Home / Proxy reviews / Bright Data Review
A leading web data platform, with speedy, reliable proxy networks, ethical practices, versatile data collections, substantial documentation, and round-the-clock support.
In the domain of proxy solutions, Bright Data stands out as a benchmark with its robust management tools and regular introduction of new, innovative features. Bright Data caters to a wide array of use cases – particularly for enterprise clients – and boasts a proven track record and brand presence.
It’s currently ranked #1 among proxy networks as per its G2 score, a testament to its reputation as a behemoth in the industry and its endorsement by Fortune 500 companies. It also has an impressive 4.5/5 rating on Trustpilot, based on 660 reviews, indicating a pretty strong vote of confidence from the user community.
But recent years have seen increased competition in the proxy space. Specialized proxy solutions catering to specific enterprise needs have also gained prominence. Does Bright Data still hold up?
In this review, we’ll aim to discover just that, as we delve into Bright Data’s current services, covering its features in detail, and evaluating its standing in the present proxy landscape and whether its G2 and Trustpilot ratings are justified.
Established in 2014, Bright Data offers a diverse range of services, including access to various proxy servers (datacenter, residential, ISP and mobile proxies), multiple data collection APIs, a cloud-based tool for developing scrapers on Bright Data’s infrastructure, and even pre-collected data sets.
Within the proxy industry, Bright Data earned its reputation by pioneering residential proxies at a time when the rest of the industry predominantly favored datacenter proxies. With its special emphasis on ethical sourcing and usage, Bright Data’s proxies are renowned for their high reliability and trustworthiness.
Bright Data procures its IPs in a public and consensual manner, with an option for peers and partners to opt out at any time. It has a strict and thorough vetting process that involves KYC checks, usage monitoring, third-party audits, and a dedicated compliance department to ensure ethical sourcing and usage. Moreover, its ethical approach has been validated by reputable third-party industry reports including Herzog Strategic, Ovum, Gartner, Frost & Sullivan, and multiple T1 security companies.
The strict adherence to ethical usage combined with impressive performance has allowed the company to thrive in the ensuing years in spite of increasing competition, with top universities and Fortune 500 companies among its clientele.
At present, 95% of Bright Data’s proxy usage is taken up by residential and datacenter proxies. While the company mainly caters to enterprise customers, Bright Data has greatly expanded the scope of its offerings in recent years, aiming to be the go-to platform for web data. These offerings make it suitable for a range of diverse use cases, extending beyond just enterprise customers to accommodate developers and companies with varying levels of web scraping experience.
In the following sections, we’ll explore Bright Data’s proxy offerings and learn about their features and pricing.
As mentioned earlier, Bright Data emerged as a trailblazer in the proxy industry landscape by being one of the first to introduce residential proxies. Today, Bright Data’s residential proxy network comprises over 72 million IPs spanning 195 countries globally and boasts an impressive 99.99% uptime. This extensive pool of residential IPs is ethically sourced from individuals who voluntarily opt in and receive rewards for contributing their IPs to the network.
These proxies allow users to access hard-to-reach websites with a diverse pool of real, user-assigned IPs, enabling the viewing or collection of data in a manner akin to a genuine user with precise location filters enabled for any location on the planet. Just like with Bright Data’s datacenter proxies, with the residential proxy network, you can target any country, city, carrier, and ASN/ZIP.
While the rotation options start with basic settings via the dashboard, they become highly customizable when using the provider’s Proxy Manager (more on that later), and there are no concurrency limits as long as the account has a sufficient balance.
Bright Data’s residential proxies also come with SOCKS5 support (via the Proxy Manager app). The benefit of the SOCKS5 protocol lies in its ability to enhance online privacy and IP protection, helping to bypass internet blocks and provide improved performance for a wide range of applications and devices. Due to its efficiency in handling firewall navigation with minimal complications, it is also a preferred choice for enterprise use cases.
The standout here, however, is the feature for highly granular ASN/ZIP targeting, providing detailed control and customization for internet traffic. Such narrow targeting can be crucial in letting users access localized data from specific regions, or even from specific networks. This ensures not only accuracy but relevance, a critical aspect in the age of information overload.
You can opt for the pay-as-you-go option to use the residential proxies without commitment or opt for a subscription. The latter may be more cost-effective in the long run (and is currently running a 40% off promotion on all proxy rates). You can reduce the rates further by instead opting for a yearly subscription as well.
It’s worth bearing in mind that activating features such as city or ZIP code targeting, while perfect for niche use cases, results in increased pricing on top of your existing plan.
If we leave out this functionality, Bright Data begins with reasonable pricing. However, when all features are activated, it can become a pretty expensive choice among its competitors until reaching enterprise levels of scale.
At the same time, it’s worth bearing in mind that Bright Data’s residential proxies stand out for their reliability and robustness, with their high success rates and ethical sourcing–qualities that are hard to match by competitors in a comprehensive manner. The choice between performance and pricing ultimately depends on your specific use case and the trade-off you are willing to make.
Bright Data’s residential proxies consistently demonstrate an impressive success rate of over 99%, with an average response time just slightly exceeding 1 second.
Notably, these proxies maintain success rates exceeding 95% even when accessing sensitive websites like Amazon, which implement internal security measures to mitigate proxy usage.
To sum up, Bright Data has a near-flawless success rate and an average response time that’s similar to most premium competitors, making it a highly reliable proxy service, ideal for both small-scale and enterprise-level tasks involving uninterrupted web scraping.
Bright Data’s datacenter proxy network boasts an impressive 1.6 million IP addresses from over 98 countries. It has 99.99% network uptime, plus a real-time network status monitor making it a reliable and robust choice for users requiring consistent and high-performing proxy services. At the same time, the datacenter infrastructure ensures that they are a fast and cost-effective solution.
The datacenter proxy network by Bright Data is equipped with the capability to target any country or city. Although not as sophisticated as Bright Data’s residential proxies, these datacenter proxies still prove valuable for a variety of use case scenarios, such as:
Bright Data provides various configurations for datacenter proxies:
Bright Data operates on a unified system, offering three types of datacenter proxy configurations. They share features like extensive location coverage, unlimited threads, and SOCKS5 support. All three configurations share the capability to rotate proxies or opt for sending multiple requests with a specific address. Regardless of rotation choices, connections go through Bright Data’s load-balancing gateway, which ensures that your workload is evenly distributed across multiple proxy servers (based on factors like server load, geographic location, and latency) and dynamically routed away from servers experiencing issues, effectively preventing bottlenecks and downtime.
Notably for the Pay per IP option, there’s a toggle for 100% uptime, automatically replacing downed proxies.
It’s worth noting that Bright Data automatically assigns datacenter proxies, and users may need to refresh some IPs once or twice (a paid service) for optimal configuration.
For all three, you can opt for a pay-as-you-go plan or commit to a fixed one. The pay-as-you-go plan suits those who require intermittent proxy usage, ensuring cost-effectiveness without contractual constraints. However, for long-term use, it may end up costing more per unit than taking up a fixed plan. As for the others:
What makes the pricing a bit tricky is that no matter which pricing plan you go with, you will have to choose if you want shared, dedicated, or premium IPs for that specific package (and the differential rates for each configuration would still apply).
In the domain of performance, Bright Data’s shared datacenter proxies manage to be consistently effective, with the majority of requests reaching the target, with low latency, and with <1 second response time. Both shared and dedicated IPs are very fast, nearly approaching download speed without proxy servers, making them suitable for streaming and traffic-intensive tasks.
However, unlike the case with Bright Data’s residential proxies, the datacenter proxies sometimes struggle with more sensitive sites like Amazon, potentially due to IP blacklisting.
Bright Data’s mobile proxy network comprises 7 million mobile IPs sourced from the mobile phones of real individuals worldwide. These residential mobile IPs are provided by ISPs for use on people’s mobile devices, and individuals willingly opt-in to share their IPs within our peer-to-peer mobile network.
This enables users to connect to authentic mobile connections worldwide, utilizing 3G/4G mobile connections and accessing the internet as a genuine mobile user. Just like with the datacenter and residential proxy networks, the mobile proxy network also includes capabilities for ASN, carrier, and mobile network targeting.
Bright Data’s mobile proxies are ideal for:
In terms of functionality, the mobile proxy network is very similar to Bright Data’s residential proxy offering. You have the flexibility to filter IPs with great precision, implement server rotation per request, or set up customized sticky sessions. Bright Data imposes no limits on the number of simultaneous requests, provides SOCKS5 support, and incorporates distinctive features such as request caching and dedicated addresses.
Again, this is all similar to the residential proxy network. The billing structure is primarily based on traffic, unless users choose to activate premium features, primarily filtering options, which result in a doubling of the base price. Additionally, opting for dedicated addresses incurs an additional cost compared to the standard service.
However, following a price adjustment in the summer of 2023, Bright Data’s mobile proxies have become highly competitive in the premium segment, particularly for users satisfied with country-level targeting. However, for those requiring more advanced features, they remain positioned as the pricier option in the market.
Bright Data’s mobile proxy infrastructure demonstrates commendable performance in an unfiltered pool test, with success rates averaging at around 98% and response time averaging at slightly over 1.5s which is pretty much the industry average for top-tier proxy providers.
However, when subjected to filtering for American IPs, it may encounter some challenges. Despite this, its overall performance remains strong, showcasing reliability and effectiveness.
Besides its proxy network offerings, Bright Data also offers a Web Unlocker that takes care of all the pitfalls associated with DIY proxy management. The Web Unlocker is a proxy-unlocking solution designed to enable you to concentrate on your data collection, with Bright Data handling the entire proxy and unblocking infrastructure on your behalf, on their server end.
Utilizing real-time monitoring, the Web Unlocker actively addresses website blocking techniques through automated features such as browser fingerprinting, CAPTCHA solving, IP rotations, header customization, request retries, and more, ensuring seamless access to any site. Moreover, it automatically selects the best proxy network for your request, managing the infrastructure on your behalf, and prioritizing success, meaning that you no longer have to exhaust your IPs or set up intricate proxy waterfalls just to access essential web data.
The Web Unlocker is an ideal solution for:
The Web Unlocker comes with the following set of features which make it a strong contender as an ideal all-in-one proxy solution especially if your use case is large-scale seamless data collection:
Similar to its proxies, Bright Data’s Web Unlocker has a range of pricing plans tailored to suit varying needs and budgets.
The pay-as-you-go plan offers flexibility with no monthly commitment. You pay $3 per thousand requests (CPM), with premium features available at $6.00 per CPM.
However, if your needs tend to be smaller in scale on a regular basis, opting for the micro-package at $10 per month could be a more suitable and cost-effective starting point in the long run. Currently, it has a 40% discount on all proxy rates. The proxy services are priced at $1.80 per CPM and premium features at $3.60 per CPM. For usage beyond $10, you can transition to the pay-as-you-go plan. Along with that, it also comes with a free trial.
Besides these, the Web Unlocker also comes with two other pricing options (both of which come with free trials):
To make use of Bright Data’s proxy services, you first have to register on their site. This is fairly simple, and you are given the option to sign up for a free account as well which starts you off with a $5 credit (you have to click on either ‘Start free trial’ or ‘Start free with Google’).
Once signed up and you log in, you are taken to your ‘User Dashboard’ where you need to click on View proxy products.
This will take you to the Proxies & Scraping Infrastructure page. Click on the My Proxies tab and then click the Add button and select the type of proxy network you want to use (in this case, we are going with residential proxies).
This will take you to a page wherein you can further customize your functionalities with a high degree of granularity. While this adds to the cost, it will give you fine-grained control over exactly what you need from the proxy network.
Once the proxy is added, you’ll be redirected to the proxy details page. You can access the necessary details, like the host, username, and password from this page.
On this page, you can access the necessary details, like the host, username, and password from this page which will be used to integrate the proxy into your codebase.
This is a fairly accessible setup process that nonetheless offers a degree of customization that lets you tailor your proxies to suit your specific needs. Moreover, Bright Data provides extensive documentation, web data masterclass, videos, blogs, webinars, code snippets for multiple programming languages, and plenty of presets to help users who are developers. This makes the process of getting started with their services a breeze, whether you are a new or seasoned developer.
For tracking your usage and subscription statistics, Bright Data uses the concept of “Zones”, which are essentially shared ecosystems, in which users can have multiple active plans for a specific service and manage them all in the same dashboard.
Zone settings include network type (Datacenter, ISP, Residential, Mobile), dedicated IPs (Shared IPs or dedicated IPs), and residential permissions (Country, City, ASN, gIP).
A “Zone” is created when configuring specific project settings and permissions (as we saw during the setup). Users can establish up to 50 zones, each with distinct configurations that are modifiable. Additional zones beyond the limit incur an extra charge.
You can also track usage across multiple zones in customizable graphs. Having detailed usage statistics on a per-proxy and per-zone level on one screen makes it relatively simple and user-friendly to keep track of usage and manage your subscription which would be complicated if you had to switch between multiple tabs.
We would say Bright Data distinguishes itself from its competition when it comes to usage management due to its unified dashboard and the comprehensive level of detail provided in its statistics. This sets it apart from many other services where “usage graphs” often lack information and are less than ideal. Combine this with the fact that it does not limit IP addresses or users on any plan, and you have a winning recipe.
For advanced users, Bright Data offers industry-leading proxy management and customization via an open-source Proxy Manager app. The sheer number of advanced features and configurations made possible by the app makes it ideal for pretty much any use case. Via the app, you have access to:
The Proxy Manager app can run on-prem as a Windows/Linux binary – meaning you retain full control over permissions, management, and monitoring – or, as a managed solution on Bright Data’s Cloud as a web app, giving you the privilege of live, 24×7 server status monitoring by Bright Data, guaranteeing uptime.
Bright Data provides extensive documentation, web data masterclass, videos, blogs, webinars, code snippets for multiple programming languages, and plenty of presets to help users.
A good starting point for new users would be the FAQ page, which is very detailed, answers all generic questions, and provides sufficient information – which is what’s desired from such an expansive product.
Bright Data offers around-the-clock 24/7 industry-standard customer support, with multilingual support for global users, along with dedicated account managers for certain plans. It makes use of ticket systems, emails, WhatsApp, and Telegram.
In the customer support department, compared to its peers, Bright Data goes the extra mile by providing frequent feature releases and personalized customization based on your needs – be it a custom dataset, a feature request for your scrapers, or any proxy-related queries. You can even report suspected abuse if you notice suspicious activities using Bright Data’s network (this is again in strict adherence with Bright Data’s commitment to ethical use).
As mentioned earlier, Bright Data aims to be the leading web data platform in the world. Based on the assessment of its proxy networks, with their speed, reliability, and large pool size, combined with the stress on ethical sourcing and transparency, as well as its various data collection offerings – not to mention substantial documentation and 24/7 support – there is enough evidence to substantiate this claim.
Bright Data primarily caters to enterprise-grade customers but as seen throughout the review, their services and plans can cater to a versatile range of use case scenarios. It is particularly well-suited for large-scale data collection projects where uninterrupted data collection is crucial.
What if you’re a smaller-scale user? Bright Data can appear to be one of the more expensive options, especially if you need to opt for premium features like unlimited bandwidth for dedicated proxies. Nonetheless, there is presently a 40% discount on the micro-package plan which might alleviate some price concerns.
If price is not a primary concern and especially if your use case involves advanced usage, large-scale, or enterprise-grade data collection projects, then Bright Data’s proxy network is one of the top choices available.
As a developer, I appreciate how this article dives into both the technical aspects and practical applications of Bright Data proxies. The mention of use cases like web scraping and data collection really resonates with my needs.
3 months ago