Do you have Smartproxy in the list of proxy providers you want to buy proxies from? Then read this Smartproxy review to know if it's the best proxy provider for you.
Smartproxy Overview
- Win Price-Performance Award with Affordable & Fast Residential Proxies
Besides, they offer one of the best prices in the market and their plans are based on traffic usage. So it’s not surprising that Smartproxy sees itself as the best residential proxy network in the market. But in this review, we’ll do our own research and test just to make sure it is true.
| Parameter | Feature |
|---|---|
| IP Type | Residential |
| Price Charged | Bandwidth |
| Price Sample | Starts from $12.5 per GB with Pay As You Go |
| Pool Of IPs | 40+ Million |
| Proxy Protocol | HTTP(S) |
| IP Rotation |
|
| Filtering/Targeting | Cites/Countries |
| Authentication | IP Authentication and Username/Password |
| Speed | Excellent |
| Free Trial | No |
| Refund Policy | 3 Days |
| Support | Live Support and Support Ticket |
| Jurisdiction Location | USA |
Smartproxy Pros
Smartproxy offers a lot of great features that make it the most wannabe proxy provider in the market. Here are the main pros of Smartproxy.
They are Cheaper Than Many of Their Competitors
One of the selling points of Smartproxy residential IP addresses is their pricing plan. While they are seen as relatively expensive because of other proxies’ prices, if you compare their pricing with their equals (other premium service providers), you will see that they’re actually really cheap. Interestingly, the price goes down as you buy more bandwidth. For example, 1 GB costs $12.5 in their basic plan, but in their Enterprise plans, the price goes down to $4.
Unlike Bright Data, GeoSurf, or Oxylabs, Smartproxy’s plans are quite flexible. They also cater to smaller proxy use cases and offer Micro Plan that has just 8 GB and is priced at $80. For instance, Oxylabs’ smallest plan costs $600 and comes with 50 GB of bandwidth that you might not need.
Enough Residential IPs and Location
Smartproxy has a good number of residential IPs in its pool. Currently, it has over 40 million real IP addresses spread across more than 195 locations in the world. Since these are residential IP addresses, they hardly get blocked. If they are abused to the extent of getting blocked, such IP is taken out of the pool, so you don’t get to use one that will put you at risk.
Smartproxy has proxies in many countries, and they also support any city, including New York, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, London, Moscow, Berlin, and Miami. On the other hand, you can target all 50 US states.
Easy to Use
One of the major advantages Smartproxy has is that it is easy to use. Their dashboard is exceptionally straightforward. Smartproxy provides documentation on integrating their proxies with many tools and software to make things even easier for their users. This includes integration guides from SEO tools, social media automation, and popular web crawlers.
Smartproxy has a great Chrome extension and Firefox add-on. They allow you to access your proxy session features easily without logging into the dashboard. Moreover, the company introduced X Browser, a new tool that is specifically designed for managing multiple accounts. X Browser generates unique fingerprints, therefore you can use a number of different browsers without risks.
SERP Scraping API
The best thing about Smartproxy is that they never cease to surprise its users. Just recently, they’ve launched a brand new tool, SERP Scraping API, With them, Smartproxy guarantees a 100% delivery success from Google Search Engine either in raw HTML or parsed JSON format. It’s perfect for SEO and price monitoring as well as retrieving paid or organic search.
I'm really impressed with the service. The SERP scraping feature is particularly useful for my business, as it allows me to easily extract search engine results pages and gather valuable data for my market research. The proxy network is fast and reliable, and the customer support team is always available to help with any issues or questions I have. Overall, I'm very happy with my decision to use SmartProxy for my scraping needs.
Excellent Scraping Performance
Smartproxy residential proxies have proven to be among the best proxies for scraping data from the Internet. With its 40+ million residential IP addresses, it has proven to be more functional than many other proxies with larger IP pools. In fact, out of all the proxies we reviewed, only Luminati has a better scraping performance result of 93 while that of Smartproxy is 90.2 – which isn’t much different.
This has made us rank it as the second-best web scraping residential proxy provider in the market.
| Performance on 300 Concurrent connections | ||||
| Test | Success Rate (%) | Error (%) | TimeOut (%) | Block (%) |
| Amazon | 89 | 0 | 0 | 11 |
| Adidas | 93 | 0 | 2 | 5 |
| Booking | 92 | 0 | 4 | 4 |
| Bing.com | 90 | 0 | 1 | 9 |
| Craigslist | 98 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| 94 | 0 | 0 | 6 | |
| Nike | 90 | 0 | 2 | 8 |
| 88 | 0 | 3 | 9 | |
| 82 | 1 | 2 | 15 | |
| Youtube | 86 | 0 | 10 | 14 |
| 90.2 | ||||
The figures presented in the performance table above shows that Smartproxy is a top one when we talk about scraping and crawling. It might interest you to know that most of the blocks and errors were caused by captchas, and as such, what you need is a captchas solver to bypass them, and you’ll no longer face blocking. Besides, you can now use their newest tool, Search Engine Proxies, for scraping Google. These proxies guarantee to bypass every captcha on their way.
Read more, Proxies for Preventing Bans and Captchas When Scraping Google.
Acceptable Proxy Speed
Response Time
Response Time is the time difference between the time you initiated a request and when you got a response back from the server. Response time is understandably longer in residential proxies than datacenter proxies. However, you’ll be marveled at the response time you will get from Smartproxy residential proxies. It is impressively fast.
As you can see from the chart above, it takes an average of 3.792 seconds for your requests to get to a web server, and the server sends you back the response. This figure is not alarming for residential proxies because of the latency and pings involved.
Proxy Connection Speed
We equally tested the size of data that can be downloaded using Smartproxy proxies in a second, and the result of the test was equally impressive. The test was done using the Speedtest tool to test the upload and download speed of Smartproxy from Chicago. The results are shown below.
- Average Ping: 73ms
- Average Download: 27.23 Mbps
- Average Upload: 15.85 Mbps
The Stupidproxy also did the speed test. You can learn about it here.
Good Session Control
Smartproxy provides two session types, each having the area it is best suitable for. This diversity in IP type has made them ideal for a good number of applications. Let’s take a closer look at these two types.
Rotating Proxies
Smartproxy’s rotating proxies have an entry point that you will use to access proxies in an IP pool. In this session type, a new IP will be assigned to you with every new connection request. Rotating sessions are the best for web scraping and data aggregation from websites. It is so because not using the same IP address makes it difficult for you to be flagged off like spam.
Sticky Proxies
With Smartproxy’s sticky sessions, you can choose how long you want to have the same IP address. This means that you can use an IP assigned to you for 1 minute and up to 10 minutes or 30 minutes before you’ll be automatically assigned another one.
This is best for social media automation as using different IPs for each session will trigger their web server security system.
Great Customer Support
Smartproxy is a customer-centric proxy provider – there’s no doubt about this! Their customer support is live via live chat 24/7! They reply as fast as possible.
Besides, they have a FAQs page that covers most of the frequently asked questions and their answers. That’s all most people need. You can also email them if there’s a need for that.
Smartproxy Cons
You’ll find some disadvantages of using Smartproxy below.
Email Support is Slow Sometimes
Probably you noticed that I didn’t mention email support as Smartproxy’s strong suit. This is because users who used their email support channel complained that the response time wasn’t as fast as they expected. However, when they finally got the reply, it was worth it.
Geo-Targeting Limitations
Geo-targeting is also one of the areas where Smartproxy flops a little bit. While you have the option to choose from a list of over 195+ geo-locations, such diversity is not available to you when it comes to city-specific proxies. At the moment, they only have 8 cities you can choose from when you need to target cities.
Luckily, this isn’t a problem for most proxy users since most are not necessarily interested in a granular targeting option, and as such, the country geo-targeting works. Moreover, Smartproxy allows you to target all 50 US states.
However, for sneaker copping and other city-dependent processes, you might want to choose another proxy provider. Except, of course, if you’re targeting one of these cities: New York, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, London, Moscow, Berlin, or Miami.
Do I Recommend Smartproxy?
Even though Smartproxy has to improve on its geo-targeting options and email response rate, I strongly recommend them. This is because they are cheaper compared to other premium providers. Their proxies performances were one of the best during our web scraping performance test, and the speed is also quite good.
Our Expert's Review
-
Scaping Performance - 9.6/10
9.6/10
-
Proxy Network - 9.5/10
9.5/10
-
Proxy Functions - 9.3/10
9.3/10
-
Customer support - 10/10
10/10
Read other user reviews
SmartProxy alternatives
- Luminati.io: Largest IP pool with great features, read our unbiased review of Brightdata here.
- Stormproxies: Cheapest residential proxies – Small pool with competitive pricing! Read our unbiased review here.
Oxylabs.io <Avoid!>: The Best alternative to smartproxy read our unbiased review to Oxylab.io here.- More residential proxies providers…
