An In-Depth Review of IPRoyal

IPRoyal has an extensive network of over 2 million unique residential proxies spread across 195 countries. These proxies offer city, state, and country-level specificity. They also boast a high success rate of 99.7%. This makes them effective for diverse web-scraping applications.

In addition to their dynamic residential proxies, IPRoyal also offers static residential proxies sourced from premium ISPs. You can choose a static IP from 21 countries with 99.9% uptime. This makes them ideal for activities that require a consistent IP address, such as e-commerce scraping, social media management, sneaker buying, and SEO purposes. Both their dynamic and static proxies support the SOCKS5 protocol, ensuring enhanced security and performance. The SOCKS5 protocol is crucial because it offers enhanced online privacy and IP protection, allows bypassing internet blocks, and delivers improved performance across various applications and devices. Additionally, its ability to navigate firewalls with fewer issues makes it particularly useful for enterprise use cases, ensuring secure and efficient connectivity.

IPRoyal follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model where you have to buy a certain amount of data that won’t expire until it’s used. For regular users, prices start at $7 for 1 GB of traffic, with rates going down to as low as $2.45 per GB of traffic for a total of 5000 GB of traffic, translating to a 65% discount for the top tier plan. As you can see, these plans scale extremely well.

For enterprise customers with a requirement of over 10000 GB of data, IPRoyal provides special rates which are disclosed upon request.

Overall, IPRoyal’s residential proxies, while not as numerous as other competitors, offer a lot of flexibility and scalability when it comes to traffic and pricing.

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.

The performance of IPRoyal residential proxies is at par with its competitors. The success rate depends on the country you are targeting. Some countries have a lower proxy pool, which lowers the success rates. However, in terms of average success rate, it’s not quite far off from its competitors.

The average response time for requests, on the other hand, could be better. It takes much longer to respond than the leaders in the same category. Also, for scraping popular websites like Amazon and Walmart, the success rate is not very impressive.

IPRoyal offers regular proxies and sneaker proxies. These are dedicated proxies and do not rotate automatically. These IPs also offer unlimited traffic and unlimited threads.

Additionally, these proxies are also equipped with SOCKS5 support, making them ideal for high-traffic applications. You can choose your proxy from more than 30 different countries. However, there are two major drawbacks: You can’t pick more than one country per plan, and some of the countries don’t have a lot of proxies available at times.

IPs are provided in a list and you have the ability to refresh the list free of charge once per month. Alternatively, you can choose to stick with the same IPs for the subscription period.

As for the sneaker proxies, they have the same features as the regular proxies, except you need to specify your target website when you’re purchasing a plan.

The pricing plans of regular datacenter proxies start at $1.56 per proxy. You’ll get a 30-day validity. But, if you want a longer validity, you can opt for 60 or 90-day plans. In which case, you also get better pricing. In all these cases, the proxies are not shared with anyone else during your usage and offer zero bandwidth or session limits.

The pricing of sneaker proxies starts at $1 per proxy per day with a validity of 1 day. The rate decreases if you opt for a longer plan, just like datacenter proxies. There are no session or bandwidth limits, and it also supports the SOCKS5 protocol. When compared to regular proxies, sneaker proxies are slightly costlier – about 10-20% more.

The pricing plan is much simpler compared to many other competitors in the domain. The pricing does not change depending on the location, which is a plus. Many other proxy services like Oxylabs and LunaProxy charge higher for specific locations. Also, the service remains scalable to 100 proxies, and even for 300-500 proxies, IPRoyal is still cheaper compared to other competitors.

The IPs are decent enough to handle regular or simple tasks. For example, the average download speed with a US IP list was around 5 MB per second, which is decent enough to handle regular tasks including video streaming. When targeting popular websites like Walmart or Home Depot, the success rate is nearly perfect. However, with Amazon, the success rate drops significantly, which isn’t ideal.

Along with residential and datacenter proxies, IPRoyal also offers mobile proxies. They have a mobile proxy pool of over 2.5 million residential mobile IPs and support 5G/4G/3G/LTE. These proxies are available for five locations – US, UK, Germany, Netherlands, and Lithuania and services are offered via carriers TMobile, Vodafone, Telia, and Bite.

The mobile proxies offer unlimited bandwidth and sessions. You also get instant IP changes and auto-rotation options. Auto-rotation allows two options: Either the IP automatically changes every 3 minutes, or you can change the IP using the Rotate IP button every 6 minutes. This auto-rotation toggle option is not available in their 1-day plan.

IPRoyal also supports SOCKS5 protocol, making it a good option for traffic-intensive operations.

The pricing starts at $7 per day getting cheaper as you opt for longer duration plans. For the 60-day plan, you get a 5% discount and for the 90-day plan, you get a 10% discount.

IPRoyal’s Private Proxies are essentially dedicated proxies. These ISP proxies catering to specific needs. While the Private Residential Proxies are good for streaming or e-commerce websites, the Private Datacenter Proxies are good for large-scale web scraping tasks. IPRoyal claims that their private datacenter proxies don’t get flagged as frequently because of their screening which prevents users from abusing and spoiling the proxy pool.

Both datacenter and residential Private proxies support HTTP(S) and SOCKS5 protocols, and being dedicated proxies they are used by one user at a time which ensures better performance and better speeds. In addition, these proxies claim a 99.9% uptime which ensures near-perfect stability.

Moreover, these proxies also come with zero bandwidth and session limits.

In terms of available locations, 15+ countries are supported currently with new locations being added regularly.

The pricing is per-proxy basis tiered as per the period of use. Plans start at the rate of $1.56 per proxy for 30 days going down to $1.39 per proxy for a period of 90 days. All plans provide unlimited traffic.

The Setup Process

The process of using IPRoyal is similar to that of most of the competitors. You can create an account by filling out the registration form and entering the relevant information like your first name, last name, email, and phone number. Once you fill out the form and verify your account details, you’ll be redirected to the dashboard, where you can manage or buy proxies.

How to Manage Subscription and Usage

The dashboard is right now available in two languages: English and Chinese. You can toggle between the languages from a dropdown.

IPRoyal offers a wallet facility. You can recharge your wallet using Credit/Debit or other payment methods like crypto or PayPal. On the deposit page, you also get to see the recent transactions. However, it’s not necessary to recharge your wallet to buy their proxies.

KYC isn’t mandatory for IPRoyal unless you’re buying static residential(ISP) proxies. However, if you’re not doing your KYC, you will only get access to 40% of the proxy pool and IPRoyal will also block access to Facebook, LinkedIn, and some other websites.

The dashboard navbar allows you to visit the pages for each product they offer. You can buy proxies or track usage of the proxy from their dedicated pages. However, you’ll only get the usage data in terms of numbers, no visualizations or graphs are offered. Alternatively, you’ll be able to generate reports in CSV format and opt for updates via email.

The dashboard also provides browser extensions that are compatible with Chrome and Firefox. These extensions operate similarly to other tools provided by other competitors, allowing users to utilize proxy servers without making adjustments to their browser or operating system settings. In addition, you also get a proxy tester feature, which lets you examine and filter lists of IPs.

When it comes to documentation, IPRoyal falls short compared to other providers like Smartproxy or Bright Data. The APIs come with reasonably detailed documentation and the product pages effectively address primary concerns, but there is a noticeable lack of configuration instructions, troubleshooting guides, and other valuable information. This is one area where there’s much room for improvement.

IPRoyal’s customer support can be accessed via live chat, email, and Discord.

To sum up, IPRoyal is a decent enough product for small-scale scraping requirements. It’s an affordable option but as a trade-off, you have to accept a not-so-crisp user experience, make do with limited documentation, and work with a small proxy pool.

As it stands, IPRoyal is not at a level where it can go head-to-head with industry leaders like Bright Data, Smartproxy, or Oxylabs, but it’s certainly on the right track. However small its pool might be, it’s diverse and also offers some flexible rotation options. With affordable rates, scalable pricing plans, and non-expiring traffic, this provider is certainly an attractive option if you’re a regular user.