Bright Data Review

Come in now to uncover why Bright Data stands among the top residential proxy service providers globally. Dive into our reviews to understand their features comprehensively. This will equip you with the knowledge to make an informed decision about utilizing their services.

The Bright Data service is one of the most popular proxy services in the market. There is hardly a proxy recommendation article you will see without the mention of this particular provider.

This is partly due to its marketing success rates, the quality of its proxy offerings and inventions, as well as how long it has been in the market. But does the hype around this service translate to real performance and get the required job the way it should? That’s the answer I will help you find out in this Bright Data review.


An Overview of Bright Data

Bright Data Overview

The Bright Data service, an Israeli-based company was founded in 2014 as the Luminati Networks and then, the company focused on providing proxy services. This name will later be rebranded into Bright Data in 2021 for two reasons. One, the brand name didn’t connote something good and secondly, they were moving away from just being a proxy provider to being a data collection infrastructure provider with proxy and data scrapers as some of their offerings.

This proxy provider owns the highest number of patents in the proxy market and has made the most contributions and innovations. It is basically a B2B proxy provider but does offer a flexible pay-as-you-go payment option for small proxy users.

Parameter Feature
IP Type Residential/ISP/Mobile/Datacenter
Price Charged Bandwidth
Price Sample Starts from $8.4 per GB with Pay As You Go
Pool of IPs 72+ Million
Proxy Protocol HTTP(S) and Socks5
IP Rotation
  • Each Session
  • Sticky Session (Time)
  • Support 100% Self-control
Filtering/Targeting Countries, Cities, and ASN
Authentication IP Authentication and Username/Password
Speed Excellent
Free Trial 7 days
Refund Policy No
Support Live Support, Contact Form, and Detailed FAQ
Jurisdiction Location Israel

Visit brightdata.com


Proxy Types

The Bright Data service has proxies from all of the proxy categories. While the review is focused on their residential proxies, let’s take a look at their proxy offerings and what they are best used for.

Residential Proxies

Bright Data offers the most advanced rotating residential proxy network in the industry. It features a 72 million IP pool which is one of the largest in the market and is used for routing their clients’ requests.

The proxies here are by default, high-rotating proxies, the types that switch IP for you after every request, making your hundreds of thousands of requests seem to be coming from hundreds of thousands of devices from different locations across the globe. With this kind of setup, you can scrape data at any scale without thinking of hitting request limits.

Its over 72 million IPs are sourced via P2P from over 195 countries across the globe. It does have geo-targeting support, allowing you to choose the geo-location of IPs to be assigned to you. This makes it possible for you to carry out scraping for specific geo-locations. Whether you need Australian IPs to scrape Google SERPs for Australia or you need US IPs to access furniture sites that only allow US IPs, Bright Data got you covered.

While the default configuration is to rotate your IP address after every request, there is support for the sticky session which will maintain sessions for a period of time. Bright Data gives you the best control over your session, allowing you to choose the rotation time from 1 minute to up to 1 hour.

This makes it possible for you to manage multiple accounts, power our social and e-commerce automation, and grow your business with its session management capability.

Residential Proxies for Bright Data

The pricing for this is based on bandwidth otherwise referred to as traffic. In the past, the minimum monetary commitment for this is high making it affordable to only enterprise customers. However, the service has introduced a pay-as-you-go payment plan with no commitment, allowing you to pay for just the amount of bandwidth you need — making it affordable to small users also.

The price per GB for this is $8.4 monthly. However, if you need more bandwidth, you can opt-in for their packaged plans which give you a discount and make the price per GB cheaper. Generally, I would say the price is reasonable for the quality of service you get.

ISP Proxies

The Bright Data service also offers ISP proxies. The ISP proxies are basically residential proxies hosted on datacenter infrastructure. Unlike in the case of the residential proxies above, the IPs here are not sourced via P2P, they are gotten directly from ISPs, giving them more control over the IPs.

These proxies here are static residential proxies and Bright Data has over 700K of them in store for you. These proxies are as undetectable as residential proxies while having a fast speed like datacenter proxies.

The major use case of these proxies is for account management. If you need proxies to manage accounts for an extended period of time, then they are a good option. They are also used for purchasing limited-edition sneakers as they are fast and undetectable. For some, they use them to unblock streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu that block users based on their location. The ISP proxy network has over 35 countries supported.

Bright Data ISP Proxies Price

The pricing for their static residential proxies is based on both IPs and bandwidth. Each IP you purchase will add $0.5 to the total cost, and then you are charged based on bandwidth at $15 per GB for their pay-as-you-go option. Really small proxy users can use their $10 package too. However, this is only for one-time users and you can’t game them. Also, heavy users can go for their other packaged plans, starting from $499 monthly.

Mobile Proxies

The Bright Data service is the pioneer in the niche as it is the first provider to offer rotating mobile proxies. Currently, it has over 7 million mobile IP addresses in its pool. The mobile proxies share a lot of similarities with the residential proxies including its location support and geo-targeting support.

The only major difference is its mobile IP footprint, which makes you view sites like a real mobile user. At first, this might not sound like a lot but if you consider the fact that mobile proxies enjoy more trust and are to some extent, unblockable, you will know how this is a game changer.

The major use case of these proxies is for accessing social media platforms. Mobile proxies are expensive compared to residential proxies and as such, they should only be used when residential proxies fail to perform well. Social media platforms that are primarily used on mobile becomes suspicious if you use residential IPs heavily to access them.

With mobile proxies, these platforms including Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and even LinkedIn think you are accessing them on mobile. They are perfect for scraping and carrying out other automation tasks on social media platforms.

Bright Data Mobile Proxies

In terms of pricing, I already mentioned it would cost you more than their residential proxies. The cost per GB is $24 as opposed to the $8.4 of their residential proxies. If you are a heavy user, you should go for their packaged plans which give you a cheaper price per GB but it starts from $499 monthly.

Datacenter Proxies

The datacenter proxies are called so because the IPs use server IPs which are easily identified as hosting IP addresses. For this reason, they are not recommended for accessing most of the popular websites. If your target site has a strong anti-spam system, there is every chance it will detect datacenter proxies. Even though the datacenter proxies offered by Bright Data have low spam scores, they should be used for unpopular sites.

Bright Data Datacenter Proxies Price

Bright Data offers both shared and dedicated datacenter proxies. The recommended option is the dedicated proxies as they are private and offer you the best performance. However, you will benefit from the shared datacenter proxies if you need to carry out IP rotation as in the case of scraping some of the sites with weak anti-spam systems. Pricing for the datacenter proxies starts from $0.11 per GB for their pay-as-you-go option.


Residential Proxy Features

The Bright Data service is the leader in the market and as such, has features that make it one and make you want to use it. Let’s take a look at some of these features below.

Most Advanced Residential Proxy Network

Bright Data’s residential proxy network is arguably the most advanced, there is in the market. The service has been at the forefront of innovations in the market and has even gone ahead to create patents for some of its creations. Its proxy manager is the first of its kind in the market and makes proxy management easy even for first-time users.

It helps to organize proxies, define custom rules for optimized results, and also serve as an easy-to-use tool to access their network. Interestingly, the proxy manager is a free tool.

Its proxy infrastructure is the best so far not just because of the result of our performance test but also from real-life usage. Bright Data is our de facto residential proxy network and the performance and features are top on the line.

The speed is the fastest, returns more unique IPs for IP rotation, and provides the highest success rate in the market. Its session control feature is the best in the rotating residential proxies and it scales well for enterprise usage since that is what it is meant for.

Large IP Pool and Excellent Location Coverage

The Bright Data service has over 72 million residential IPs in its pool, making it one of the largest residential proxy networks. There are providers that offer way above this number as some claim to have over 100 million IPs in their pool.

However, when it comes to the metrics that having a larger pool would be an advantage such as unique IP rate, Bright Data still beats them all as it returns the highest unique IP rate in the market. This large pool of residential IPs is what makes it great for large-scale web scraping and other automation tasks.

Large IP Pool and Excellent Location Coverage of Bright Data

Good enough, the IPs are not located in one region, they are scattered and gotten from all over the world with support for all of the countries in the world. It does have one of the best geo-targeting support, which encompasses country, state, and city-level targeting.

It also does have support for carrier and ASN targeting, giving you more control over the IPs that get assigned to you. This makes it one of the best residential proxy networks for localized scraping of data.

Excellent Scraping Performance

Web scraping is the major use case of residential proxies. Whether it is branded as price monitoring, marketing research, SEO scraping, social media monitoring, or even e-commerce review scraping, they are all forms of web scraping.

And the Bright Data service has been built specifically for this. It residential proxies are undetectable, the pool is constantly being monitored to remove the bad IPs, while the pool is also large enough to handle millions of requests.

Generally, the service has been built to perform at scale and the result is offering the best scraping performance there is in the market as it has the highest success rate, fastest response time, and returns the most unique IPs. If you are an enterprise user, this is the best service you should you for your web scraping tasks. It is also a good option for web automation tasks due to its good session control feature.

Powerful Proxy Control Tools

The proxy manager tool provided by Bright Data makes the management of proxies a breeze. It does not only provide you with proxy credentials and setup but also provides you with more features that other providers do not offer. One of these is waterfall rotation, which allows you to rotate IPs from a pool of four proxy types (residential, datacenter, ISP, and mobile) automatically, helping you to reduce cost while staying undetectable.

For this to happen though, you need to pay for all the proxy packages. It supports custom rules and regex, allowing you to choose the requests to send and ignore, thereby making it possible for you to reduce bandwidth usage.

It provides a detailed report of all of your requests and provides you with all of the metric data you need to make an informed scraping decision. While the proxy manager tool is for web scrapers and automation users, there is support for a proxy browser extension. The extension is available for only Chrome. Its main usage is making it easy to switch between multiple proxies without going through the repetitive method of manually setting proxies.


Residential Proxy Performance

Performance is where the Bright Data residential proxies shine. In this section of the review, the focus will be on revealing the result of some of the performance tests carried out ranging from response time, proxy success rate, and unique IP rate.

Proxy IP Geo Test

Residential proxies boast of having support for over 100 countries. However, most are not forthcoming with the actual number of IPs in specific countries. This is because they do not have a sizeable pool in most of the countries they claim to support.

That is, while they have IPs from those countries, the number of IPs is not enough for any reasonable localized scraping tasks. Bright Data is the only provider that truly has worldwide coverage, and does not only provide you details of the number of IPs it has in its top countries but also for small countries. Below is a chart showing the percentage of IPs in their pool from its top countries.

Proxy IP Geo Test of Bright Data

The United States and India contribute the highest at over 3.5 million IPs each. Followed by Brazil with 1.8 million and the UK with 1.3 million. The other countries with sizeable IPs in the network include Russia, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Japan, Canada, and Australia.

For all of these countries, there is a sizeable IP pool for your local scraping tasks. For the other countries, you can view it location support page. When you click on any, you will see the total number of IPs it has from the country.

In most of the countries even for unpopular countries, there are over 100K IPs. With this, you can not only say it has a sizeable pool for geo-targeted tasks, but you can also say it is transparent about its local IP pools.

Proxy Success Rate Test

The proxy success rate is a test that reveals the percentage of your requests that will succeed especially in terms of web scraping. There is no doubt that when web scraping at any reasonable scale, some of your requests will fail and your proxies are contributory factors.

To success rate varies from target to target as some web services are more effective at blocking web scrapers than others. For this reason, we tested the success rate of their proxies against 10 popular websites on the Internet.

For each of the sites, we send 300 concurrent requests multiple times to it and record whether the successes and failures. The idea is to get a more precise representation and an average figure that is truly average. Below is the result gotten.

Proxy Success Rate Test of Bright Data

The average success rate when calculated gave us 96.1%. This is the best in the market so far. The closest to this is Soax at 95% followed by Smartproxy with a success rate of 93.4%.  As you can see from the chart, the success rate for some of the sites such as Booking and Bing is 99%.

With this result, we can all agree that the Bright Data residential proxy is a dependable network for web scraping. You can use the proxies on social media platforms, e-commerce platforms, as well as search engines. It operates at an enterprise level and will handle tasks at any level.

Response Time Test

Another performance metric is the response time test which gives us an idea of speed — how long will it take for you to get a response after sending a web request. Speed is not one of the strengths of residential proxies and as such, you need to be careful when making a choice as some of them can take up to 3 seconds to respond.

If you have hundreds of thousands of requests to make, you can tell how long you will have to wait to wait for your tasks to complete. We tested the response time of the top residential proxy providers including Bright Data. Below is the result of the test.

Response Time Test of Bright Data

The response time for Bright Data is 0.48 seconds and it is the fastest in the market. While this can be termed slow if you weren’t using a proxy or if you use datacenter proxies, for residential proxies, this is the fastest you can get. The slowest on our watchlist above is 3.72 seconds and I tell you, that’s a lot of waiting time even for just one request.

At the kind of speed Bright Data operates, you can scrape hundreds of thousands of pages in a shorter period of time compared to any other residential proxy service in the market.

Unique IP Test

The last test in this section is the unique IP test which is used to reveal the percentage of duplicate IPs during IP rotation. It is common for residential proxies to claim they provide users with new IPs after every request. However, the reality is different as no provider does not, especially if the project is a large one.

The expectation here is, that the larger the size of an IP pool, the lower the duplicate IP rate. Bright Data has over 72 million IP addresses — what is its expected duplicate rate? We tested this by sending over 500K web requests without using their geo-targeting option and tracked the IPs for each of the requests. We also did so for other providers as you can see below.

Unique IP Test of Bright Data

The duplicate IP rate of Bright Data is 10.31% and it is the lowest in the market. This is the best result you can get so far, considering we set over 500K requests.

At this rate, you do not need to worry about exceeding requests as we can say out of the 500K requests, only 50K had duplicate IPs reassigned. And it might even be that no IP was reassigned more than twice or 3 times. At this rate, you can be sure you won’t even exceed limits that will get you blocked.


How to Use Bright Data

The Bright Data service is a leader and offers some of the most advanced features in the industry. The result of this is that it is not the easiest to use out there. First, you will need to create an account and do your KYC. For the KYC, you will need to schedule an appointment which usually, is within two days.

After the procedure is complete, it takes about an hour to verify and grant you full access to the service. With KYC completed, you get a $5 credit which you can use it get started and acquitted with their system.

Usage of Bright Data

To create a proxy endpoint, you just need to navigate to the ‘My Proxies' section. While there, you will find everything self-explanatory. For configuring the proxy endpoint, you have the option of geo-targeting which supports country, state, and city.

If you need to maintain a session for an extended period of time, then you should toggle the “Long-session peers” option ON so your requests will be sent through IPs that have higher chances of remaining online for long. If you need to cache some of your requests, there is also support for caching by toggling the cache proxy option.


Customer Support

How will the support team at Bright Data treat you when you need their support? Well, the Bright Data service as a leader in the market has enterprise customers using their service, and as such, having a dedicated support team is not something one will think they should play with.

However, I notice something not so good about this service. Unlike other services that have their live chat support feature conspicuously displayed on their page, you will need to look for that to see it. The live chat support is provided via popular social media platforms such as WhatsApp, WeChat, and Telegram.

Customer Support of Bright Data

You can find the links to these channels at the bottom of the page. However, if you want more professional support, you can contact them via email. This is the option I like to use. I have used this option multiple times since Bright Data is our de facto residential proxy anytime we need proxies for scraping. The response time of their customer support is usually within 5 hours. Sometimes, I get a response in two hours.

The good thing about their support team is that they are not only responsive and helpful, but they also like to do follow-up. The service also assigns you a dedicated account manager who serves as your support agent for better support personalization.


Source of IP Addresses

The over 72 million IPs in the pool of Bright Data’s residential proxy network are not owned by the service. It is obtained from regular Internet users who agree to the usage of their device resources including bandwidth and IP address. When Bright Data claims to route requests via ethically sourced IP addresses, this is what it means. There are basically two ways it gets IPs into its P2P networks that it uses to route requests.

The first method is by using its own apps and the second is by using third-party apps that install its SDK for monetisation. For the first option, Bright Data has a network of apps it uses. The most notable of them is Hola VPN, a free VPN service that allows you free usage but in exchange, you allow your device to be used as a proxy exit node.

If you don’t want to, you can opt out and pay to use it instead. It is the same model it follows for its partners that can install its SDK and get users of the app to consent and allow their device into the network in other to use the app for free.


Conclusion

The Bright Data service does not only offer proxies that work — its proxies are top-on-the-line, offering the most advanced features not available in most other providers. It offers the best performance, has a large pool of IPs, and has the highest success rate. With all of these and many more, you can tell I will recommend their proxies.

They are especially great for enterprise-level and large-scale web scraping and automation projects. Interestingly, even small providers can use it as its pay-as-you-go payment option makes it affordable to all. However, its KYC needs to be scheduled and as such, you are better off creating an account and requesting to do KYC now.


Alternatives to Bright Data

While Bright Data is our recommended residential proxy network, there are some other providers we can recommend if you don’t want to make use of it.

Soax — Recommended for great geo-location precision

Soax Overview

The Soax is another premium residential proxy network and from our performance tests, it came second, directly behind Bright Data. It has one of the cleanest pools in the market and offers a granular geo-targeting option, allowing you to choose IPs from a specific state or city, giving you better control over the geo-location of IPs assigned to your requests.

The only major problem with this is that it has a minimum monetary commitment of $99, making it not affordable for small proxy usage.

Smartproxy — Recommended for cost-effective with powerful proxy management tools

Smartproxy Overview

Smartproxy offers the same powerful proxy management tools but has a lower pricing and even more cheaper and affordable proxy packages than Bright Data. It is the choice for you if you need premium proxies for small to mid-scale scraping projects and wouldn’t want to go through all of the hurdles just to use the Bright Data network. It does offer a 3-day free trial for new users. It is also a great performance option.

Proxy-Cheap — Recommended for small-scale scraping.

Proxy-Cheap Overview

This provider is the cheapest among residential proxies that have good performance. It has a sizeable pool of residential proxies enough to handle small-scale web scraping tasks. It also has extensive location support. One thing you will come to like about this service is that its pricing starts from $5 per GB. While there are cheaper options, anything below this mark and you will have to deal with performance issues.


Our Expert's Review
  • Scaping Performance - 10/10
    10/10
  • Proxy Network - 9.9/10
    9.9/10
  • Proxy Functions - 9.9/10
    9.9/10
  • Customer support - 9.4/10
    9.4/10
9.8/10

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Residential IP Proxies sold by Bright Data (Luminati)
Average rating:  
 1 reviews
by Chris on Residential IP Proxies sold by Bright Data (Luminati)
So fast!

I like their proxies, one of the best proxies in this market!

Except the price is a little high, all other is #1!

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