Are you looking for the best proxies to use with the Helium Scraper for a maximum web scraping experience? Then come in now and discover our recommendations picked by our expert reviewers.
Overview: Proxies for Helium Scraper
- Luminati: 72+ million IPs in Pool – <Starts from $500 for 40GB | $12.5 per GB> – Overall Best Provider in the Market
- Soax: 5+ million IPs in Pool – <Starts from $75 for 5GB | $15 Per GB > – Clean and updated proxy pool
- Shifter: 31+ million IPs in Pool – <Starts from $249 for 10 ports | $25 per port> – Unlimited Bandwidth
- Stormproxies: 40K IPs in Pool – <Starts from $50 for 5 ports | $10 per port> – Cheapest provider on the list
- Proxyrack: 2+ million IPs in Pool – <Starts from $125 for 250 ports | $0.48 per proxy> – Regular provider
In most cases, proxy usage is an integral part of web scraping regardless of the web scraping bot you intend to use. Even web scraping tools that do not require you to provide proxies use them in the background. The tool of focus in this article is the Helium Scraper.
If you intend to make use of it for web scraping, then you will need to make use of proxies in other to avoid blocks. This is because all the tool does is to send requests and incorporate some anti-bot evasion systems – and the use of proxies is an integral part of this.
Generally, Helium Scraper does not have specific proxies it works with. The proxies you make use of depends largely on your target site. Take, for instance; you can make use of datacenter proxies to scrape data from Twitter. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of Instagram as it is more aggressive in the fight against automation and the use of proxies than Twitter.
For this reason, our recommendation will tilt towards residential proxies that are more detection proof. Before going into the recommendation proper, let take a look at an overview of Helium Scraper and why you will need proxies to use it.
Helium Scraper – an Overview
Helium Scraper is a web scraper you can use to extract data from websites on the Internet. The web scraper has been engineered to be able to scrape data from all kinds of websites, even the modern websites that depend largely on JavaScript for functionality.
With Helium Scraper, you can collect product details, generate leads, extract training data for machine learning projects, and scrape discussion forums and review sites for discovering trends and sentiments, among others.
Helium Scraper is an already made web scraper that does not require you to know how to write code in other to make use of it. It comes with an intuitive interface that even a newbie will find easy to use. All that’s required is for you to train the software by using the point and click interface provided to pinpoint data points, and the tool will scrape the required data for you. With its simple workflow, you can capture complex data at the fastest speed possible.
Helium Scraper comes with some advanced features, which include fast extraction, support for big data, database generation, SQL generation, API calling, proxy rotation, similar elements detection, list detection, data exporting in many formats, and scheduling, among others.
Why Use Proxies with Helium Scraper?
Helium Scraper has support for proxies and can even help you rotate proxies if you provide it a proxy list. But is it a must that you make use of proxies? the short answer is NO. But that’s not all. In most cases, proxies are a must. There are basically two web scraping scenarios that you will not need to make use of proxies if you are to make use of Helium Scraper.
The first is when you are scraping from a single page, and all of the information can be found on a few pages. The second scenario is if you are scraping a site that does not have any anti-bot system in place to discourage bot traffic, automation, and scraping. Aside from the two scenarios mentioned, any other use case will require the use of proxies.
Proxies are required because of anti-bot systems that track and ban IP addresses. Most websites that have data of interest to web scrapers or want to discourage the use of bots track IP addresses it gets requests from and blocks further requests if it gets too many requests from a certain IP address within a short period of time. What each site regards as too many requests varies and depends largely on what seems natural and the average a regular user can send.
Helium Scraper sends many requests in a minute, and as such, it could cross the request limit in no time, and as such, you will need proxies and rotate IPs to evade IP tracking and blocking. With proxies, you can also access geo-targeted data as your real IP address is hidden, and a new IP from your location of interest is assigned to your requests.
Best Residential Proxies for Helium Scraper
As stated earlier, we are going with residential proxies as it is more reliable and undetectable than datacenter proxies – and cheaper and quite functional as mobile proxies. the proxies we will be recommending are rotating proxies are they are the best for web scraping in most use cases. Below are the recommended proxies for Helium Scraper.
Luminati
- IP Pool Size: Over 72 million
- Locations: All countries in the world
- Concurrency Allowed: Unlimited
- Bandwidth Allowed: Starts at 40GB
- Cost: Starts at $500 monthly for 40GB
When it comes to the proxy market, Luminati is king. It has the largest proxy network with over 72 million IP addresses sourced via a peer-to-peer (P2P) network from all countries and regions across the globe. Luminati proxies integrate well with the Helium Scraper, and it even takes care of rotating IP on its own. Luminati provides you 100 percent control over sessions, and you can maintain a session for up to 30 minutes.
If you want high rotating proxies that changes IP addresses after every request, you can also get them from Luminati. Luminati has support for geo-targeting, and you can select to use proxies from specific countries, states, and even cities. Their proxies are compatible with most websites and, according to our tests, are some of the best for web scraping.
Soax
- IP Pool Size: Over 5 million
- Locations: All countries in the world
- Bandwidth Allowed: Starts at 19GB
- Cost: Starts at $20 daily for 19GB and 300 ports
Soax residential proxies are also some of the best proxies you can use together with Helium Scraper for web scraping. They have got one of the cleanest proxy pools that is regularly being updated to make sure that bad IPs are removed. Currently, they have got over 5 million residential IP addresses sourced from many countries across the world.
Because of diversity in terms of IP address location, they have got a good support for geo-targeting as you can choose proxies from a specific country, region, city, and even providers. Their proxies are elite proxies and undetectable.
Shifter
- IP Pool Size: Over 31 million
- Locations: 130 countries
- Concurrency Allowed: Unlimited
- Cost: Starts at $249.99 monthly for 10 ports
With Shifter, you have got a backconnect proxy service that rotates IP address after every 5 minutes. Shifter is different from Luminati and Soax in the aspect of pricing. While Luminati and Soax packages have limits to the amount of bandwidth you can use, Shifter allows its users to enjoy unlimited bandwidth.
This is because it is priced based on bandwidth. It can be said to be averagely priced and cheaper when compared to Luminati – Soax is cheaper than it. Shifter has got one of the largest proxy networks with 31 million IP addresses in its pool. It has support for many locations too.
Stormproxies
- IP Pool Size: 40,000
- Locations: US and EU
- Cost: Starts at $50 for 5 ports
The Residential IPs Backconnect Rotating Proxy Service of Stormproxies is one of the best you can use alongside Helium Scraper. With this provider, you can also enjoy unlimited bandwidth usage. In terms of pool size, Stormproxies can be said to be at a disadvantage as its residential proxy pool has just over 40K IP addresses.
Its location support is only the US and the EU. So, if you need to scrape geo-targeted data outside of these two regions, then Stormproxies is not for you. the main advantage I see in Stormproxies is pricing as it is cheap. the smallest package of this provider is sold for $50 and comes with 5 ports.
Proxyrack
- IP Pool Size: over 2 million
- Locations: 140 countries
- Concurrency Allowed: unlimited
- Cost: $120 for 250 proxies for a month
Proxyrack has a residential proxy service that you can use together with Helium Scraper. Pricing is affordable and quite cheap, even though it is not the cheapest on the list. It has a proxy pool of 2 million IP addresses from many countries and cities around the globe.
It has an ever-growing and dynamic network – and alp allows for an unmetered monthly data transfer. Their proxies are ideal for web scraping and data mining, among others. The Proxyrack proxy network has got proxies that are reliable, secure, and compatible with most websites on the Internet.
How to Integrate Proxies in Helium Scraper
If you have purchased proxies, the next step is integrating them with the Helium web scraper. It turns out that Helium Scraper makes it easy to integrate proxies. Helium Scraper has support for proxy rotation, and as such, if you have a list of proxies, you can provide them, and Helium Scraper will rotate them for you automatically.
In our own case, the proxies we discussed above are rotating proxies, and as such, all we have is a gateway or a few gateways, and rotating will be done at the proxy service level and not by Helium Scraper. Follow the steps described below to integrate and enable proxies on Helium Scraper.
- Download the Helium Scraper. It comes with 10 days of a full-featured free trial.
- Install and launch it. When the Helium Scraper program launches, go to “File” and click “Proxy List.”
- An interface with a list of proxies should open. It should be empty but if it comes with a list of proxies, press the “clear button” to have a new slate to work with.
- Go to the user dashboard of the proxy provider you bought proxies from and copy the proxy address, port, and username and password if applicable. If you chose Stormproxies, you need to know that it does not support username and password authentication. It only supports IP authentication, and as such, you will have to whitelist your device's real IP address from the Stormproxies dashboard. For others, you will need to copy the username and password as you will be using it in Helium Scraper. But for proxies with IP authentication, username and password is not required.
- Switch back to Helium Scraper proxy list interface under address, enter the IP address of the proxy, e.g., zproxy.lum-superproxy.io. Under port, enter the port of the proxy, e.g., 39835. If username and password is applicable, fill them appropriately and press OK.
- You have set up proxies successfully. However, they have not been activated yet. To activate proxies on Helium Scraper, create a new project by going to File => New => Open, then select Project => Settings. Under the “Proxies” section, set “Enable Proxies” to “True” and click OK.
FAQs About Helium Scraper Proxy
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Does Using Proxies Save you from the Anti-Bot Systems of Websites?
Proxies help a lot in bypassing the anti-bot systems of websites. However, it is not always effective, and sometimes, you might get to solve Captchas. For this reason, you will need to have a Captcha solver handy. Helium Scraper has support for Captcha solver as third-party integration.
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Should I Use Rotating Proxies or a Proxy List?
Helium Scraper has support for both rotating proxies and a proxy list. If you provide it a proxy list, it will rotate the IP it uses for each of your requests.
Interestingly, rotating proxies, just like the ones discussed in the article, take care of IP rotation themselves, and as such, there is no need for Helium Scraper to do that. If you are using datacenter proxies that are static, then Helium Scraper will rotate them if you provide more than one.
Conclusion
If you intend to extract web data using either a custom script or a visual scraping tool such as the Helium Scraper, you need to know that using proxies is a must as it helps you bypass IP tracking and blocks. From the above, we have recommended some of the best proxies that work well with Helium Scraper and how to set them up.
