Infatica Review
Infatica offers advanced features to all clients and highly competitive pricing at scale.
Infatica is one of the mid-market proxy providers with enterprise aspirations, competing with companies like Bright Data, SOAX, and Smartproxy. We revisit it in mid-2024 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 metrics based on weeks of testing.
News about Infatica
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By Adam Dubois
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General Information
Infatica is a UK-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 the UK, Infatica’s owners and part of the staff are of Eastern European origin.
The provider’s main target seems to businesses: primarily small to medium, but Infatica is also willing to serve 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.
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, 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.
Some parts of the ethical code had to make way for business goals, with hilarious results. At the time of writing this, both sides of the screenshot below were live on Infatica’s website. We all know which prevailed.
Infatica Proxy Networks
Infatica sells four types of proxy servers:
- Datacenter proxies in shared lists that are located primarily in the US.
- ISP proxies in dedicated lists and over 15 countries to choose from.
- Residential proxies with flexible targeting options around the world.
- Mobile proxies that borrow the network connections of phones and other end-user devices.
We cover individual proxy types in the expandable drop-downs below:
Residential
Residential proxies are Infatica’s highlight and main product. They give you full access to large network of IPs associated with residential devices.
Pool Size & Coverage
Infatica is relatively modest in its advertising claims: 15 million IPs area much less compared to Bright Data’s 72 or Oxylabs’ 100 million proxies.
In any case, they’re enough for global coverage – and even very precise targeting options like city or ASN.
Features
Infatica’s residential proxies can rotate with every connection request or establish sticky sessions. The session length ranges between five and 60 minutes – you can specify it by choosing one of the provided intervals. Infatica also offers the ability to manually force the rotation of all the sessions you’ve created.
Traffic aside, the service is pretty much unlimited.
Integration & Use
Like most residential proxy networks, Infatica uses backconnect gateway servers for access.
You can connect to them in two ways:
- By generating lists. This way, you select the parameters and Infatica creates a namable list with one IP address, a custom username, and 1,000 ports. It’s possible to generate up to 20 lists per plan.
- By using the API tool. This is a more standard approach where you customize the pool by adding parameters to the username.
The second option seems easier to manage, as your choices transparently reflect in the credentials. At the same time, it still requires changing the port number for sticky sessions and may not support list-based traffic statistics.
Pricing Plans
Infatica lets you use its proxy network without commitment, or you can subscribe to a plan – the cheapest starts from $96. Larger plans offer increasingly better rates, which you can further improve by 20% with a yearly contract.
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 competitors, Infatica’s rates beat most enterprise providers and remain slightly more expensive compared to mid-market providers like Smartproxy. However, they tend to scale well past 500 GB of traffic.
Performance Benchmarks
We last tested Infatica’s residential proxies in March 2024, for the annual Proxy Market Research.
#1: Pool size & composition
* IP2Location database, Usage type data point, ISP, ISP/MOB, MOB IPs.
** Combines Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands.
Infatica had a solid proxy pool in all our benchmarked locations. While it still can’t reach the level of NetNut or Oxylabs, the network has grown multiple times since our last test a year ago. In short, it should be large enough for most use cases.
One drawback was that IP2Location identified around every tenth IP as non-residential. This isn’t ideal compared to something like Bright Data whose proxy network is flawless in this regard.
#2: IP quality
We checked 20,000 proxies in the Global pool and 10,000 proxies in the US using the IPQualityScore database.
Infatica had serious issues with the IPQualityScore database – its results were some of the worst among all our tested providers. The situation was especially bad in the US, where the IPs had an average fraud score of 89/100.
On one hand, this score can indicate that Infatica’s service is popular. On the other hand, we can also interpret this as overextending or failing to handle abuse.
#3: Infrastructure performance
This benchmark shared the same parameters as the pool test. Our scraper was located in Germany for the Global pool, and we also had scrapers in the US and Singapore for individual country pools. We targeted a global CDN – it pinged a server nearest to the proxy IP and had a response size of several kilobytes.
Infatica’s infrastructure success rate was just okay, especially compared to providers like Oxylabs which barely ever failed. However, the proxies responded very quickly, with European locations being the highlight.
#4: Performance with popular targets
We made ~2,600 connection requests to each target using US-filtered proxies. Our computer was located in the US. Note that your results may differ based on your web scraping setup.
The residential proxies did very well with all targets, showing that specialized tools like IPQualityScore don’t always predict success. Few competitors managed to beat this success rate in our limited-scale test.
Mobile
Mobile proxies are Infatica’s premium product for the toughest targets or specialized use cases. This is a peer-to-peer network, meaning that it uses real mobile devices.
Usually, such services include only carrier IPs. But as Infatica warns us (and as we’ll soon see), it’s a mix of mobile and Wi-Fi networks:
Pool Size & Coverage
The advertised pool of 5 million IPs sounds modest, and so do the 100+ countries. But it’s good that Infatica isn’t trying to inflate numbers just for marketing’s sake.
In those locations, the provider supports even more precise targeting options, such as city and ASN targeting. We’re happy to see them, but it’s worrying whether the pool this size is able to realistically offer this level of granularity. We’ll see soon enough.
Features
Infatica offers generous targeting options: between the standard rotation with every request and sticky sessions, you can also choose custom intervals up to 60 minutes. Of course, there are no guarantees that the IP will really last this long.
The service doesn’t limited how many threads or parallel requests you can establish at once.
Integration & Use
Infatica gives you two integration formats to work with:
- The first creates a list with 1,000 ports, each representing a sticky session. Your filters reflect in an automatically generated username. Infatica allows creating and naming up to 20 lists per plan.
- The second, called API tool, lets you add parameters to the username. It’s more transparent, as the username isn’t random but rather reflects your choices. However, sticky sessions still require using different ports rather than session IDs.
Infatica supports SOCKS5, but we believe the protocol doesn’t allow UDP traffic at this time.
Pricing Plans
Infatica’s mobile proxy network can come with a subscription but doesn’t have to. Of course, committing gets you better rates and the ability to decrease them 20% further with a yearly plan.
If that sounds good, the cheapest package starts from $45 ($7.5/GB).
Compared to the competition, Infatica costs a similar amount to mid-market providers and a fair bit less compared to premium competitors like Bright Data. This is thanks to a significant price reduction made in the summer of 2024.
Performance Benchmarks
We last tested Infatica’s mobile proxies in March 2024.
#1: Pool size & composition
We ran 280,000 requests over 14 days using the unfiltered pool and country pools, and 140,000 connection requests over 7 days using the Australian pool. We enriched IP data with the IP2Location database.
* IP2Location database, Usage type data point, ISP/MOB, MOB IPs.
** Combines Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands.
Infatica’s Global pool looked pretty good on paper. But in reality, it consisted predominantly of Indian IPs. Furthermore, the majority of other proxies weren’t even mobile – just like Infatica warned us. All in all, we’re not really happy with what we got.
#2: Infrastructure performance
This benchmark shared the same parameters as the pool test. Our computer was located in Germany for the Global pool, and we also had computers in the US and Singapore for individual country pools. We targeted a global CDN – it pinged a server nearest to the proxy IP and had a response size of several kilobytes.
Infatica’s infrastructure performance looked decent, but we have to remember that these proxies aren’t exactly mobile. The Indian pool – the only one that was true to its claims – failed relatively often.
#3: Performance with popular targets
We made ~2,600 connection requests to each target using US-filtered proxies. Our computer was located in the US. Note that your results may differ based on your web scraping setup.
The mobile proxy network performed very similar to Infatica’s residential proxies – that is to say, very well.
How to Use Infatica
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, and you can set up two-factor authentication.
Subscription Management
It’s possible to 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 needed 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.
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, Infatica provides an instructions page for its API 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.
You can also view traffic use for a particular proxy list. The option isn’t easy to find, but it’s there.
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.
Public API
Infatica provides a public API for interacting with the system programmatically. Currently, it’s able to retrieve information about traffic usage, active locations, and available ISPs.
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 had a 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. Looking at the trajectory, the provider is getting there.
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 competitive prices and a different but similarly performant proxy pool may have enough appeal for quite a few businesses.
Infatica Alternatives
Oxylabs offers similar features with a larger proxy pool and better performance. Pay-as-you-go is another bonus, though the overall rates are higher.
Bright Data is another strong option with a host of features and second-to-none proxy management tools. But once again – mind the price.
SOAX is the most similar provider to Infatica of the bunch. Same rotation and targeting options, very similar entry fee, strong overall performance.
Recommended for:
Budget-conscious companies looking for a competent premium proxy provider.
Use the code proxyway2024 to get 20% off your first purchase.
Use the code proxyway2024 to get 20% off your first purchase.
