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.
By mid 2023, Smartproxy 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 main reasons why the company received our Best Value Provider award, three years in a row.
In this review, I’ll try to show what makes Smartproxy one of the best proxy services today – and whether you should choose it over the competition. Let’s go!
General Information
Smartproxy was founded in 2018 by “a group of four international entrepreneurs”. It started out in reaction to premium proxy providers like Luminati (now Bright Data) and GeoSurf, which were only accessible to business customers and had cumbersome onboarding procedures.
The company first resold addresses from others. Nowadays, it has a diverse pool that combines proxies from various sources. According to Smartproxy, they’re carefully vetted, but the provider doesn’t go into much detail about the topic.
Smartproxy built its business on residential and rotating datacenter proxies. At the time, they managed to fill a gap between premium providers and cheap yet mediocre services like Storm Proxies. The IPs performed well while costing less than the high-end counterparts. It also helped that Smartproxy heavily invested into customer experience: quality documentation, responsive support, and user-friendly interface.
This, along with some targeted marketing efforts, allowed Smartproxy to quickly sweep up many of the sneakerheads, Instagram managers, and small-time scrapers that were looking for affordable residential addresses. While its website is still heavily oriented towards these audiences, the company has been gradually expanding its reach.
Today, Smartproxy can be considered one of the largest proxy providers, probably the third after Bright Data and Oxylabs. Rotating proxies remain the backbone of its service, but there are now more products to choose from, including several web scrapers.
Smartproxy Datacenter Proxies
Datacenter proxies are Smartproxy’s entry option. They’re made for cost-efficient web scraping when your target doesn’t care about IP reputation or precise location targeting.
Smartproxy offers three datacenter products:
- A list of shared IPs with customizable traffic and ability to rotate.
- A list of dedicated proxies in the US.
- A large pool of rotating proxies in the US and Europe.
Features
The three proxy networks are pretty distinct in terms of features.
Smartproxy’s dedicated proxies – like most dedicated datacenter proxies – give you pretty much unlimited access to the IPs. They’re also the only proxy type to support full SOCKS5 – including the UDP protocol. However, there are two big caveats: the proxies don’t rotate and the only available location is the US, with no option to specify particular cities.
The 100,000-strong rotating proxy network gives you a lot of disposable IPs that you can simplify rotate away. Its choice of locations includes multiple major European countries like Germany and the UK. If necessary, you can keep the same IP for 30 minutes.
Smartproxy’s shared proxies bring even more locations, namely Australia and Israel. They come in a list by default, but you also get an endpoint that automatically rotates the proxies for you. It’s possible to choose where exactly you want the IPs to be located when buying a plan. (For instance, 56 proxies in the US, 32 in Australia, and the remaining 12 in Germany.)
Pricing Plans
All three options use a subscription-based pricing model that automatically renews every month. The rotating proxies charge for traffic use, dedicated proxies – IPs, while the shared proxies combine both formats.
Smartproxy offers a broad range of pricing plans. Their entry threshold is small, but the plans scale to thousands of IPs and terabytes of traffic. Naturally, the more you buy, the cheaper it gets.
If your rotating plan outgrows its traffic allowance, Smartproxy provides an option to top up without moving on to the next tier. There’s one gotcha: the price for a gigabyte always remains at its most expensive rate of $0.7. All shared plans start with 50 GBs of traffic, but it’s very cheap to get more: a gigabyte literally costs fractions of a cent.
In a broader context, Smartproxy’s prices look good. It charges less than most premium competitors until enterprise levels of scale, no matter which option you consider.
Performance Benchmarks
We last tested Smartproxy’s rotating proxy pool and 100 dedicated US proxies in March 2023.
Test #1: Infrastructure performance (rotating proxies)
We ran 50,000 connection requests using Smartproxy’s US-filtered rotating proxies. 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.
Smartproxy’s infrastructure performed nearly without fail. Their response time was par for the course with the competition. Overall, the service should be perfectly suitable for uninterrupted web scraping.
Test #2: Download speed
We tested 10 rotating and 10 dedicated IPs using DigitalOcean’s 100 MB NYC benchmark.
Both services should be plenty fast even for streaming video files. Funnily enough, Smartproxy’s random selection of rotating proxies performed several times better than the premium dedicated option.
Test #3: Performance with popular targets
We made ~2,600 connection requests to each target using US 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.
Both products performed well with most targets. One exception was Homedepot, which gave serious trouble to Smartproxy’s rotating IPs. The provider’s other users may have abused the IPs with the target. This is a caveat of sharing your proxies. On the bright side, they could scrape Amazon surprisingly well, at least at this small scale.
Smartproxy Residential Proxies
Rotating residential proxies are Smartproxy’s flagship service made for accessing strict websites. It comprises a pool of 55 million monthly IPs borrowed from real people’s devices. To give you some context, this is among the larger proxy networks on the market, at least looking at advertised numbers.
Features
The service supports granular filtering options: you can get IPs from any country, state, or city. The rotation options include not only every connection request but also 1, 10, and 30 minute thresholds. It’s convenient compared to services like PacketStream, where your only option for sticky sessions is to keep the same IP as long as it remains available.
As is often the case with residential proxies, the service is limited only by your traffic allowance. As long as you have some, you can make as many connection requests as you like. With the addition of SOCKS5 in May 2023, the product became complete, missing only the fringe-most of features like ASN or ZIP-code targeting. Note that the SOCKS5 support is mostly nominal for now: you can’t use the UDP protocol or non-web ports.
Pricing Plans
Smartproxy’s residential proxies used to have the highest starting price out of the provider’s three proxy networks, but now you can pay as you go. It’s not cheap compared to competitors like PacketStream but beats most premium and mid-range alternatives. So, these residential IPs can be a viable choice for small projects that need quality addresses.
To avoid getting stuck between pricing tiers, Smartproxy allows topping up each plan at the same rate per gigabyte. This is limited to 80% of the plan’s worth, at which point it makes sense to simply buy a bigger plan.
The proxies can be a solid option for large projects, as well. Smartproxy scales very competitively into hundreds of gigabytes, and some premium options fail to catch up even at a terabyte of data.
Performance Benchmarks
We tested Smartproxy’s residential proxies in March 2023, for the annual Proxy Market Research.
#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.
Smartproxy proved to have a very large proxy pool. 250,000 IPs in the US should be enough for scraping at any scale, and even the Australian endpoint generated over 30,000 proxies. This is among the largest proxy networks we’ve tested. Furthermore, most of the IPs were indeed identified as residential, which isn’t always the case with the competition.
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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.
Smartproxy’s residential proxy pool is not only big but also performant. The infrastructure had no problems routing requests successfully over 99% of the time. The response time was faster than all other providers but Oxylabs, beating direct competitors like IPRoyal several time.
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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.
The residential proxies handled most websites we threw at them admirably. The only target to give them a hard time was Google where every fourth request failed. Not ideal but we’ve seen much worse.
Smartproxy Mobile Proxies
Mobile proxies are Smartproxy’s premium service made for mobile-first or most hardened websites. Its 10 million-strong network borrows IPs from phones and other devices on a cellular connection.
Features
Smartproxy’s mobile proxies have all the basic features you’d expect from a peer-to-peer service: wide country coverage, unlimited threads, and ability to either quickly rotate IPs or establish sessions for multi-step tasks. The only missing feature is city-level targeting; but to compensate, Smartproxy offers OS filtering (ability to choose between Android and iOS devices), which is hard to come by.
Pricing Plans
You can get Smartproxy’s mobile proxies by subscribing to a plan, which starts from $38 ($19/GB). A plan lasts for a month and updates automatically. Or, you can pay as you go at a fixed rate of $21/GB.
Like most similar products, this one charges for traffic, otherwise giving you full access to the proxy network.
Compared to the broader market, Smartproxy’s rates are below the average, and it manages to outprice most providers we’ve reviewed (such as Oxylabs, Bright Data, or SOAX). All in all, if you’re looking for a premium service, these proxies present a pretty good deal.
Performance Benchmarks
We tested Smartproxy’s mobile proxies in March 2023.
#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.
Smartproxy’s mobile network was very large in all of our tested locations. With over 70,000 IPs in the US, it’d take a while to get the same proxy twice. This ensures that the pool remains clean, even with many people using it. Smartproxy should also be a viable option for those who need IPs in non-standard locations, as proved by the size of its Australian pool.
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- Unfiltered pool comparison
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- Mobile 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.
Smartproxy’s mobile proxy infrastructure had a very high success rate. While it couldn’t quite reach residential proxy levels, you’ll be able to to focus on extracting data and not fighting your proxy servers. The proxies were also nippy – they outpaced most competitors, including SOAX and Bright Data.
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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.
The mobile proxies had few issues with challenging websites like Google and the photo-focused social media network. Their success rate was lowest with Walmart – mostly due to issues unrelated to IP quality. All in all, these are good proxies.
Web Scraping APIs
Proxy networks aside, Smartproxy offers four web scraping APIs. You can pass them an URL, and the APIs will return its contents without fail. You won’t have to worry about managing proxy networks or overcoming website protection mechanisms.
Web Scraping API is Smartproxy’s general-purpose scraper – it can extract any page without structuring the output. The other three have parsers for specific website groups, namely search engines, e-commerce stores, and social media networks.
Features
Smartproxy’s scrapers are rich with features. You can select any country, specify a device type, add custom headers, and pass on cookies with a session ID for multi-step scraping.
The general-purpose API accepts any URL you send it. Smartproxy’s specialized APIs use a parametrized request structure, meaning you can simply enter a search query, ASIN, or hashtag without forming URLs yourself. They also have target-specific parameters like domain language or co-ordinates for localized Google results.
In addition, Smartproxy has built specialized scrapers for various properties of major targets. For example, there’s an endpoint optimized for Google ads, Amazon product pages, or TikTok hashtags.
All four tools integrate as an API or proxy server. The first method works over an open connection, or you can fetch results via webhook with an option to send batch requests.
If there’s anything missing, it’s page interactions and maybe more output formats like .CSV.
Pricing Plans
Request-based pricing that starts from $50.
Performance Benchmarks
We last tested Smartproxy’s web scraping APIs in January 2023, for our research on web scraping APIs.
Test #1: Google
We made 10,800 requests to Google SERP pages over a week, one request per minute. This served both to test the API’s stability, as well as its ability to open Google.
Smartproxy’s SERP scraper performed flawlessly with Google: it returned nearly all of our requests, and enabling data parsing had no effect on the response time.
Test #2: Amazon
We made 1,000 requests to Amazon product pages with data parsing enabled.
Amazon posed no challenge as well. The scraper was even faster compared to Google, despite Amazon having much bigger page sizes.
Test #3: Photo-focused social media network
We made 500 requests to the website’s GraphQL endpoint and 500 more requests fully rendering pages with the headless parameter.
The results with social media were also perfect. One weak spot was response time with JavaScript rendering enabled – it slowed down the scraper significantly.
How to Use Smartproxy
Smartproxy is one of the easier providers to use. It supports self-service, doesn’t take long to set up, and has user-friendly tools to help you work with proxies.
Registration
To register with Smartproxy, you’ll need to enter an email and password, select a use case from a provided list, and then verify your email address. Alternatively, you can sign up with your Google account.
Smartproxy does have a KYC procedure, but you only need to interact with someone if you trigger the provider’s safeguards. It’s possible to access the dashboard without verifying an email address, but you won’t be able to buy anything until you do.
Dashboard
Smartproxy’s dashboard includes all the necessary functionality to manage proxies yourself. You can:
- add money to the Smartproxy wallet,
- buy and upgrade plans,
- authorize access to proxies,
- set up the proxy server,
- create sub-users,
- track your traffic use,
- and contact customer support.
Most of the controls are separated by service. There are sections for datacenter, residential proxies, and web scraping tools which lead to individual products. For example, to reach mobile proxies, I’d need to click on the Residential proxies drop-down and select them from the available options.
You can get a quick overview of your services on the dashboard’s main screen: see your current plan, top targets, and traffic use. However, it’s once again dedicated to one product at a time, requiring you to open different tabs for other services.
There are introductory tutorials and guidance all around to help you get acquainted. However, they don’t feel overbearing.
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- The dashboard’s main screen
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- A tab with available products
Subscription Management
Smartproxy supports full self-service for each product. You can buy a plan in two ways. The first is by making a direct purchase with your credit card, PayPal, or another payment method. Alternatively, you can add money to the Smartproxy wallet first and then use it for purchases. This lets you pay as you go.
Before purchasing a plan, you can use Smartproxy’s Smart Plan Recommendation tool. It requires completing three steps: entering a target, selecting headless or non-headless scraping, and usage frequency. The dashboard then recommends a suitable plan. This tool is available for the residential proxies and scraping APIs.
Smartproxy has a separate Billing section where you can see payment history, download invoices, overview and modify all active plans. It’s also the place to top up your wallet balance.
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- Selecting a plan
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- The plan recommendation tool in action
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- Our active subscriptions
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- The list of payments
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- The wallet page
Proxy Management
The proxy setup is pretty straightforward:
- Create a user or whitelist an IP address.
- Use a convenient widget to filter the proxy servers you need. The widget asks you to choose your preferred authentication method, set up the filtering options (location, OS), rotation time, protocol, and output format (endpoint:port or cURL formatted).
- Select how many endpoints you want to generate. Or, in the case of dedicated proxies, select your assigned IPs. Once you’re done, you can copy this list to the clipboard, export it into .csv or .txt.
Smartproxy also automatically generates code samples in cURL and multiple programming languages. You can copy-paste this into your web scraping script.
Overall, the setup procedure is well thought out. My only gripe is that you can’t set a custom password for a proxy user. The system generates them automatically.
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- The residential proxy setup widget
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- Auto-generated code samples
In addition, Smartproxy offers a fleshed-out API for controlling its proxies programmatically. The API is available for every user, not only resellers. Its functions include creating and managing sub-users, setting traffic limits, viewing usage reports and subscription status, and filtering available endpoints.
If you need proxies on your web browser, Smartproxy provides browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox. They work only with residential proxy plans. In the settings, you can choose a country, whether you want the proxies to be sticky or rotate, and authorize them either with a whitelisted IP or user:pass credentials.
Usage Tracking
Smartproxy’s dashboard includes visual graphs where you can see how much traffic or requests you’ve expended. You can filter the graphs by sub-user or date, and they also display statistics for each target. The timeframes are 24 hours, week, month, or custom.
Alternatively, you can fetch traffic expenditure statistics using an API call.
Residential proxy traffic usage statistics
Documentation
Smartproxy has got the documentation part down. You’ll find a plethora of instructions covering various aspects of the service:
- a detailed start guide that explains all the concepts and features,
- an FAQ divided into multiple sections by topics,
- integration guides for major bots and automation tools,
- and configuration guides for web browsers and operating systems.
There’s also a separate hub for technical documentation with tips & tricks, code samples, and troubleshooting. Some of the content has become outdated, but the documentation is handled well in general.
Smartproxy’s documentation hub
For users of its scraping APIs, Smartproxy has an interactive playground to try out the service.
Hands-On Support
Smartproxy’s customer service is available round the clock via email or live chat. The main language is English, though the support can also speak Chinese – and, of course, other languages via Google Translate.
Whenever we’ve had to interact with the support agents, we received quick (think nearly instant) and competent responses. In 2020, we even gave Smartproxy an award to acknowledge its customer service. It remains excellent to this day and can be considered one of the provider’s strongest points.
Conclusion
Having read this far, I hope you can see where I was coming from in the introduction.
Smartproxy really has struck something great. The company has responsive customer support, performant proxies, and everything set up for convenient self-service.
To be fair, compared to something like Bright Data or Oxylabs, it’s nothing special. But this is without considering Smartproxy’s final ace – it somehow manages to achieve all this while keeping prices very competitive.
Of course, not everything is perfect. Some corners had to be cut, and you may find services like Smartproxy’s dedicated proxies – or in some cases, its web scraping APIs – limited.
But that’s the whole point of Smartproxy: the company focuses on the functionality that is good enough for the majority of users at the expense of some nice-to-have or niche features. And it is damn good at that.
Based on my experience with Smartproxy, I can recommend it to anyone looking for a great proxy provider.
Smartproxy Alternatives
Oxylabs is like a premium version of Smartproxy. It controls a significantly larger IP pool, and you can get specialized APIs that simplify web scraping.
Bright Data is another strong option with more features and powerful proxy management tools. It also sells proxy-based web scraping APIs and even complete data sets.
The options above are expensive. Let’s go the other way. PacketStream offers some of the cheapest residential proxies on the market with rotation every request and sticky sessions.
Thanks for the review guys! Anyhow, I have a question about Smartproxy and their proxies for sneakers – their website says that they work with all major bots, including Yeezy, but what about their IPs? What’s the chance that I’ll constantly get an abused one and won’t be able to cop?
Vincent, residential proxies are shared, so there’s always a risk you’ll get an IP that’s been already blocked on your target website. This goes for any provider, not only Smartproxy. In theory you can get unused static residential proxies, but they’re hard to find and will likely cost more.
Considering that Smartproxy has one of the larger residential proxy networks, the chances of getting a used IP out are not that high. I’d gladly take them. Besides, you can set up multiple tasks for your sneaker bot to further reduce the risk. So, I wouldn’t worry about that too much.
Happy copping!
Would the micro plan be enough to let Nike Sneaker not run a large amount of tasks without having a drop in latency ?
James, each residential IP is like a unique server, so the number of sneaker tasks you run with different proxies will have no effect on network latency. Unless, of course, you run so many that your PC/VPS starts lagging!
As you can see on this page, we load tested Smartproxy (up to 500 tasks at a time from a single VPS) and it performed very well.
Its micro plan also lets you use the whole network (for 5 Gb of traffic), which is enough for a couple of sneaker releases or more, depending on the number or tasks you run and your monitor frequency.
I think about getting them for sneakers, but do you know if they work well with bots? For example AIO bot or the shit bot?
Greg, Smartproxy is compatible with sneaker bots. They also have integration instructions for most major bots (https://smartproxy.com/integrations). The Shit Bot isn’t on the list, but there shouldn’t be any compatibility issues with it.
Easy
Hey, the discount only is 20% now. thanks
Thanks for the heads up!
Hello. And Bye.
Please help me to check whether these IP is your company’s proxy IP. If so, I will buy your proxy.I have a lot of agency needs.73.124.158.247,45.50.52.81,72.184.6.215
Sorry zhang, we don’t have the ability to check that. You can try asking Smartproxy directly.
Hi
Do you have UK proxy that support Iphone and can connect to website like Stripe?
Thank you!
Hi Ly. According to its FAQ, Smartproxy might block Stripe. It’s best if you contact them and ask directly.
Hi, i keep getting deactivated whenever i try to verify my account.
Hi Jeff. You should contact the provider’s customer support. They should be able to help you solve the issue.