Dive into the detailed and enlightening ProxyEmpire Review to grasp its unique position in the fiercely competitive proxy service landscape. Whether you're a seasoned user or new to proxy servers, this review offers a comprehensive guide to help you make an informed decision about ProxyEmpire's offerings.
The ProxyEmpire service makes some bold statements and wants you to believe it is the solution to your proxy problems. However, a brief scan of their website content reveals some inconsistencies which can either be a result of the content and technical team not aligning or there is a much bigger issue.
Be that as it may, it is a service that works and there are situations we recommend them as they do have their strengths and what still kept them in business.
An Overview of ProxyEmpire
But will their proxies work for your use cases or you just waste your money? In this ProxyEmpire review, I will reveal all you need to know about the ProxyEmpire service to make an informed purchase decision.
The ProxyEmpire service is best described as a small-scale residential proxy provider. It offers proxies in multiple proxy markets ranging from residential, mobile, and datacenter proxies. The major focus of their proxies is on web scraping and general web automation. The service is based in Bulgaria and it is subject to their laws there.
One thing you will come to like about the service is that it is one of the residential proxies that support bandwidth rollover which is a good feature for small proxy users. It, however, also has some aspects you need to be wary of cons which will be discussed as we go deep into the review.
| Parameter | Feature |
| IP Type | Residential/ISP/Mobile/Datacenter/ |
| Price Charged | Bandwidth |
| Price Sample | Start at 1GB – $9 (Monthly) |
| Pool of IPs | 5.3M+ IPs |
| Proxy Protocol | HTTP and SOCKS5 |
| IP Rotation |
|
| Filtering/Targeting | Countries and Cities |
| Authentication | Username/Password |
| Speed | Average |
| Free Trial | $1.97 with 100MB |
| Refund Policy | No |
| Support | |
| Jurisdiction Location | Bulgaria |
Proxy Types
As stated earlier, the ProxyEmpire service offers proxies in a good number of proxy categories. Let’s take a look at the specific types of proxies offered and what they are best used for.
Rotating Residential Proxies
The rotating residential proxies are their most popular products and the one this article will focus more on. These proxies rotate IPs frequently for you, enough to avoid exceeding request limits that will get you blocked. This, together with the residential IPs they utilize makes them quite undetectable when used correctly.
For now, the service has 5.3 million IPs in the pool even though this number is not consistent on their website — some pages will show 100 million while others 9 million. You can use their geo-targeting feature to get IPs from specific countries and cities with over 170 countries supported.
These proxies are best used for small-scale web scraping, web automation, and everything in between including price monitoring, SEO monitoring, ad verification, and marketing research.
It integrates perfectly with web scrapers of your choice (either custom-built or already-made), thanks to its multi-protocol support with both HTTP and SOCKS5 supported. You can also use it with any anti-detect browser and on most websites without getting detected when used correctly.
In terms of pricing, there are both packaged plans and a pay-as-you-go option. The cost per GB for the pay-as-you-go option is $9. This is cheap as a standalone but not competitive when compared to the pricing of other smaller providers in its league such as Proxy-cheap. This pricing looks more like that of a competitor at the level of Bright Data, Oxylabs, and Smartproxy but that is not the class of this provider.
Static Residential Proxies
The ProxyEmpire service also offers static residential proxies, the type of proxies others will call ISP proxies. The major difference between these static residential proxies and their rotating counterparts mentioned above is that your IP doesn’t get changed — it remains the same for a period of one month or even longer provided you pay for it.
This is a game changer as you are able to maintain a session for a long period of time which is what their rotating proxies lack. One of the best use cases for these proxies includes account management even on popular sites such as e-commerce and social media. You can manage multiple accounts with them. They are also perfect for streaming content online as well as purchasing limited edition sneakers.
Unlike in the case of their rotating proxies, there are only about one million IPs for this. But considering they are static, the size here is even more reasonable. You have the option of choosing from 21 countries at the time of purchase. In terms of pricing, the cost per IP here is $2 which makes it quite competitive and one of the cheapest in the market. Interestingly, the more IPs you purchase, the cheaper the price per IP becomes.
Rotating Mobile Proxies
Their rotating mobile proxies will rotate mobile IPs for you after every request to hide your activities away from your targets. They are somehow like the rotating residential proxies but with two main differences. The first difference is that it routes requests via mobile IPs which have more trust than residential IPs, allowing you more leeway than residential proxies.
It is this higher trust it carries that makes it flavored for accessing social media. Mobile proxies are the best for scraping and automating your tasks on some of the hard-to-access via proxy social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and LinkedIn.
The second difference is in the pricing — it is expensive and you need to pay $20 per GB to use their proxies. For this reason, except residential proxies can’t be used for the tasks you need proxies for, there is no reason you should use mobile proxies. Currently, social media is the major use case here. Also, they are the slower option among the two.
Dedicated Mobile Proxies
These ones are even more expensive. From the ProxyEmpire service, the cost per plan is $250 monthly. IPs are maintained and not rotated by default. However, there is support for IP rotation done instantly on-demand. For this, you get US IPs with access to IPs from 52 locations in 38 US states.
There is a cheaper plan which is sold for $125 and gives you access to more countries including the US, Israel, the UK, and Austria. IP rotation for this one is less flexible as you can do that only 4 times per day. Their dedicated mobile proxies should only be used for account management on social media platforms and for accounts you can’t afford to lose.
Rotating Datacenter Proxies
If your task requires you to scrape data from a website that is not powered by an effective anti-spam system or its anti-spam system is basic, then you can use the ProxyEmpire rotating datacenter proxies.
These are datacenter IPs that are easily detected by popular websites across the globe but not many small to mid-scale sites block them. The number of countries you have access to here is quite small as there are only 13 countries. Likewise, the pool is also small with only over 41K IPs.
However, it is also cheaper and the fastest in the list of proxies offered by ProxyEmpire. You can purchase 40GB for $25, putting the price per GB at $0.62 as opposed to the $8 for their residential counterparts. Remember, if you use it on popular sites, you will get blocked.
Residential Proxy Features
In this section of the review, I will focus more on their residential proxies and discuss some of their features you should be aware of.
Rotating and Session Port Support
ProxyEmpire supports two types of ports — rotating and session ports. The rotating port will assign a different IP address to you after every request. This port is the port you should use for web scraping and everything in it ranging from SEO scraping and monitoring, price monitoring, and marketing research.
The new IPs assigned to you make it difficult for websites to identify the hundreds of thousands of requests you will potentially send as coming from the same device.
The other port is the session port and this is used for session management and best for account management. For this, an IP is assigned to you for a limited period of time, and for this period, a session is maintained.
The maximum session duration using their session ports is 60 minutes. However, the average session duration hovers around 16 minutes. You can set the session time after which the IP assigned to you will be changed but it must be 60 minutes or below.
Excellent Location Coverage with Sizable IP
The IP pool size of ProxyEmpire is not competitive when compared to the top-on-the-line proxy providers such as Bright Data, Oxylabs, Soax, and Smartproxy, among others. However, when compared to the small providers, it is competitive.
Currently, there are over 5.3 million IPs in its pool which is available for all users of their service. This size is big enough for most small to mid-scale scraping projects. Interestingly, pool size is not the only good thing about this service. It also gets things right in the aspect of location support. ProxyEmpire currently has IPs from over 170 countries cutting across all of the continents with all the popular countries supported.
For this, you don’t only have the option to choose IPs from the supported countries, you can also choose to use IPs from selected cities and currently, there are thousands of regions and tens of thousands of cities supported which you can choose for your geo-targeting option. This makes it a provider for scraping and accessing geo-targeted tasks.
Bandwidth Rollover Support
Most residential proxies, specifically those with rotation support are priced based on bandwidth — and for most, the bandwidth expires after 30 days regardless of whether you consume the bandwidth or not. This is not something that goes down well with small proxy users as many don’t exhaust the bandwidth they pay for before expiration.
The ProxyEmpire service is one of the services that support bandwidth rollover. With bandwidth rollover, you get your expired bandwidth added to the one you purchase in the subsequent month. This is a step better than losing your unused bandwidth. However, there is an even better deal — the IPRoyal service supports non-expiry bandwidth.
Unlimited Concurrent Sessions and Threads Support
The ProxyEmpire network has built its service with no limitation at least from the aspect of sessions and threads. It allows you to generate multiple endpoints and each of those endpoints will have its own session, good for multiple account management. The good thing here is that there is no limit to the number of concurrent sessions you can create. But that is not all, there is also no limit to the number of concurrent requests or threads you can create.
I will say that most users, shouldn’t take this to heart as regardless of whether ProxyEmpire supports unlimited concurrent threads or not, their device might not have the capacity to support and so, what your device can handle will determine the limit for you.
Residential Proxy Performance
The features look good for residential proxy service. But how about the actual performance? How well does it meet up? Let’s take a look at some of the key aspects of their proxy performance below.
Proxy IP Geo Test
The ProxyEmpire service is one of the top tiers among the small proxy users and it claims to have over 170 countries supported. While this is a flex to it, what we are not told is the size for each of the country-level pools. The details for the top providers in other proxy pools are made available — but that of their residential pools is not mentioned.
To tell the truth, I find it difficult to even pinpoint the top locations in terms of the number of IPs from their website. When this number is not made available, it only means one thing — a provider is not proud of the size of their proxy pool per country.
For this reason, the ProxyEmpire service is not the service for you to scrape geo-targeted countries especially if your target location is not a tier-one country. Based on experience, I can say the service has a large number of their IP pool from the United States and a few other countries in Europe.
For the United States and the United Kingdom, you can be sure it has a large pool enough to ensure efficient geo-targeting. But for other countries, I am not sure — you will need to speak to their support.
Proxy Success Rate Test
The Proxy success rate test seeks to uncover how many percent of your requests sent will succeed and what percent will fail in the case of web scraping. It might interest you to know that in most cases, not all web scraping requests sent will succeed — and the proxy you use is the cause for some of the failures.
So, you will need to use a provider that will keep the failure rate as small as possible. To test the success rate, we sent 300 concurrent requests multiple times to popular web targets and measured the success rate. Below is a summary of the results we got in a chart.
The average success rate we recorded was 88.6%. This value might be seen as a bad result, but I will tell you it is a success rate for a residential proxy. The average performance in this regard is around 80%. If you take a look at the result, you will see that the highest success rates were in e-commerce platforms such as Amazon, Booking, and Nike.
It also did well in scraping Instagram, Bing, and Adidas. The worst result was actually on Google Search. With this, you can tell it does not perform at its best for SEO scraping.
Response Time Test
Response time is a good indicator of performance — together with download/upload speed and ping rate, you get a comprehensive detail of how fast or slow a provider is. However, in this review, the focus here is on the response time.
Using it, one can tell how fast on average you will get a response after sending a web request. Ideally, you will need something under one second but the average is more than that with some even taking as much as 3.75 seconds. Where does the ProxyEmpire stand in this regard?
The average response time of ProxyEmpire is 1.02, approximately one second. This is obviously not one of the fastest in the market. However, it is not one of the slowest and can be said to be even faster than the average.
Being a provider I will recommend for small-scale usage, I will say this speed is acceptable as there is only one small provider that is faster than this and that is Proxy-cheap. With this, it can be said that it is fast, especially for small-scale scraping projects.
Unique IP Test
The last test in the performance section is the unique IP test which reveals the percent of the duplicate IPs that will be assigned to you while web scraping. In web scraping, you need as many unique IPs as you can and most providers will promise to provide you new IP per request.
But the reality is that even the best provider does not, especially for large-scale projects. We decided to test how many percent of the IPs assigned have already been assigned. We tested this by sending over 500K web requests and keeping track of the IP addresses assigned. Below is the result of that of ProxyEmpire together with other providers.
As you can see above, the duplicate rate of their service is 18.39% and I will say this is one of the best results as the result for the best service is 10.31% and that is for Bright Data, a leader in the market. The result can be as high as 82.53% as in the case of Infatica.
With an IP duplicate rate of 18.39%, you can tell you won’t exceed request limits that will get you blocked. If you consider we sent about 500K requests for this result, you will accept this as a good score, considering it has less than 10 million IPs in its pool.
How to Use ProxyEmpire
The ProxyEmpire service is a small proxy provider and does not come with some of the advanced features offered by the top providers. While this might be seen as a cons on one hand, it is great on another aspect, especially on the aspect of usage.
Using their proxies is easy. All you need to do is create an account, add money to your account, and purchase a plan. You can get your proxy credential from the dashboard. The credentials required are proxy address, port, username, and password. The username and password are for authentication's sake — the service has no support for IP authentication.
The proxy credentials are found in the proxy manager tab. If you need to use the geo-targeting option, the tool is there to choose the country, state, and even city you want IPs from. But except your get location is in one of their top supported locations, I will recommend you don’t make use of this. It is also important you know that when you tweak this, the proxy credentials will change.
Customer Support
Customer support is an integral part of every business and proxy is no different. One thing you will come to like about the ProxyEmpire service is its customer-focused business. I must admit, whoever designed their website and approved it needs to relearn everything about user experience as finding information about their proxies is terrible, and the content there appears more like an article than a copy written to enable you to scan and find what you need fast.
But for the customer support, it is good. I have used their customer support and the result was swift and helpful for the two times. I usually get a response in less than 2 minutes.
However, their customer support team is not always online. If you visit their site when there is no customer support team online, then you can contact them via email. The email support is not as swift as their live chat feature. You should expect to get a response within 5 hours and at most, within 24 hours. You can also contact them via their social media handles.
Source of IP Addresses
The ProxyEmpire service gets its IP address for its rotating residential proxies via P2P. This is basically a pool with devices that route requests via them. Ideally, it should source these IPs ethically. But what does it mean to be ethical here?
It means the users should be aware of how their device and its resources will be used and give their consent. The only way this is possible is for the user to get something in return — either financial compensation or to use an app for free.
Unlike some other providers that state how they get their IPs and some even go as far as providing details of the apps they use for their users to verify, ProxyEmpire is secretive about that. For this reason, we can’t ascertain whether their IPs are sourced via ethical means or not.
Do We Recommend ProxyEmpire
The ProxyEmpire like every other provider does have its strengths and weaknesses. When compared to other smaller providers like itself, it is one of the best, especially in terms of performance. While it might not be the best for geo-targeting, it is good in other aspects.
I recommend this for web scraping and other forms of authentication but for small projects. You shouldn’t use it for large projects as it can become inefficient.
Alternatives to ProxyEmpire
Below are some of the alternatives to the ProxyEmpire service you need to take a look at if it does not meet your requirements.
Bright Data — Recommended for better session control.
Bright Data is our recommended provider for web scraping. It also has the best session control in the rotating residential proxy market and you can customize its IP rotation from 1 minute to up to 60 minutes. Interestingly, the difference in pricing with ProxyEmpire is small and negligible. However, it has better performance, more location support, and other advanced features.
Smartproxy — Recommend for Faster speed.
If what you need is a faster provider and don’t have the money to pay for Bright Data, then the Smartproxy service is the option for you. It has the same pricing as ProxyEmpire but is a lot faster and offers even better customer support. It also has a larger pool and supports more locations.
Soax — Recommended for a larger and cleaner IP pool.
This provider constantly monitors its pool to remove bad and inactive IPs. The result is a cleaner IP pool with fewer connection errors and retries. It also has a larger pool making it an alternative for large-scale scraping, something I wouldn’t recommend you do with ProxyEmpire. However, it also costs more and you need a minimum of $99 to get started.
Proxy-Cheap — Recommended for its cost-effectiveness.
This provider is a lot cheaper than ProxyEmpire. However, they have almost the same pool size and location support. Interestingly, Proxy-cheap has better performance, making it a better option especially if you want the highest value for your money.
Our Rating
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Scraping Performance - 8.8/10
8.8/10
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Proxy Network - 9/10
9/10
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Proxy Functions - 9/10
9/10
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Customer support - 9.2/10
9.2/10
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