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Smartproxy Review

The best balance between features and price.

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

Rating 9.2 / 10
4.6/5

Try Smartproxy Residential Proxies for free.

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 2024, 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!

News about Smartproxy

It’s the second price cut in less than a year.
It’s the second price drop in six months.
The mobile proxy price wars continue.

General Information

CountryInternational
Founded2018
Proxy networks

Datacenter (shared, dedicated, rotating)
ISP (rotating)
Residential
Mobile
Proxy API (Site Unblocker)

Web scrapers

General-purpose, SERP, e-commerce, and social media APIs
No-Code Scraper

Other toolsAntidetect browser, browser extension
Price rangeMid-range
Starting price$7
Payment methodsCredit card, PayPal, Bitcoin
Trial14-day refund

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

  1. A list of shared IPs with customizable traffic and ability to rotate. 
  2. A list of dedicated proxies in the US.
  3. A large pool of rotating proxies in the US and Europe.

Features

 SharedDedicatedRotating
FormatIP list / custom poolIP listProxy pool with 100,000 IPs
CountriesUS, Australia, Israel & EU locationsUSUS & 5 major EU locations
RotationEvery request, staticStaticEvery request, 30 mins
ThreadsUnlimited
TrafficUp to unlimitedUnlimitedBased on plan
SOCKS5
AuthenticationCredentialsCredentials, IP whitelistCredentials
Other Monthly refresh, non-sequential IPs

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

 SharedDedicatedRotating
ModelIPs + trafficIPsTraffic
FormatSubscription
Starting price$10 for 100 IPs & 50 GB$7.5 for 3 IPs$30 for 50 GB
UpsellsMore trafficNon-sequential IPsMore sub-users
Trial14-day limited refund

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.

#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.

Avg. success rate
Avg. response time
99.93%0.80 s
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.

#2: Download speed

We tested 10 rotating and 10 dedicated IPs using DigitalOcean’s 100 MB NYC benchmark.

Avg. without proxiesRotating averageDedicated average
17.49 MB/s12.87 MB/s4.11 MB/s
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.

#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.

 RotatingDedicated
 Success rateResponse timeSuccess rateResponse time
Amazon91.94%3.11 s94.95%2.93 s
Homedepot27.24%1.51 s98.91%1.18 s
Walmart100%1.62 s99.81%1.33 s
Total73.06%2.08 s97.89%1.81 s
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

Proxy pool:
55 million IPs
Countries:
195
Rotation: Every request, 1, 10, 30 minsConcurrency: Unlimited
Integration:
Backconnect gateway
Targeting:
Country, state, city

SOCKS5:

Authentication:
Credentials,
IP whitelist

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

Model:
Subscription, pay as you go
Self-service:
Starting price:
$7 for 1 GB
Other:
Auto top-up
Format:
Traffic
Upsells:
More whitelisted IPs/sub-users
Trial: 14-day refund 

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.

diagram of the number of smartproxy IPs by location
residential pool comparison 2023
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.

#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.

GatewayAvg. success rateAvg. response time
Random99.43%0.57 s
US99.71%0.76 s
UK99.63%0.41 s
Germany99.60%0.39 s
France99.66%0.38 s
India98.72%1.51 s
Australia99.71%1.16 s
smartproxy residential proxy response time comparison with other providers march 2023
Smartproxy’s residential proxy pool was 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.

#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.

WebsiteAvg. success rateAvg. response time
Amazon97.43%3.27 s
Google77.68%1.85 s
Social Media99.08%1.90 s
Walmart99.41%1.98 s
Total93.40%2.25 s
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

Format: Proxy pool with 10 million IPs
Locations: All countries
Filtering: Country, state, city, ASN, OS
Rotation: Every request, 1, 10, 30 mins
Threads: Unlimited
Traffic: Plan based
SOCKS5:
Authentication: Credentials, IP whitelist
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 product has particularly generous filtering options: you can choose not only a city, ASN, but also the desired device operating system. One caveat is that ASN and city filters can’t be used together – this is likely to keep the IP pool reasonably large. 

Pricing Plans

Model: Subscription, pay as you go
Format: Traffic
Starting price: $20 for 1 GB
Trial: 14-day refund

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 $20/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 premium providers we’ve reviewed (such as Oxylabs and Bright Data). All in all, if you’re looking for a quality 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.

GatewayUnique IPsMobile %
Random175,40496.33%
US73,52197.45%
UK19,44898.86%
Germany29,85299.01%
France43,71198.34%
India181,09599.29%
Australia4,87894.53%
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.

#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.

GatewayAvg. success rateAvg. response time
Random97.37%1.12 s
US98.28%1.69 s
UK97.80%0.93 s
Germany99.05%0.85 s
France98.73%0.87 s
India98.47%2.13 s
Australia97.32%2.14 s
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.

#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.

WebsiteAvg. success rateAvg. response time
Amazon96.27%4.42 s
Google94.95%2.66 s
Social Media97.57%2.38 s
Walmart92.28%3.14 s
Total95.66%3.15 s

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.

Smartproxy 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

Targets: Universal
Structured data: Google, Amazon, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit
Locations: All countries (with coordinate-level targeting for Google)
JavaScript rendering:

Concurrency: Unlimited
Integration: Real-time API, asynchronous API, proxy
Output formats: HTML, PNG, JSON (for targets with parsers)
Other features: Batch requests, device type, headers, cookies, sessions

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 three 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

 Web SERPE-CommerceSocial Media
ModelSubscription
FormatSuccessful requests
Starting price$50 for 25K requests ($2 CPM)$50 for 13K requests ($3.85 CPM)$50 for 15,000K ($3.33 CPM)$50 for 25K requests ($2 CPM)
Trial3,000 requests over 14 days
Smartproxy’s web scraping APIs charge for successful requests, which is the industry standard. However, they don’t differentiate the rate based on additional features, such as target difficulty or headless browsing. This makes basic requests more expensive but can work to your advantage with complex targets.
You can subscribe for a month or a year at a discount. Unless you cancel it, the subscription renews automatically.
Smartproxy has a variety of pricing plans. They all start at $50, but the cost per 1,000 requests differs by API. Web Scraping APIs is the cheapest, and the most expensive product, SERP Scraping API, costs nearly twice more.
The rates aren’t the lowest on the market, but they tend to scale pretty well. Social Media Scraping API, however, is a bargain: you can get data from challenging targets like Instagram for $2/1k or less. Few competitors offer social media scrapers at all due to litigation risk, let alone this cheap.

Performance Benchmarks

We last tested Smartproxy’s 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.

 Avg. success rateAvg. response time
Unparsed 100%6.09 s
Parsed99.85%6.04 s

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.

Avg. success rateAvg. response time
100%4.69 s

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.

 Avg. success rateAvg. response time
GraphQL
100%8.95 s
Headless100%29.09 s

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.

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.

Proxy Management

The proxy setup is pretty straightforward:

  1. Create a user or whitelist an IP address.
  2. 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). 
  3. 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.

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. 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.

smartproxy dashboard traffic use
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.

For users of its scraping APIs, Smartproxy has an interactive playground to try out the service.

smartproxy documentation hub
Smartproxy's documentation hub.

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 logo
Rating 9.3 / 10
4.6/5

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 logo
Rating 9.1 / 10
4.6/5

Bright Data is another strong option with more features and powerful proxy management tools. It also sells proxy-based web scraping APIs and complete data sets.

black soax logo
Rating 9 / 10
4.5/5

SOAX offers similar features and performance to Smartproxy. The proxy pool may be smaller and less diverse, but it comes at a slightly lower price point. 

Want more? View the full list of the Smartproxy alternatives.

Recommended for:

Anyone looking for a great balance between features and price.

Try Residential Proxies for free.

smartproxy-logo
Rating 9.2 / 10
4.6/5

Try Residential Proxies for free.

Adam Dubois
Adam Dubois
Proxy geek and developer.

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