Instantly Find The Best Proxy Provider For Your Web Scraping Needs And Budget
Understanding the different types of proxies and their pros and cons can be confusing. In this section we breakdown everything you need to know.
Picking a proxy provider can be a confusing process.
It’s a delicate balancing act between finding the proxy provider that has the best combination of reliability, speed, price and support for your particular needs.
Here at ScraperAPI, in our search for the best proxies for our own proxy pools, we’ve tested proxies from all the big proxy providers in the market.
As a result, we have a deep understanding of the pros and cons of each proxy provider and how to choose the best one for your needs.
In this guide, we’ve condensed our findings of the 10 best residential, backconnect and rotating proxy providers for web scraping so you don’t have to go through all the trouble of doing it yourself.
First on the list is ScraperAPI, not just because that’s us but because we’ve found the best residential, backconnect and rotating proxies on the market and incorporated them into our API.
ScraperAPI is a tool for developers building web scrapers, it handles proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs so developers can get the raw HTML from any website with a simple API call.
Our job at ScraperAPI is to make scraping the web as easy as possible. That’s why we spend our days optimising our proxy management logic and finding the best proxies for our proxy pools so our users can reliably scrape the web.
Better yet, not only do we have some of the best proxies on the market, we’ve built in some really powerful functionality into the API to take the hassle out of web scraping those more complex sites.
Functionality like: JS rendering, geolocation targeting, custom user agents, customisations to bypass anti-bots on the most difficult sites.
If you’d like to give ScraperAPI a try, then check out our free plan that gives you access to all our best functionality at zero cost. And if you need to scrape millions of pages a month, then contact our sales team for a custom quote.
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With over 10 million rotating residential proxies, geolocation targeting and reasonable pricing Smartproxy is one of the best providers of proxies on the market.
Smartproxy’s robust platform offers rotating sessions, random residential IPs, geo-targeting, sticky sessions, an automatic proxy rotator, unlimited concurrency whilst only charging $3 and $15 per GB (depending on volume).
And with SLAs offering 99% low failure rates and 24/7 technical support Smartproxy is a great option for those doing mission-critical scraping.
Offering over 40 million geotargeted datacenter, residential and mobile rotating IPs Luminati is the gorilla of the proxy world. As one of the first movers in the residential proxy market, Luminati’s platform boasts some of the best functionality, including preset configurations for proxy manipulations, random header generator, and built-in captcha solving.
The one downside to Luminati is their price. With bandwidth-based plans starting at $0.6 per datacenter proxy or $12.5/GB for residential proxies their monthly plans are some of the most expensive on the market.
If you’re looking for a good deal on reasonably priced datacenter and residential proxies then look no further than Shifter. With over 26 million proxies and no limits on bandwidth like many residential proxy providers, Shifter is a great option for those who don’t want to pay by bandwidth.
Shifter platform is built around rotating backconnect proxies that rotate your IPs every 10 minutes. Removing the need to worry about creating your own proxy rotation logic.
If you have a pretty steady stream of requests that you can spread over a number of unmetered ports and you need residential proxies, this may be a service that’s worth looking at.
With prices ranging from $8 to $15 per GB of bandwidth, Geosurf offers residential proxies at premium prices. And with plans only starting at $450/month, they are definitely targeting only the upper tiers of the proxy market.
That said, if you do have that type of budget and are in need of high-quality residential proxies then Geosurf could be a great option for you.
They offer proxies for countries that most proxies providers don’t (like China and Iran) and even offer special proxy pools for certain use cases, such as Craigslist proxies and ad verification.
With a wide range of datacenter and residential proxy options, along with a real-time crawler to extract data from search engines and e-commerce sites Oxylabs is up there as one of the best providers of residential proxies.
While they are a bit on the expensive side (prices comparable to GeoSurf and Luminati), Oxylabs do provide a premium service and access to over 30 million IPs from dozens of countries.
Although they do require you to fill out a form before trying out their proxies (instead of getting started straight away) they use this information to allocate you to the best proxy pool for your particular use case.
With monthly plans starting at $600 per month and $180 per month for residential and datacenter IPs respectively, Oxylabs is definitely on the premium end of the market.
With prices starting at $200 per GB with a minimum of 5GB, with additional data available for $200 per GB, Intoli is the most expensive proxy provider on the list.
Intoli is a smart proxy service boasting a large pool of residential proxies. It has a lot of functionality built-in as standard, automatic proxy rotation on each request, automatic retries, intelligent routing and an integrated headless browser.
The one advantage of these premium prices is the fact the two founders take a very hands-on approach with their users. Regularly working with users to fix issues and customising the pools to meet their specific web scraping needs.
Similarly to ScraperAPI, Crawlera offers users the ability to send their requests to a single end-point API and have it take care of the rest. Internally, Crawlera manages it’s own pool of proxies and the management logic so you don’t have to worry about rotating proxies, throttling, blacklisting IPs, etc.
Whilst Crawlera is a battle-tested proxy solution its age is starting to tell. Currently, they don’t offer javascript rendering via the API and it has difficulty dealing with more complex websites such as Amazon, Google, etc. at scale.
Like ScraperAPI, Crawlera also only charges for successful requests which is good for those who want to predict their proxy costs each month.
However, Crawlera is a good bit more expensive than ScraperAPI and doesn’t offer anything more in terms of reliability or functionality. If anything, it often performs worse.
Talk to an expert and learn how to build a scalable scraping solution.
