In the expansive realm of proxy servers, Nimbleway might not yet be on your radar. How does their Nimble IP stack up, and is it worth a try? In this article, we will conduct an in-depth analysis of Nimbleway's residential proxies, after which you can decide whether to try their proxy services.
The Nimbleway service is one of the newest proxy providers. New not just in terms of the date of founding but also new in the kind of proxies it offers as its proxy network can be termed as modern, utilizing state-of-the-art technology like AI to help you stay undetected as you collect the data of choice legitimately.
I seek to provide an honest review of the Nimbleway proxies, with a focus on their residential proxies. Among other things, I will discuss the proxy type offered here, the features, performance tests, customer support, and a host of other details you need to know.
An Overview of Nimbleway
The Nimbleway proxy service made its debut in the proxy market in 2023 as both a proxy provider and a data collection infrastructure. Currently, the service offers residential proxies, and unblocking proxies, web scraping APIs, an AI automation browser, and a parsing engine powered by AI.
The service is a premium service, offering services only to enterprise customers and large proxy users as you need a minimum of $600 to use their proxies or any other service offered by them. Currently, it has the likes of Uber, Pinterest, the New York Times, Discord, Wayfair, and a lot more enterprises on its customer list.
| Parameter | Feature |
| IP Type | Residential |
| Price Charged | Bandwidth |
| Price Sample | Start at $600 |
| Pool of IPs | Undisclosed |
| Proxy Protocol | HTTP |
| IP Rotation |
|
| Filtering/Targeting | Countries, states and cities |
| Authentication |
|
| Speed | Good |
| Free Trial | 22 GB |
| Refund Policy | No |
| Support | Email and Contact Form |
| Jurisdiction Location | USA |
Proxy Types
Unlike some other proxy providers that offer proxies in a good number of proxy categories, the Nimbleway service is currently niched — offering proxies in just residential proxies. However, it offers an advanced form of proxy known as an unblocker proxy. Let’s take a look at these two.
Residential Proxies
Nimble describes this as a modern residential proxy for bypassing blocks and restrictions. These are residential proxies that rotate IPs for you automatically. It has millions of residential IPs in its pool. It is from this pool that it chooses an IP to assign to you either after each request or after a specific time.
One thing that makes this service unique is its IP selection engine which selects the IP to be assigned to you based on decisions made by its AI engine as opposed to the pure random nature of the other proxy providers. The AI engine chooses the IP to assign to you based on your website of target as well as your use case.
Unlike other residential proxies, this one didn’t state the number of IPs in its pool. But based on the enterprise customers that use their service, we can tell it is huge in the millions and might even be one of the largest out there.
In terms of location support, all countries are supported with support for selected states and cities around the world. The major use case for their residential proxies is web scraping and other forms of automation. It is undetectable against popular e-commerce, social media, and search engine sites.
In terms of pricing, that is where the problem lies for small proxy users. The minimum you can spend on their proxies is $600 and that gives you 75GB. Except you have a really large web scraping project, you wouldn’t need 75GB nor are you willing to spend this amount on proxies alone. But for those that have large projects, this is affordable and cheap as the cost per GB is $8. There is a free 2GB trial for users who complete their KYC.
Unblocker Proxy
The unblocker proxy is a next-generation proxy that gives you much more than traditional residential proxies. In fact, it can’t be said to be a standalone proxy as it utilizes the premium residential proxies of Nimble (the one discussed above). However, it comes with other features that make web scraping a lot easier with fewer headaches.
Some of the features you get in this that you don’t get in their residential proxies include header management and user agent management. Using this, you are able to tweak the user agent and other headers used when sending web requests — this is something that traditional residential proxies lack.
But that is not all, it also renders Javascript, automatically retries unsuccessful requests, avoids captchas, and unblocks websites. This is because it is powered by the Nimble AI browser. In general, you can see this as a proxy API, and should be used when traditional residential proxies fail or using them is costing you a lot in terms of proxy management.
The pricing for this is based on CPM and starts from $2.2 per CPM for the smallest plan. However, the minimum monetary commitment is $600 monthly. This again is quite expensive for small proxy users and if you are one of them, you might want to check the alternative part of this review to choose from the list of alternative proxy providers.
For those who can afford this, there is a 100 CPM free trial plan available for new users to try out the service before making a monetary commitment.
Residential Proxy Features
In this section, we will take a look at some of the features this proxy network brings to the table that a good number of enterprises are making use of.
Granular Geo-Targeting
Websites are becoming increasingly localized, showing you content based on your perceived location. And you can think of even big websites with this practice such as Google, Netflix, and the rest.
For web scraping, if you need to collect data from locations you are not, you will need a proxy that will provide you IPs for those locations. That’s one of the strengths of Nimbleway. The Nimble residential proxies have proxies in over 190 countries. This means that you can get IPs from virtually all of the countries in the world.
For the countries it supports, you can use the geo-targeting option to get IPs from only a selected country based on the locational requirement of your task. However, it does not stop there — it also does have support for state and city-level geo-targeting.
Using these two, you can get IPs from specific states and cities respectively. It is important you know that the state and city-level geo-targeting will only work for selected regions and the number of IPs in some regions will be too small to support this.
Rotating and Sticky Session Support
The proxies offered here are rotating proxies and not static proxies. So by default, you get your IP changed after every request or refresh. Using this, you are able to send millions of web requests without getting blocked and this is what makes it perfect for web scraping.
The team at Nimbleway didn’t just provide you with their residential proxies to use, it is also used to power their data collection pipelines and web scraping APIs they develop. If you go with the default setting, you should get a new IP after every request. However, there are instances where you will not want to switch IP to a newer one after every request.
Tasks that require you to maintain sessions such as account management will require you to maintain an IP address for the session duration. The Nimble residential proxy network does support sticky sessions that will maintain the same IP for a period of time known as a rotation period of up to 30 minutes.
The rotation period of customisable and you can choose between 1, 3, 5, 10, and 30 minutes. The rotation you choose should be in line with your task requirement. It is also important you know that there are chances that your session will be cut short and a new one will start prematurely as Nimble does not own full control over the IPs since they are sourced via P2P.
Geo Session Support
The sticky sessions are good for maintaining sessions for a limited period of time (days or weeks). If your task requires you to maintain a session for a longer duration and with geo precision, then what you need is not their sticky session but geo-session — a feature only Nimble offers for now.
With this, you can maintain a longer session and when the IPs are offline, you are not given a different IP but instead, the system waits for it to return. For this, the system selects more stable IPs to reduce the chances of assigning you unresponsive IPs or IPs that go offline too quickly.
One other good thing that their geo-session has aside from longer duration and more precise location targeting, it also allows you to share the session ID with other users on the Nimble platform. However, while the geo session seems to be superior and stable compared to the sticky session, the sticky session has the advantage of a quicker IP rotation should the session IP become unresponsive and you have access to more IPs.
IPv6 Is Supported
The de facto proxies in the market are IPv4 proxies. As such, when a provider does not specifically state the protocol of its IPs, just know that what it offers are IPv4 proxies. However, there is a shift albeit a slow move to IPv6 protocol as the number of IPv4 IPs available does not meet the growing demand for IPs. Most of the IPv6 proxies sold are datacenter proxies. The Nimbleway residential proxy service is one of the few that have support for IPv6 proxies.
But this is not provided by default. You will need to optionally opt to use it before your requests are routed through IPv6 proxies. One thing you need to know is that while IPv6 proxies are cheaper than their IPv4 counterparts, most websites do not support them yet. So, you are better off finding out if your target supports it before using it.
Residential Proxy Performance
In this section of the review, I will focus on the performance of their residential proxies, discussing the important test that makes up part of the performance.
Proxy IP Geo Test
Since the web has increasingly become localized, the geo-location of the IPs we use for web scraping has become more important than ever. If you need to scrape Google SERP for the US, you will need US IP addresses as using a Nigerian IP address will show you the SERP as it appears for Nigerian Audience.
When it comes to location support, the Nimble service has support for all countries and you can even use the geo-targeting feature for specific states and cities, giving you more granular support. However, unlike other services, the Nimble residential proxy service does not state the total number of IPs it has in its pool — not to talk of the IPs it has in specific countries.
The screenshot above shows the top supported countries. The actual number of IPs in each of these is not known. However, by virtue of the customers it serves, we expect it does have a sizeable pool for many of the countries it supports especially the 12 countries shown above. If you need IPs from a different country, then you will need to speak to their team to know if they have a sizeable pool for the location.
Proxy Success Rate Test
Ideally, you will want all of your web requests to succeed without any failure. However, web scraping involves you sending a lot of requests within a short period of time, and with this, there are higher chances of some of the requests not succeeding. Interestingly, the proxy you use has been fingered as one of the contributory factors.
Here, we try to test and see the percentage of requests that will succeed. The goal is to see if the result is something that we can work with. To test this out, we send 300 concurrent requests multiple times to popular web targets. Below is the result of the test.
Average success rate: 92.2%
The average success rate using their proxies is 92.2%. This means 8 out of 100 requests will fail. If you ask me, this result is great, considering we sent 300 concurrent requests. To put things in perspective, the best performer in this category has a success rate of less than 95%, and the worst on our watch list has a success rate of less than 80%.
If you check, you see the highest success rate is on Booking, YouTube, Bing, and Instagram. Surprisingly, the success rate for scraping Google is 85% which is the lowest we got.
Response Time Test
Residential proxies are some of the slowest in the market and have proven to be a bottleneck in applications that use them. However, all residential proxies are not the same. Some are fast enough to get your task done while others are noticeably slower.
The negative impact of a slow proxy might not be felt when you send a single request, but it will be felt and have a negative impact on a web scraping project that sends thousands of requests. What the response time measures is the time between sending a web request and getting a response. Below is the response of Nimbleway residential proxies as measured by us in comparison with other providers.
As you can see above, response time is one of the places Nimbleway got things right. On average, its response time is 0.51 seconds, making it the second fastest in the market directly behind Bright Data at 0.48 seconds.
The difference between them is even negligible. It might interest you to know that at this speed, you can scrape at a speed close to your actual speed without using the proxy. If you browser using their proxies on your browser, you wouldn’t even notice the slowness in their proxies.
Unique IP Test
The unique IP test is used to measure the percentage of the unique or duplicate IP assigned to you during IP rotation in the case of web scraping. For web scraping, you need as many new IPs as you can get to exceed request limits and avoid blocks. Most residential proxies will promise you a new IP but this is almost not fulfilled in all cases.
Using this test, I will reveal how much percentage of the assigned IPs by Nimble residential proxies are duplicate IPs. To do this, we sent over 500K web requests and tracked the IPs assigned to us. Below is the result of the test together with the result of other providers.
Looking at the chart above, you will see that Nimbleway came 7, with an IP duplicate rate of 15.23%. At first, you might want to look at this result as poor. However, I am here to tell you that it is a good result as a 15% duplicate rate for a high rotating proxy won’t get you blocked except there is another thing wrong with your setup.
However, if you want to pitch your tent with a provider that will provide you with the lowest duplicate rate, then that has to be Bright Data with a duplicate rate of 10.31%. There are also far worse performers in this category with some even having a duplicate rate of as high as 70% – 80%.
How to Use Nimbleway
The Nimble service prides its residential proxy as a modern proxy service and it claims to have learned from the mistake of the already existing services. One thing you will notice immediately when you log into the user dashboard, you will notice there are a lot of user interface elements as it is quite advanced and offers much more than just proxies.
What you should do after purchasing your proxies is to go to the Nimble IP section. The service provided a helpful guide to get you started pretty quickly. From the ‘Send a Request’ tab, you will find the proxy endpoint and port and the guide on how to use the proxy.
Generally, unlike other services that require just a username and password for authentication, Nimble requires you to also provide the name of a pipeline for authentication (there is a guide on how to create one in the user dashboard). If you need to use the geo-targeting option, you also do that by appending it to the username.
The service does have support for detailed analytics and your usage per pipeline which gives you a better understanding and intelligence on your usage. There are multiple options also such as session control and much more from the user dashboard.
Customer Support
Customer support is an important aspect of any business and it is expected that all proxy services that know what they are doing to have a dedicated team for that. The Nimble service understands this and has a dedicated team for this.
However, it provides this via support tickets and emails. One thing you will come to like about this service is that if you subscribe to its advanced plan, you are assigned a dedicated account manager. I am not subscribed to and I know some of our readers wouldn’t either.
In fact, I tried to contact their support not as a registered user but as a site visitor and used their email support. I sent them an email and got a response after 16 hours. If you ask me, I will say this is a long time to wait to get a response. However, I suspect they give higher priority to their registered and paid customers as support was faster and more responsive when I logged into my account.
Source of IP Addresses
The source of IP addresses is one important aspect one needs to pay attention to especially if you are the type that pays more attention to the ethical side of things. One thing about the Nimble residential proxy service is that, unlike other providers that state the number of IPs they have in their pool, this provider does not. Interestingly, it also does not state the source of their IP addresses.
However, we do know they do not own the IP addresses they route requests to — the IPs are sourced via P2P networks. Unfortunately, we don’t know the specific apps they use in getting the IPs into their pool and as such, it becomes difficult for us to say with certainty whether the IPs are sourced via ethical means or not.
But considering they have a strict KYC procedure and their network is meant for enterprise usage, I want to believe their IPs are sourced via ethical means.
Do We Recommend Nimbleway?
The Nimblway residential proxies is one of the newest providers. However, it comes with some unique twists and advanced features that make you want to use it. It is a performance beast and scales gracefully without impact on performance.
For this reason, it is recommended, especially for large web scraping and other forms of automation. However, it can be expensive and the minimum amount you can spend is $600. Interestingly, for those who can afford it, it is one of the best proxy investments and the cost per GB is cheap.
Alternatives to Nimble Residential Proxies
No doubt, the Nimble residential proxies work. However, they are not for everyone. If you are looking for an alternative, you can make a choice below.
Soax — Recommended as a cheaper alternative with precise geo-targeting.
Soax also has its focus more on larger projects and enterprise customers. However, it can be said to be cheaper as you need $99 to get started with them as opposed to the $600 required by Nimble. Interestingly, it is also a good performance and has better geo-targeting support.
Bright Data — Recommended alternative for web scraping and data collection.
Bright Data is the best residential proxy network according to our findings. Interestingly, it is the best for web scraping and data collection. It has a large pool of IPs, supports an extensive list of locations, and is the fastest so far. It also has the best success rate for web scraping and returns the most unique IPs while giving you better session control. This provider is also a lot cheaper as you can get started with just $10.5 per GB.
Smartproxy — First choice for small and medium-scale users.
The Smartproxy service is a premium proxy provider. However, it has a more affordable pricing structure and a more relaxed onboarding procedure. It is one of the best alternatives for web scraping if your scraping project is not too large. For this service, you can get started at $8.5 per GB.
Proxy-Cheap — Cheapest alternative to Nimbleway
If you are on a tight budget and need the cheapest alternative you can lay your hands on that will work, then Proxy-Cheap is the provider. It offers you a residential proxy network that works, has a sizeable pool for small-scale web scraping, and is fast enough to get your tasks done. However, it does not have many of the advanced features offered by Nimble.
Our Expert's Review
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Scaping Performance - 9.6/10
9.6/10
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Proxy Network - 9.4/10
9.4/10
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Proxy Functions - 9.6/10
9.6/10
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Customer support - 9.4/10
9.4/10
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