Do you have Smartproxy in the list of proxy providers you want to buy proxies from? Then read this Smartproxy review to know if it's the best proxy provider for you.
The Smartproxy service is one I have come to use for my personal proxy needs and I must say this is so because of how easy and accessible it has made it service. To start with, this service is a premium proxy and web scraper provider.
It has made a lot of good numbers for itself and you can see that even on review sites. But is all of what you see and hear about this service true or they are all paid praises? To find out the answer to these questions, we did our research, carried out performance tests, and will present all of our findings in this Smartproxy review.
An Overview of Smartproxy
Smartproxy is a United States-based proxy service with proxies in the residential, datacenter, and mobile proxy categories — the service also offers web scraping APIs. It offers some of the best proxies in terms of quality and has good customer support. However, its pricing tries to accommodate both small proxy users as well as big users such as enterprise customers.
One thing you will come to like about this service is its generous refund policy and even free trials. While it offers proxies in a good number of proxy categories, the major focus of this Smartproxy review is on their residential proxies.
Parameter | Feature |
IP Type | Residential/ISP/Mobile/Datacenter |
Price Charged | Bandwidth |
Price Sample | Starts from $7 per GB with Pay As You Go |
Pool Of IPs | 55+ Million |
Proxy Protocol |
|
IP Rotation |
|
Filtering/Targeting | Cites/Countries/US States |
Authentication | IP Authentication and Username/Password |
Speed | Excellent |
Free Trial | 3 Days |
Refund Policy | 14 Days |
Support | Live Support and Email |
Jurisdiction Location | USA |
Proxy Types
As mentioned earlier, the Smartproxy service offers proxies in a good number of categories. I will discuss the proxies offered and what they are best used for before focusing the review on their residential proxies.
Residential Proxies
Their most popular product is the residential proxies — which is actually a rotating residential proxy. For this, you get your IP changed frequently either after every request or a period of time in the case of session management. It has a pool with over 55 million residential IPs sourced from devices of real Internet users.
There are basically two modes you can use for this service — rotating and sticky session sessions. If you go for the rotating session, you get a new IP after every request. This is the setup you should use for web scraping and considering how big its pool is, rotation is efficient.
With your IP switched after every request, you don’t even near the request limit set by websites that will get you blocked and that is why it is perfect for web scraping and its different types such as price monitoring, SEO monitoring, social monitoring, and the rest.
It has support for geo-targeting with all countries supported. This makes it possible for you to scrape geo-targeted content from any region of the world with even support for state-level targeting for states in the United States.
However, for tasks that require session management, their high rotating ports would mess things up for you. Instead, you go for their session ports which will maintain sessions for a while of up to 30 minutes. You can customize the rotation time to suit your requirements. It is this session ports I recommend for account management tasks including multiple accounting.
Smartproxy allows you to create as many proxy endpoints as you like. You can use them to manage multiple accounts.
In terms of pricing, this provider is the cheapest premium proxy provider in the market. The pricing is based on bandwidth and you can purchase as small as 1GB in their pay-as-you-go plan for just $7. Interestingly, if you go for their packaged plan, the cost per GB gets cheaper and can go as low as $4.5 per GB for regular users, and $2.2 per GB for enterprise customers.
ISP Proxies
There is something I didn’t mention in residential proxies above; they don’t own the IPs but are sourced via P2P and as such, don’t have full control over them. In their ISP proxies, however, they source the IPs directly from the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and host them on their servers.
This not only makes them real but also gives them control and such, you can have a session for as long as you want. Another name for this is static residential proxies as their dedicated ISP proxies assign only static IP addresses. These are best used for long-term account management, sneaker coping, ticket scalping, content streaming, and online gaming.
Aside from the dedicated ISP proxies, there is also a rotating option that behaves like the rotating residential proxies above. However, the session duration is longer with no connection drops you will experience with their rotating residential proxies. Interestingly, the speed is also faster and you earn more trust.
The pricing for the dedicated ISP is based on the number of IPs and starts from $10 for 3 IPs. If you purchase more IPs, the cost per IP gets cheaper. For the rotating on-demand IPs, pricing is based on bandwidth and starts from $14 for 2GB. Just like in the case of its other plans, you get a discount for purchasing more bandwidth.
Mobile Proxies
The Smartproxy mobile proxies are rotating proxies and provide you with the highest level of anonymity and compatibility. These route requests via mobile devices of real Internet users, making it seem as if you were using their mobile phones to access your target website.
There are over 10 million mobile IPs in their pool that power this. From this pool, the network randomly chooses an IP to assign to you after every request. Just like in the case of their residential proxies, there is also support for session proxies. In terms of location, their mobile proxies support over 160 countries which you can use for geo-targeting.
In terms of usage, mobile proxies should be used only when using residential proxies is not appropriate or gets easily detected. This is because they are more expensive and are the slowest. Some of the major use cases of mobile proxies are social media account management, social media automation, and social media scraping.
The mobile proxies are charged based on bandwidth and the price starts from $20 per GB for their no-commitment plan. If you purchase bundled packages with more GB, the cost per GB becomes cheaper.
Datacenter Proxies
Smartproxy also offers datacenter proxies. However, their datacenter proxies are of different types. Currently, the service has support for shared proxies charged based on bandwidth, shared proxies charged based on IP count, and dedicated proxies.
Generally, the dedicated proxies are the fastest and most private and should be used for tasks that require you to have a private IP. These are less abused compared to the shared ones and the spam profile is low. However, it costs more than the shared options. Unfortunately, for this, there is support for only US locations. The pricing for the dedicated datacenter proxies is $2.5 per 3 IPs. The more IPs you purchase, the cheaper the price per IP becomes.
For the shared proxies, there is a worldwide pool of IP addresses that you use and there is an option for IP rotation. This makes it possible for some sort of web scraping but for low-powered websites that have very weak anti-spam systems. Generally, you should avoid using them on any website that is popular as you will get blocked instantly. For this, you can either go with the plans charged based on bandwidth or number of IPs.
Residential Proxy Features
The Smartproxy service as mentioned earlier is a premium proxy provider. And like others, it has features that make it the favorite among many marketers. Let’s take a look at some of these features below.
Cheaper Charges Than Its Competitors
One of its key competitive advantages is its pricing. The Smartproxy service is not the cheapest residential proxy service out there. The likes of IPRoyal, Proxy-cheap, Hydraproxy, Geonode, Asock, and Froxy are all cheaper. However, we won’t call the aforementioned it competitors as they are all small proxy providers and can’t be called premium. For the providers that you will call premium residential proxies, the Smartproxy service is cheaper than most.
The smallest plan for this is the pay-as-you-go plan, allowing you to purchase as small as 1GB at $7. The same plan provided by its competitors such as Bright Data and Oxylabs is sold for $10. But that is not even all. If you go for its packaged plan, the smallest plan consists of 2GB and brings down the price per GB to $6. Such a plan does not even exist for its competitors. This makes it a good option for big proxy users while still being affordable to small users.
Large IP Pool and Global Coverage
One feature you will come to like about Smartproxy is the size of its pool and the locations it supports. The service has over 55 million residential IPs in its pool. This makes it one of the large residential proxy pool owners and puts it in direct competition with only the best and biggest in the market.
With this size of IP pool, the network is large enough to handle web scraping and other forms of automation at a large scale without running out of IPs too quickly. That is why it has one of the lowest IP duplicate rates in the market.
But a large pool is not all that matters, the distribution also matters and Smartproxy has over 195 countries' support. This makes it possible for you to scrape localized data from any region of the world. Aside from the country-level targeting, there is support for city-level targeting for popular cities. Interestingly, there is also state-level targeting for all of the 50 US states.
Rotating and Sticky Session Support with Good Session Control
The proxies offered for their de facto residential proxies are rotating proxies that change IPs. By default, the proxies are highly rotating which means, will change IP for you after every request. Even if you don’t send a web request, there is a 60-second refresh timing that changes the IP assigned to the endpoint you have.
It is this high rotating capabilities that make it perfect for web scraping. However, when session management is required, changing IP this frequently is bad.
For this reason, the Smartproxy residential proxies support sticky sessions that maintain IP for a limited time before changing it. For the period an IP is maintained, the session is also maintained. The period is customizable, giving you good control over the session. The supported rotation time includes 1, 10, and 30 minutes. If you need an extended session duration of more than 30 minutes, then I will recommend their ISP proxies instead.
Easy to Integrate
The Smartproxy residential proxies have been made to be compatible with most web clients, scrapers, and automation bots. It is one thing to support a tool, it is another to make it easy for integration and Smartproxy does the two. The service provides tutorials on how to easily integrate their proxies with the popular tools out there including sneaker bots, web scrapers, social media tools, SEO tools, proxy managers as well as anti-detect browsers.
Aside from the easy integration, the service also provides some free tools to make your usage enjoyable. One of these tools includes the X-Browser, which is a free anti-detect and multi-accounting browser — most of its competitors are paid. Other tools provided include browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox, as well as a free proxy checker and proxy list generator.
Residential Proxy Performance
In this section of the review, I will focus on the performance of Smartproxy and reveal to you what to expect based on my tests.
Proxy IP Geo Test
The location support for residential proxies is much more than a flex — it gives an idea of the locations you can access content for and scrape its localized data. Unfortunately, most providers only list the number of countries supported and not the number of IPs in each country.
According to the information provided by Smartproxy, it has 55 million residential IPs. But what is the distribution of these IPs in terms of location?
As you can see above, out of the 195 countries supported by Smartproxy, 6 of them account for 39% of the total of the 55 million IPs. India alone has over 9 million, followed by the US with over 7 million, and then Germany and the United Kingdom having 2.3 million and 1.7 million respectively. Generally, in the locations mentioned, there are millions of IPs enough to power a web scraper to collect localized data even on a large scale.
However, if you need to scrape localized data for unpopular locations, the pool can be too small for an efficient IP rotation. I recommend you always speak to their support if your location is unpopular to find out if they have a sizeable pool for that location before you purchase a plan from them.
Proxy Success Rate Test
Not all of your requests will succeed especially during automation such as web scraping and for some of these, your proxies will be responsible. Residential proxies are known to have connection errors, timeouts, and delays and these add to the failure rate of your requests. For a higher success rate, you will need proxies that have been engineered to keep failure as low as possible.
To find out whether Smartproxy is one of such, we sent 300 concurrent requests multiple times to some of the popular websites on the Internet and recorded the success rate. Below is the result presented in a summarised form.
The average success rate for their residential proxies is 93.4% and this is one of the best in the market so far with only the likes of Bright Data and Soax surpassing it but with a small margin. If you take a look at the chart, you will notice the success rate for some sites such as Adidas, Amazon, and Bing was as high as 95%.
With a success rate such as this, we can conclude that Smartproxy offers some of the most undetectable residential proxies as most of our requests succeeded without being blocked.
Response Time Test
Residential proxies are known to be slow and are some of the bottlenecks you will have to deal with when web scraping. It is for this reason that you will need to get the fastest residential proxies you can lay your hands on to scrape as fast as possible as using a slow provider will waste valuable time especially if you have a fairly large project.
We tested the response time of Smartproxy residential proxies to see how fast they return a response after sending it a request. Below is the result of the test together with that of other providers.
As you can see above, the average response time of their proxies is 0.53 seconds which makes it one of the fastest in the market. The fastest provider is Bright Data at 0.48 seconds. Now when you compare this with the slowest which takes 3.75 seconds to respond, you can tell Smartproxy is one of the fastest. And to be frank with you, the difference between Smartproxy and Bright Data is small enough to be negligible for most users.
Unique IP Test
Most rotating residential proxies claim to provide you with a new IP address after every request or refresh. This is the kind of setup you want for web scraping. Unfortunately, not many of them have the capacity in terms of pool size to support this which leads to duplicate IPs being assigned to you.
Generally, no provider will provide you with 100% unique IPs. However, the lower the duplicate rate, the better. To test the duplicate IP rate of Smartproxy, we sent over 500K web requests without using their geo-targeting option and recorded the IPs assigned to each of the requests. You can see the result for yourself below.
The duplicate rate for Smartproxy is 12.02%. Again, this is one of the best performances among all of the proxy providers as only Bright Data and Soax surpass this — the difference again, isn’t much. It might interest you to know that a 12.02% duplicate rate wouldn’t get you blocked even for large-scale projects.
This performance result shows you can use the Smartproxy residential proxies for web scraping. However, the result might be different if you use the geo-targeting option as you will have fewer IPs to work with.
How to Use Smartproxy
The Smartproxy is one of the easy-to-use residential proxies out there. First, you need to create an account, go through their KYC procedure, and purchase a plan or fund your account for their pay-as-you-go pricing model. To use their residential proxies, you will need to create a proxy endpoint. A proxy endpoint is the gateway to access IP pools. It is presented as a subdomain such as gate.smartproxy.com and a port.
Smartproxy provides a proxy list generator that you can use to generate as many proxy endpoints as you want and this is one of its secret powers.
At the point of generating the endpoint, you have the option to configure the authentication method which can either be username/password or IP whitelisting. If you need to use the geo-targeting option, you should change the location setting from random to the specific location you want.
There is also the option for setting the session type which can either be rotating or sticky. Once you are done with the configurations, you can enter the number of endpoints you want to generate and then get the tool to generate them for you.
The endpoint is provided in the form of a proxy address, port, username, and password. If you use the IP whitelisting option for authentication, a username and password won’t be necessary. You can either copy the endpoints directly or download them as either a CSV or TXT file.
Customer Support
Customer support is an important part of a business and for services like proxy services where some details are not made open on their websites, having a ready customer support in place forms part of a great user experience.
The Smartproxy service is one of those proxy services that invest in its customer support and you can see that from the swiftness to which you are responded to and how helpful and knowledgeable their customer support team members are. You have the option of getting support either via live chat or email support.
For me, I like to get responses faster and as such, I prefer to use it. While writing this article, I used their live chat feature in a bid to see how fast I would get a response and I wasn’t disappointed; I got a response within one minute — this is the fastest it can get with a real human and not bot.
The support team agent was friendly and helpful. Unfortunately, their live chat is not always online. When there is no support team member online, you can contact them via email and you should get a response in less than 5 hours —- it can be as fast as 2 hours.
Source of IP Addresses
I mentioned earlier that Smartproxy has over 55 million residential IPs in the pool. What I didn’t tell you and is also not clear on their website is that they do not own these IPs. These IPs are sourced via P2P networks. How this works is simple.
The service gets devices to join its peer-to-peer network and for each device that joins, it can use its IP address and bandwidth to route requests. In essence, what it uses are real IP addresses from the devices of real Internet users and that is what makes it undetectable.
For this to be ethical, the owners of the devices need to give their consent and also need to know what it entails. This is only possible if they get something in return either in the form of a free app to use or financial compensation. The Smartproxy service didn’t give much detail on this instead, tells us it IPs are ethically sourced. For now, there is no way to verify whether they are ethically sourced or not.
Conclusion
The Smartproxy service offers premium residential proxies that work extremely well. It has one of the best performances, extensive location support, and even a large pool to support large-scale scraping.
Based on our performance test, their proxies are a great choice for web scraping, especially mid-large scale scraping tasks. Interestingly, their proxies are also a great choice for small-scale web scraping as they are the cheapest of the premium proxies available.
Alternatives to Smartproxy
The Smartproxy service is a great choice, but not for everyone. If you have your reasons why you wouldn’t want to make use of it, then you can choose from one of the alternatives below.
Bright Data — Best alternative to Smartproxy.
This provider is our recommended residential proxy and offers the best performance in areas such as scraping success rate, response time, and unique IP rate. It has a large pool and extensive location support. It is also the best when it comes to proxy management tools with its proxy manager being a notable tool. It will cost you a little more but the extra USD is worth it.
Proxy-Cheap — Best budget alternative to Smartproxy
If you are on a tight budget and need an alternative that performs well and costs less, then the Proxy-cheap service is the option for you. However, this is not suitable for use in large-scale projects and should be used for small-scale web scraping which it is better suited for.
Soax — Recommended for precise geo-location targeting
Soax is another premium option and has a slightly better performance than Smartproxy, but still behind Bright Data. It has one of the largest pools with extensive location support. One thing you will come to like about its geo-targeting is how precise and granular it can get.
You don’t only have the option to choose the country of the IPs, you can also choose the state and city you want IPs from. However, unlike in the case of Smarproxy where you can get started with $7, you need a minimum of $99 to get started with this.
Our Expert's Review
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Scaping Performance - 9.7/10
9.7/10
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Proxy Network - 9.6/10
9.6/10
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Proxy Functions - 9.5/10
9.5/10
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Customer support - 9.6/10
9.6/10
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