★★★★ 4.4/5

Adam Dubois

Proxy geek and developer.

August 28, 2024

The post Evomi Review appeared first on Proxyway.

Massive Review

Chris Becker — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 09:08:50 +0000

Massive Review

Merely big for now, but still packing a punch.

Massive covers the basics well, has many residential IPs in the US and Europe, and a robust infrastructure to keep things running.

Rating 8.7 / 10

★★★★★ 4.4/5

Massive isn’t a new company by any means, but it only seriously entered the proxy server market in 2024. US-based, well financed, and ambitious, the provider tries to prove that these are the residential proxies you should choose for your project.

Is the service any good? And more importantly – is it better than what you can get for a comparable price, given how tough the competition currently is? Let’s find out!

General Information

Country: US
Founded: 2018
Employees (LinkedIn): 25-50
Proxy networks: Residential, ISP
Supporting tools: ❌
Price range: Mid-market
Starting price: $4
Payment methods: Credit card, US bank account, Cash App (Stripe)
Trial: Available

Massive is a US company founded in 2018 by Jason Grad and Brian Kennish. Its main aim was – and still remains – to build a computer resource sharing platform. To that end, Massive has raised over $12M in venture capital, mostly in late 2021.

The platform’s uses have changed over the years: it was primarily used for crypto mining during the hype, and now the focus is on downloading small amounts of data from the web – in other words, proxying traffic.

The vehicle for this is Massive’s SDK, which developers can add to their software as a monetization method. It’s a standard way to source residential IPs, but Massive stands out by being very upfront about what it does. There’s even a (bit dated) article on TechCrunch covering the business model.

In other words, Massive could be considered one of the more transparent residential proxy providers, at least as far as IP sourcing SDKs go. That said, the FAQ page still lacks any example apps despite promising them over a year ago. There’s always room for improvement, we suppose.

Massive started truly productizing its proxy network in mid-2024. In that sense, the provider is still new to the market. This is evident when looking at the website, which mashes together the proxy service, SDK, and even crypto mining, leading to an experience that’s not always coherent.

For the time being, it seems like Massive will focus on establishing itself as a web data infrastructure provider. Besides the main product – residential proxy network – the company is also testing the waters with ISP proxies, and there are traces of a search engine API in the documentation.

Currently, Massive’s weakest side is probably marketing. But if it perseveres, the company has the building blocks to become a force in the industry.

News about Massive

December 31, 2025

New Research: Internet Sharing SDKs as an Emerging App Monetization Model

We overviewed internet sharing SDKs and their role in app monetization.

By Adam Dubois

December 30, 2025

Google Sues SerpApi

The lawsuit involves avoidance of Google’s anti-bot measures and copyright infringement.

By Adam Dubois

Provider News

December 3, 2025

New Report: Web Scraping APIs in 2025

We benchmarked 11 companies and overviewed AI’s impact on the market.

By Adam Dubois

Massive Proxy Networks

Massive currently offers two proxy server products:

Residential proxies from most countries around the world.
ISP proxies in the form of dedicated list. They’re available only in the US.

We cover individual proxy types in the expandable drop-downs below:

Residential

Ping Proxies Review

Adam Dubois — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 05:42:11 +0000

Ping Proxies Review

Spick and span.

Ping offers good proxies and a great platform to make use of them.

Rating 8.7 / 10

★★★★★ 4.4/5

Use the code PROXYWAY10 to get 10% off.

Looking for residential or ISP proxies? Ping has just what you need!.. But so do the next twenty providers.

How does Ping Proxies compare against them? And does it have any virtues that would deserve your hard-earned proxy budget? Let’s find out!

General Information

Country: UK
Founded: 2020
Employees (LinkedIn): 5-10
Proxy networks: Residential, datacenter, ISP
Supporting tools: Proxy checker
Price range: Mid-market
Starting price: $
Payment methods: Credit card, Apple & Google Pay, cryptocurrencies
Trial: 1 GB

Ping Proxies is a UK-based provider of proxy servers. Its founder, Timur Gok, incorporated the company in 2020, after receiving a scholarship from his university. By that time, he had already been servicing the sneaker scalping market for three years.

So, Ping Proxies started off specialized. It had a few good years before the market burst (you can read an interview with Timur covering this topic here). The provider had to choose what to do next; and like many other companies in its shoes, it decided to become a general-purpose proxy vendor.

However, Ping Proxies approached this challenge in an unconventional way. Instead of simply cutting prices and calling it a day, Ping opted to build a proper platform, with in-house infrastructure and (at least partially) its own residential IP sourcing methods.

We know that Ping owns a VPN browser extension, while the rest of the IPs are sourced through partnerships with SDKs and bandwidth-sharing apps. The latter part is a bit vague; to alleviate concerns, the company imposes a KYC procedure and strict usage policies.

With fewer than 10 members on LinkedIn, Ping Proxies is far from big. But when we wrote this in mid-2025, it was churning out updates like crazy, introducing advanced observability tools, features like HTTP3 support, and a proprietary bandwidth optimization technology within several months.

The competitive environment for mid-market providers is extremely tough these days. But Ping Proxies is surely doing its darndest to carve out a place in it.

News about Ping Proxies

September 17, 2025

New Review: Ping Proxies

Ping Proxies joins the ranks of our reviewed providers.

By Adam Dubois

Provider News

Ping Proxy Networks

Ping currently offers three types of proxy servers:

Residential proxies from most countries around the world.
ISP proxies in the form of a dedicated list. They come from around 15 locations in the US, Europe, and Asia.
Datacenter proxies with the same configuration but fewer locations than Ping’s ISP product (six when we last checked).

We cover individual proxy types in the expandable drop-downs below:

Residential