Social media platforms like TikTok are a treasure trove of valuable data and marketing opportunities for any savvy digital marketer. By web scraping social media posts, you can piggyback on the most trending topics to drive more traffic or build a pipeline of hot leads that could boost your revenue.
However, one of the most difficult parts of the social media web scraping process is finding a reliable and cost-effective proxy provider that allows you to extract social media and TikTok data.
In this web scraping proxy comparison, we will break down the 7 best social media and TikTok proxy providers. We’ll discuss their pros, cons, pricing, and their best use cases.
1. ScraperAPI: The Best Proxy for Scraping Social Media
ScraperAPI is one of the best proxy solutions specializing in social media, including TikTok. It simplifies web scraping by routing your crawler requests through their service. This ensures you consistently obtain the necessary data from TikTok and other social media platforms while offering cost-effectiveness compared to alternative social media proxy solutions.
ScraperAPI is the ideal proxy solution for businesses seeking to extract substantial volumes of data from social media platforms, TikTok profiles, and trending topics. By simply submitting the URL of the target page to the API, it seamlessly returns the complete HTML response, containing all the desired data ready for immediate parsing.
Better yet, ScraperAPI is by far the most cost-effective social media proxy solution on this list. Using their free plan, you can scrape up to 1,000 social media or TikTok profiles every month completely for free. For the paid plans, you can get 250,000 requests for just $49 per month or upgrade to 3M API credits for $299 per month.
Pros: Simple to use proxy API that takes the hassle out of scraping websites at scale. Great reliability and functionality at a great price.
Cons: Not suited to scrape profile data from social media or TikTok as it doesn’t support scraping behind the login.
2. SmartProxy: For High-Speed Social Media Web Scraping Proxy
SmartProxy is a good proxy option to scrape public data from social media platforms like TikTok or powering your automation tools. With a diverse pool of IPs from 195 locations, SmartProxy excels when precise geolocation is crucial, such as matching your accounts with local IP addresses for enhanced social media automation.
Compatible with major tools and bots like Jarvee, DominatorHouse, Follow Liker, and Gramista, SmartProxy is a strong contender for growth hackers and marketing automation professionals.
SmartProxy pricing plans start at $2.2/GB for their residential proxy solution and $4.5/GB for the mobile proxies. This mid-level cost can be a significant factor, especially for users managing numerous automated accounts.
Pros: High quality social media proxies that work great with automation tools and bots, dedicated datacenter proxies from the US, code integrations in 6 programming languages.
Cons: Expensive to use for large scale web scraping or automation of hundreds/thousands of accounts.
3. Bright Data: For Country-Level Social Media Scraping Projects
As the biggest and most well-known proxy provider on the market, no social media proxy list is complete without mentioning Bright Data. However, in this case, Bright Data probably is not the best-suited proxy solution for social media scraping and automation.
While they allow you to scrape public data like TikTok social posts and videos with their proxies, you are not allowed to use their residential IPs to log into social media and use automation tools and bots. Making them only viable for scraping public social media data.
However, using Bright Data residential proxies for scraping social media can get expensive very fast. As an example, you need to pay $499 monthly for a 69 GB residential proxy service and $170 monthly for their dedicated datacenter proxies.
Pros: High-quality residential proxies with a lot of features and geotargeting capabilities.
Cons: Very expensive for scraping social media, and you can’t use them with automation tools and bots.
4. OxyLabs: A Social Media Proxy with a Massive Proxy Pool
Another big player in the residential proxy market and a great option for social media proxies is OxyLabs.
Like Luminati and SmartProxy, OxyLabs offers a wide range of data center and residential proxies from over 40 different countries from around the world. Making them a great option for scraping social media web data.
Although not as open as SmartProxy to using their proxies for social media automation, it is possible to use OxyLabs residential IPs with automation tools and bots.
But like SmartProxy and Luminati, their proxies aren’t cheap. You’ll need a big budget if you want to web scrape large amounts of social profile data from TikTok or other social platforms every month.
Pros: Good residential proxies with great geotargeting capabilities.
Cons: Very expensive when scraping at scale.
5. HighProxies: A Social Media Proxy with a Dedicated Support
Offering cheap social media proxies, HighProxies is a great option for those who want proxies for social media but who are on a tight budget.
Although not as high-quality or reliable as services such as ScraperAPI, High Proxies offers low-cost social media proxies that are great for anyone just getting started in social media web data scraping or marketing automation.
Their customer support isn’t the best, and you will have more reliability issues, but with plans starting at less than $3 per month, they are a great starting point.
Pros: Very low-cost social media proxy solution.
Cons: Not very reliable and not suitable for scraping social media sites at scale.
6. ProxySeller: A Social Media Proxy with 24/7 Customer Service
Although not the best-quality social media proxy provider on the list, ProxySeller is great for those on a very tight budget.
You can get a month worth of 100 GB residential proxies for $450. This includes the 100Mbit/s speed, unlimited traffic, and Http/Https/Socks5 enabled. Making it a great option for social media automation tools and bots.
However, like HighProxies, as the quality of their proxies isn’t the best, you will have higher failure rates compared to other providers on this list, and due to their smaller pool sizes, they aren’t suitable for scraping large amounts of profile data from social media platforms.
Pros: Cheap proxies and plans for all use cases.
Cons: Proxies aren’t very reliable and have limited support.
7. PhantomBuster.io: A Social Media Proxy with a Friendly Interface
Although not exactly a social media proxy solution, PhantomBuster.io is a great option for those of you who want an easy-to-use social media scraping and automation tool.
Unlike other tools out there, PhantomBuster.io removes the need for you to build your own social media scrapers and find your own proxies. They have a huge variety of pre-built web scraping and marketing automation tools for all the major social media platforms that will give your growth marketing the edge over your competitors.
ScraperAPI is the Best Social Media Web Scraping Proxy Provider
The success of scraping social media platforms like TikTok hinges on the quality of your web scraping tools, particularly the choice of proxy provider. ScraperAPI emerges as a leading solution, offering a robust and reliable network of over 4 million residential proxies distributed across 30+ countries worldwide.
With ScraperAPI, extracting data is effortless. Simply make an API call, and it returns the HTML of any web page. Furthermore, our powerful web scraping solution streamlines the process by automating data extraction and delivering the scraped social media data directly in a user-friendly JSON format.
Sign up here to get a 7-day free trial (5,000 API credits) or contact our sales team for a personalized offer.PhantomBuster.io: A Social Media Proxy with a Friendly Interface
