Infatica is one of the business-minded proxy providers competing with Bright Data, SOAX, and Oxylabs. We revisit it in mid-2023 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!
Aside from providing some general information, we mostly focus on Infatica’s residential proxy service. The review comes with in-depth performance benchmarks made throughout weeks of testing.
General Information
Infatica is a Singaporean proxy provider established in early 2019. It initially sold premium residential proxies but has since expanded to mobile, datacenter proxy services, and web scraping APIs. Despite having a HQ in Asia, Infatica’s owners and part of the staff are of Russian origin.
The provider’s main target seems to be industrial clients (read: medium and large businesses). 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. This is important knowing the dubious reputation of proxies, and frankly not an easy task. Still, the company has done a pretty good job, borrowing several tools from Bright Data’s playbook.
Infatica is transparent about how it gets and governs the residential IPs. It injects an SDK into apps and borrows the traffic from people who install them. In return, it saves them from ads or other monetization methods. Infatica once caught heat for putting the SDK into Chrome extensions, but things have been quiet since.
In addition, Infatica claims not to resell the proxies to others. I’m not sure if there’s any way to verify this, but if true, it serves to further prevent abuse. And, of course, there’s a KYC process during purchase to weed out malicious users.
All in all, it’s a standard mid-sized proxy server company competing in the premium segment. With a call for $2M investment in late 2022, Infatica looks ready to increase the pressure on its competitors.
Infatica Residential Proxies
Infatica controls a network of 10 million monthly residential IPs. They’re sourced through the provider’s peer-to-business network which is based on partnerships with browser extension and app developers.
Features
Infatica’s residential proxies are stacked with features. You can choose from most countries, then further filter the IPs by state, city, and ASN. It’s possible to select multiple countries at once or use a pre-set based on regions (such as world mix, Europe, or Asia).
The provider also offers relatively flexible rotation settings. The option are every connection request, sticky sessions between five and 60 minutes in five minute increments, or until the IP goes offline.
Infatica supports the SOCKS5 protocol. However, the availability of ports is limited, as with most similar services.
Pricing Plans
Infatica uses a subscription-based pricing model that charges for traffic use. You can choose from a variety of plans starting from $96. The entry threshold is actually steep now when most premium alternatives have implemented an option to pay as you go.
Unfortunately, it’s not possible to top up a plan. When traffic runs out, the system will automatically renew the current plan if you’ve set up a payment method.
Compared to other premium competitors, Infatica costs the same or slighly less until a terabyte of data. Then, its pricing sharply decreases, outscaling even mid-range competitors like Smartproxy. There’s also a relatively generous 20% discount for yearly plans.
Performance Benchmarks
We last tested Infatica’s residential proxies in March 2023.
#1: Pool size & composition
We ran 1M requests over 21 days using the unfiltered pool, 500,000 requests over 14 days using the country pools, and 140,000 connection requests over 7 days using the Australian pool. We enriched IP data with the IP2Location database.
Infatica had a modest but respectable proxy pool in all our tested locations. It can’t stand up to major providers like Bright Data or Oxylabs, but 40,000 IPs in the US should be enough for a variety of tasks.
One problem we experienced was that our IP database identified a good part of the IPs as non-residential. In other words, they were treated as belonging to datacenter and other IP ranges. This can potentially (but not necessarily) cause issues with websites that care about IP origin.
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- Unfiltered pool comparison
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- Residential country pool comparison
#2: Infrastructure performance
This benchmark shared the same parameters as the pool test. Our computer was located in Germany. We targeted a global CDN – it pinged a server nearest to the proxy IP and had a response size of several kilobytes.
The residential proxy infrastructure worked well in general, though most alternatives had a better success rate. The main error we encountered was 503 or service unavailable. Based on Infatica’s own information, the service might’ve been overloaded or under maintenance.
On the bright side, Infatica’s proxies were very fast. The unfiltered comparison below may not look like it, but the provider had among the quickest proxies in the US (0.9 s average) and Europe (0.4-0.5 s average).
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- Success rate comparison
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- Response time comparison
#3: Performance with popular targets
We made ~2,600 connection requests to each target using US-filtered proxies and a non-headless Python scraper. Our computer was located in Germany. Note that your results may differ based on your web scraping setup.
Infatica’s proxies handled all targets admirably. Despite an error here and there, we couldn’t really fault them with such hard targets as Google.
How to Use Infatica
This part covers Infatica’s dashboard, proxy setup procedure, and customer service.
Registration
To register with Infatica, you’ll have to complete a registration form. This involves entering a name and surname, country, email address, and password. You can optionally add your WhatsApp or Telegram acccount.
Alternatively, it’s possible to register using a Twitter of Facebook profile. Opting for social networks and not Google sounds strange considering that Infatica targets companies.
You won’t have to confirm your email address when signing up, but it’s necessary for buying a plan. The first purchase is tied up with identity verification, which requires sending an ID and selfie to a company called Veriff.
Dashboard
Infatica provides a dashboard for managing subscriptions and access to products. It’s a competent panel with the all necessary features but also not the most convenient one.
For example, each product gets a different tab. But instead of being a hub for that product, it only lets you buy a plan. Then, no matter what you bought, you have to visit the Services tab and reach your plan through there. This make sense but also confuses and wastes space. In a similar way, clicking on Infatica’s logo leads you to the website’s home page. Why?
However, these are minor annoyances. Infatica also made some good decisions. I like the dashboard’s access management system which allows giving permissioned controls to others.
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- The dashboard’s main screen.
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- This tab is only for buying a plan – even if you already have one.
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- You can give access to others.
Subscription Management
You can buy a plan using two methods. One is to pay directly. The second is to add money to Infatica’s wallet and then get a plan. The latter option allows paying with crypto and reduces the number of transactions if you add more funds in advance.
You can find all invoices on a separate page in the dashboard. They include payment status and transaction details.
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- Our invoices.
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- You can top up your account here.
Proxy Management
The proxy setup has its own quirks. To reach the right page, you need to go through the My Services tab and find your active plan. There, you’ll find a widget for proxy setup that generates endpoint:port lists based on your parameters.
The flow involves naming the list, choosing an authentication method, selecting a location pre-set or a custom location, specifying the rotation interval, and finally the output format. The system then generates a list of 1,000 endpoints that you can copy-paste to your software. It’s possible to create multiple lists this way.
Alternatively, you can use Infatica’s API tool for residential proxy setup. It involves adding parameters to the username, such as a country shortcode or session ID. This method is more limited: for example, we couldn’t find a way to select an ASN.
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- A list of active (and not so active) services.
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- The proxy setup widget.
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- Infatica’s alternative proxy management tool.
Usage Tracking
Infatica has two tools to track proxy usage. The first is a graph that shows how much traffic you’ve expended in total for the plan, and how much remains. The second graph shows your traffic expenditure throughout the day, week, or month.
Currently, there’s no way to select a custom period or get any other metrics, such as success rate or request count. Providers like NetNut or Bright Data have Infatica beat in this regard.
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- You can view your total traffic expenditure…
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- … or over a set time period.
Public API
Infatica provides no API for managing subscriptions and its products programmatically.
Documentation
If you ever find yourself at a loss, the provider has a documentation hub to help you. It’s mostly concerned with walking through the purchase and setup flows of Infatica’s different products. Otherwise, the hub includes several integration guides and static code samples. The latter would fit better in the dashboard’s proxy setup page.
Hands-On Support
On the other hand, Infatica’s live chat support works 24/7 and with an SLA-mandated response time of four hours. We’ve had fast and satisfactory experience with it. Alternatively, you can create a ticket for lengthier interactions.
Conclusion
Infatica leaves the impression of a competent business. It has the markings of a premium provider with responsive customer service, performant proxies, and ethical aspirations.
Though it managed to catch up on features with the market leaders, Infatica still has a hard time matching them in user experience or proxy network size. Perhaps acknowledging this, it tries to compensate in price.
All things considered, it’s hard for me to pinpoint something unique about Infatica, especially with companies like SOAX offering very similar services. But maybe there’s no need to? The promise of lower prices and a different but similarly performant proxy pool may have enough appeal for quite a few businesses.