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Reliable, fast, and high-quality proxies with accessible documentation and great 24/7 customer support – at affordable prices.
Starting as an affordable option to the other premium providers in the market, Smartproxy has now become one of the top proxy providers in the industry.
In a market initially dominated by expensive proxy services and unreliable cheaper alternatives, Smartproxy quickly became a trusted name as it delivered performance and ease of use while remaining affordable.
Currently, Smartproxy ranks #4 as per its G2 Score, which is commendable in the industry. On Trustpilot, Smartproxy boasts an impressive 4.7/5 rating based on 1059 reviews which shows its popularity among mainstream users.
In this review, we’ll take a look at the services Smartproxy offers, their features, along with their pricing and performance, and see whether its G2 and Trustpilot ratings are actually justified.
Smartproxy, founded in 2018, initially began as a reseller of IPs but presently the company offers a diverse pool of proxies that are affordable and, per the company’s claims, ethically sourced.
The company essentially filled a gap between premium providers like Bright Data and the cheaper and unreliable options in the market. While Smartproxy may not have diverse features like Bright Data, it still offers a reliable proxy service that is performant and highly affordable at the same time.
Besides affordability, the company’s emphasis on user experience, customer support, and ease of onboarding, coupled with its marketing efforts played a major role in attracting and retaining users.
While the majority of Smartproxy’s customers are small-scale users like social media managers, individual users, and small businesses, the company also has enterprise customers in its books.
Currently, Smartproxy is the third-largest proxy provider in the industry, within touching distance of industry leaders Bright Data and Oxylabs.
While Smartproxy’s best offering remains its proxy services, the company also offers robust scraping APIs for both general purpose and specialized requirements. In the following sections, we’ll explore these offerings and learn about their features and pricing.
Residential proxies are the main offering from Smartproxy’s stables. Going by advertised numbers, Smartproxy has a diverse pool of over 55 million residential IPs, spread across 195 countries. These IPs, having been sourced from real devices, make accessing strict websites possible.
Smartproxy also provides location-based targeting at the country, state, and city levels. However, ASN/ZIP targeting isn’t possible yet. This proxy service also comes with rotation capabilities – letting you rotate IPs per request or per session (lasting 1, 10, or 30 mins). This is a nice bit of flexibility to have if you don’t want to remain stuck with an IP for a fixed duration.
When it comes to connection requests, Smartproxy imposes a limitation on traffic based on the plan you opt for, allowing unlimited connection requests as long as you’re within traffic limits. This is consistent with most residential proxy services.
Further bridging the gap between Smartproxy and its premium competitors is the recent addition of support for SOCKS5 protocol.
Smartproxy’s plans are subscription-based and tiered as per traffic. Its plan starts at $8.5 per GB capped off at 1GB, getting cheaper per GB as traffic increases. However, its larger plans only add more sub-users and whitelisted IP slots and not much else.
Currently, Smartproxy also provides a pay-as-you-go plan for residential proxies. Overall, while Smartproxy’s offering isn’t exactly dirt cheap, it’s still very attractive when compared to most premium and mid-range providers.
In addition to the subscription model and pay-as-you-go plan, the company also allows topping up should your traffic limit be breached before the end of the subscription period. This flexibility is nice to have if you rarely hit your allowance limits.
Since the service gets cheaper as you scale up, it’s a really great option for large-scale scraping projects.
Smartproxy returned ~691,000 unique IPs when requests were run without using any location filter. When using location filters, Smartproxy returned over 250,000 IPs from the US, over 130,000 from the UK, and over 30,000 from Australia, proving that the company does indeed have a large network as promised on its website.
Moreover, as opposed to most competitors, Smartproxy’s IPs were indeed found to be residential IPs.
Hence, it’s no surprise that Smartproxy’s residential proxies turned out to be highly reliable, with the average success rate for requests being over 99%. In addition to being performant, these proxies were also one of the fastest. Even with popular targets, Smartproxy returned a high success rate for all barring Google.
Overall, Smartproxy is a solid option to consider if you’re looking for a reliable residential proxy solution.
Datacenter proxies are Smartproxy’s base-level offering. If you’re looking for a cost-effective solution and can make do without precise location-based targeting and don’t much care about the quality of IPs used then these are the proxies you opt for.
Smartproxy offers three kinds of Datacenter proxies:
Smartproxy’s shared Datacenter proxies come from a wide range of countries including Australia and Israel and you’re able to specify the locations you want the IPs from while opting for a plan. This service also lets you automatically rotate IPs via an endpoint.
Its dedicated proxies are pretty much always accessible to the user – as is the norm with all dedicated proxies. As a bonus, these proxies support SOCKS5 including the UDP protocol. The SOCKS5 protocol is important because it offers enhanced online privacy and IP protection, allows bypassing internet blocks, and delivers improved performance across various applications and devices. Moreover, its ability to navigate firewalls with fewer issues makes it particularly useful for enterprise use cases, ensuring secure and efficient connectivity.
On the flip side, there are two serious drawbacks of these proxies – there is no rotation capability and these proxies are only available in the US, with no possibility of specifying locations.
Besides, the dedicated and shared proxies, Smartproxy also offers 100,000 rotating Datacenter proxies. These proxies give you the option to stick with the same IP for 30 minutes if you wish or rotate per request. As for location, you can get these proxies from the US, UK, and some other EU countries like Germany.
Smartproxy offers several plans with smaller limits in terms of IPs and traffic for its entry-level plans but scaling to thousands of IPs and terabytes of data for higher tier plans, with prices reducing as you scale up.
Smartproxy follows a subscription-based pricing model for its datacenter proxies. While the rotating proxies are charged based on traffic, dedicated ones are charged per IPs, and shared proxies are charged using a combination of both models.
Smartproxy’s plans get auto-renewed every month. Should your traffic limit expire before the end of the month, you can choose to top-up traffic by paying its base rate of $0.7 per GB of traffic. While you’re paying the highest possible rate per GB, you’ll not be forced to opt for a higher-tier plan. This is a nice bit of flexibility to have if you generally stay within limits.
Besides flexibility, Smartproxy’s prices are lower than most other premium competitors for all its plans except for its enterprise tiers. This makes it a very attractive option, especially for non-enterprise users.
Smartproxy’s datacenter proxies had a 99.93% average success rate with an average response time of 0.8 seconds.
Smartproxy 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 tasks involving uninterrupted web scraping.
Smartproxy had mixed results when it came to scraping popular targets like Amazon, Homedepot, etc. While the dedicated proxies performed nearly flawlessly, rotating proxies suffered a great deal with abysmal success rates for some sites and below-average response times which is an expected outcome as rotating proxies are generally shared among all users and universally abused.
Smartproxy offers mobile proxies as its premium product. These proxies are sourced from mobiles and tablets on cellular connections and are used mainly for mobile-first websites. Currently, Smartproxy has a huge network of 10 million mobile IPs spanning almost all countries in the world.
These proxies come with all the basic features such as location-based targeting at the country, state, and ASN levels. However, city-level targeting isn’t possible yet, in exchange you get an OS filtering option which is a rarity in this segment.
Similar to residential proxies, this proxy service also comes with rotation capabilities – letting you rotate IPs per request or per session (lasting 1, 10, or 30 mins). This is a nice bit of flexibility to have if you don’t want to remain stuck with an IP for a fixed duration.
Smartproxy’s plans are subscription-based and tiered as per traffic. Its plan starts at $15 per GB (the base plan costs $30 with traffic capped off at 2GB). Your plan expires at the end of each month and gets auto-renewed. You also have the option to opt for the pay-as-you-go model which would cost a fixed rate of $20 per GB.
Like most other mobile proxy providers, this service lets you use the entire proxy network till you hit the traffic limit.
Smartproxy’s mobile proxies are available at a much lower cost compared to most other premium and mid-range competitors.
Smartproxy returned ~175,000 unique IPs when requests were run without using any location filter. When using location filters, Smartproxy returned over 70,000 IPs from the US, over 19,000 from the UK, and over 4,500 from Australia. Judging by the numbers, the company indeed has a large network of IPs that can ensure you’re not repeating the same IP within a short duration, even if you’re opting for IPs from non-standard locations like Australia.
Besides being from diverse locations, these proxies turned out to be highly reliable as well, with the average success rate being around 97.37%. Coupled with an average response time of 1.12s, these proxies were also one of the fastest among its competitors. Even with popular targets, Smartproxy returned a high success rate for all barring some social media sites.
Overall, Smartproxy is a very good option when it comes to mobile proxies.
Smartproxy’s Site Unblocker is similar to a proxy solution – it lets users extract valuable web data from complex websites without the need for a scraper or a headless browser, avoiding captchas and IP bans.
The Site Unblocker comes with a lot of features such as automatic retries, IP auto-rotation, JavaScript rendering, and advanced browser fingerprinting that make it a great tool for seamless data collection. Pricing Smartproxy offers two pricing models for the Site Unblocker – Regular and Enterprise.
The Regular plans start at $28 for a total of 2GB bandwidth (at a rate of $14/GB) scaling up to $500 for a total of 50GB bandwidth (at a rate of $10/GB). All tiers come with a 14-day money-back guarantee and access to all the features offered.
The Enterprise plan starts at $900 for a total of 100GB bandwidth (at a rate of $9/GB) scaling up to $6000 for a total of 1000GB bandwidth (at a rate of $6/GB). For even higher plans, users can contact support and get custom offers. Like the regular tiers, all enterprise tiers come with a 14-day money-back guarantee and access to all the features offered. In addition, the enterprise plan also includes a dedicated account manager for all its tiers.
Smartproxy offers two pricing models for the Site Unblocker – Regular and Enterprise.
To make use of Bright Data’s proxy services, you first have to register on their site. This is fairly simple, and
Smartproxy is one of the easiest tools out there in the scraping industry. The company’s emphasis on user experience lets you set things up easily and get started without much fuss.
First, you’d need to register with your email address or Google account. You can access the dashboard without verifying your email but to get started with the tools you need to verify your email.
KYC is not mandatory but becomes necessary if you somehow trigger the safeguards.
For the ease of its users, Smartproxy provides a dashboard using which you can easily manage proxies, subscriptions, etc.
The dashboard comes with a wallet functionality that lets you transfer money to the platform, using which you can purchase or upgrade plans. You can also set up the proxy server, authorize access to your proxies, add sub-users, track usage, and contact support via the dashboard.
On the dashboard, each service has a separate section from which you can manage and track that specific service. While you get an overview of all your subscriptions from the dashboard, you need to open separate tabs for each service – which is a bit cumbersome if you have a large number of subscriptions running simultaneously.
To make things easier, Smartproxy has also provided guides that are accessible to all users and also quite helpful.
For managing subscriptions, Smartproxy allows self-service where you can pick and choose the services you want from the dashboard itself. There are two methods in which you can purchase subscriptions – one via direct payment using credit cards, PayPal, etc. and the other by adding an amount to your wallet on Smartproxy’s platform. The latter also allows you to opt for pay-as-you-go plans.
Moreover, if you’re looking to use residential proxies or one of the scraper APIs, you also have the option to let the Smart Plan Recommendation tool select a suitable plan for you. All you have to do is, mention the target, select whether you want headless or non-headless scraping, and mention the usage frequency.
For modifying and upgrading plans or topping up your wallet balance you get a separate billing section on the dashboard. You can also get all your invoices, see your payment history, etc. from this section itself.
As for managing proxies, Smartproxy has a straightforward workflow for setting up your proxies:
Moreover, you can get Smartproxy to automatically generate code samples in cURL or multiple programming languages which you can copy-paste into your scraping script.
The setup procedure is streamlined and user-friendly. The only drawback perhaps is that you can’t set custom passwords for proxy users, you’re only allowed to use the system-generated passwords.
In addition, Smartproxy also provides a well-rounded proxy-management API that lets you create and manage sub-users, set traffic limits, view usage reports and subscription status, and filter available endpoints. This API is available to all users including resellers.
For managing your residential proxies you also get a proxy-management browser extension that works with Chrome and Firefox. You can use this extension to filter by country, and set up rotation or sticky sessions. For authorization, you can either use your credentials or whitelisted IPs.
The Smartproxy dashboard provides visualizations that let you view your traffic or requests usage. The dashboard also lets you view usage graphs per sub-user, date, or target for a daily, weekly, monthly, or custom timeframe.
Besides the dashboard, you can also fetch traffic stats via an API call.
Documentation is something Smartproxy has clearly invested in. While the documentation is detailed, it’s streamlined enough and doesn’t feel overbearing. In fact, its strength lies in its accessibility.
The documentation includes a getting started section that explains in detail all the features and concepts, then there’s a FAQ section which is detailed and divided into multiple sections classified by topics. There are several integration guides as well for major automation tools and a bunch of configuration guides for web browsers and operating systems.
A separate section is also dedicated to tips, tricks, code samples, technical documentation, and general troubleshooting guides. Some of the content is presently outdated but overall, the documentation is good enough to get you started.
Customer support is one of the strengths of Smartproxy. The company offers round-the-clock support to its customers via email or live chat and its support agents generally respond pretty fast to queries. Support agents mainly interact in English but they can speak in Chinese as well if need be. For other languages, Google Translate is used.
To sum up, Smartproxy, with its convenience and economical options, is perfectly suited to small businesses and small-scale scraping projects. Such customers form a major section of the user base and the features offered by Smartproxy are sufficient for their requirements.
Hence, even if the company is cutting out a lot of niche features, it’s offering enough features to satisfy regular users. However, for the same reason, when it comes to enterprise-level scraping projects, Smartproxy might come up short.
Overall, Smartproxy is a great proxy provider that offers proxies that perform well, are reliable, and are faster than a lot of premium and mid-range competitors.
If you’re someone who doesn’t require a lot of granular customization, then Smartproxy is a great choice. Otherwise, you could look at premium options such as Bright Data or Oxylabs.