Soax Review

Are you looking forward to learning more about Soax proxies before making a monetary commitment? This article will be used to provide an honest review of Soax proxies.

There are a good number of proxy providers in the market but most of them are pretty average, struggling to get your tasks done and earn from that. Only a few providers have set themselves apart, giving you all of the features you need and even more.

The Soax service is one of such proxy providers and has gotten a lot of things right. But are they the best for your proxy needs? In this Soax review, I will discuss all you need to know about their proxies including what they are best used for, and reveal their performance to help you make a decision.


An Overview of Soax

Soax Overview

The Soax service is a service that takes pride in its proxy offering and focuses its service and investment on mid to large-scale projects and enterprises. The service started as a proxy provider before rebranding into a data collection service with a proxy arm. The focus of this review is on their proxy arm, specifically their residential proxies.

The service has the largest residential pool from the list of providers on our watchlist. It is based in the UK and is indeed, a reputable company with its standards. However, like every other service, it is not the best for everyone. I will reveal both the strengths and weaknesses as you read deep into the review.

Parameter Feature
IP Type Residential/ISP/Mobile/Datacenter
Price Charged Bandwidth
Price Sample 15GB – $99 (monthly)
Pool of IPs 155+ Million
Proxy Protocol HTTP(S) and Socks5
IP Rotation
  • Each Session
  • Sticky Session (Time)
Filtering/Targeting Countries, Cities, Region, ISP
Authentication IP Authentication and Username/Password
Speed Excellent
Free Trial $1.99 for 100 MB (3 days)
Refund Policy 3 days
Support Live Support, Contact Form, Email, and Social Media
Jurisdiction Location UK

Visit Soax.com


Proxy Types

The service offers four types of proxies. Let’s take a look at these proxies and what they are best used for before focusing on their residential proxies.

Residential Proxies

The Soax service's most popular product is the residential proxies. These are rotating proxies that route requests via the devices of real Internet users, making them undetectable. This network is powered by the largest pool in the market with over 155 million IPs and from it, it randomly chooses IPs to assign to you either after every request or your specified rotation time.

The default for this is high rotating, changing IP for you after every request. With this, you are able to scrape data from websites without getting detected and blocked. With over 155 million IPs from over 180 countries, it can take on large scraping projects for enterprises without IP rotation becoming inefficient.

Aside from general web scraping, you can use their high-rotating proxies for SEO monitoring, marketing research, price monitoring, social media scraping, and monitoring. If you don’t want to change IPs after every request, you can use their session proxies that will maintain IP for a limited period of time.

This is the mode you will want for session management tasks such as account management. You can use them for managing accounts on social media and e-commerce platforms.

Residential Proxies for Soax Proxy

In terms of pricing, the Soax service is charged based on bandwidth. However, unlike the majority of the market that has come to accept the pay-as-you-go pricing model to accommodate small proxy users. Its pricing starts from $99 monthly and this gives you 15GB.

At first, this looks expensive. However, the cost per GB is $6.6 which makes it one of the cheapest for those that need as much bandwidth as this. At this price, you can tell it is even cheaper than most of its premium competitors while beating most of them in terms of performance. Interestingly, the more bandwidth you purchase, the cheaper the price per GB becomes.

US ISP Proxies

Their ISP proxies only provide US IP addresses. The IPs assigned to you in their ISP proxy service are obtained directly from Internet Service Providers (ISPs), giving them more control over the IPs and as such, they can provide you an extended session of up to 24 hours. The ISP proxies offered here are rotating ISP proxies, quite different from the norm in the market that maintains IPs for as long as you pay for them. It does have over 2.9 million IPs to power this service.

US ISP Proxies for Soax Proxy

One thing you will like about these proxies is that they combine the undetectable nature of residential IPs and the speed of datacenter proxies, giving you the best of both worlds. However, you still have to be careful with abuse as they are not as undetectable as pure residential proxies and as such, there is more chance you will be caught when abused. The pricing for their ISP proxies is the same as the pricing for their residential proxies.

Mobile Proxies

Soax has the largest mobile IP pool with over 33 million IPs in it which powers their mobile proxy service. The mobile proxies offered are rotating proxies that switch IP after every request or a specific period of time in case you need to maintain a session.

The only major difference between mobile proxies and their residential proxies is that while mobile proxies route requests via mobile IPs, residential proxies do that via residential IPs. This is a lot as mobile IPs enjoy more trust and the chances of blocking them are also lower. However, they are quite slower.

Because of the slow speed, you will only want to use mobile proxies where residential proxies fail and that is majorly in your marketing activities on social media platforms. You can use them for scraping some of the most difficult-to-scrape social media platforms such as Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok. You can use them to also manage multiple accounts on the aforementioned social platforms.

Mobile Proxies for Soax Proxy

There is something interesting about its pricing here. For most other providers, the price of their mobile proxies is usually 2X more. However, for Soax, the pricing for their mobile and residential proxies is the same, leaving you to choose the one to use based on your job requirements and not the price. The pricing here also starts from $99 and gives you 15GB for a month.

Datacenter Proxies

The service also offers datacenter proxies which give them more control over the IPs. They are the fastest you can get in the market and also the most stable. However, they are hosted and use hosting/data center IP addresses which are easily detected by websites. I recommend you don’t use them on popular websites as they are blocked by default.

Unlike in the case of their mobile and residential proxies, they have support for most countries and give you granular geo-targeting support, for their datacenter proxies, the locations supported are just 6 including the United States, UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Poland.

Datacenter Proxies for Soax Proxy

These proxies come two in flavors, there are the rotating datacenter proxies which utilize a shared pool of datacenter proxies. You can use this for web scraping websites that don’t have a strong system for detecting and blocking proxies. The second mode is the dedicated IPs which should be used when you need private IPs and you need to maintain a session for long.

While their dedicated proxies are charged based on the number of IPs, their shared datacenter proxies are charged based on bandwidth with both starting at $12.5 for 5 IPs and $49 for 15GB respectively.


Residential Proxy Features

In this section of the review, the focus will be on some of the major features that the service takes pride in.

Huge IP Pool

It is rather impossible, to keep a tab on all of the proxy providers in the market since the market is unregulated. For this reason, we have a watchlist of worthy providers we keep a tab on. For the ones we track, the Soax residential proxies have the largest pool of IP addresses.

When this service was first introduced into the market, its combined pool of both residential and mobile IPs was less than 7 million. In less than 3 years, it has grown this pool into a pool of over 155 million for residential and 33 million for mobile IPs, this is the largest growth we have experienced in the market for this period.

Having a large pool this big comes with its advantages with one of its being having an efficient IP rotation system as there are more IPs available. This in turn, also makes it a feasible option for larger projects that need as many IPs as possible. Unfortunately, things can also get messy as some of the IPs can quickly turn dead, thereby increasing the chances of request failure.

The team behind this service is aware of this and has baked in a monitoring system to find and remove these bad IPs. So far, this has been successful as Soax has one of the cleanest residential proxy pools in the market.

Excellent Location Coverage and Geo-Targeting Options

Because the Internet has become localized, the location support of a residential proxy service is important. If your task requires you to use IPs from a specific location, then this feature is an important one you should look out for.

The Soax service has IPs from over 180 countries across the globe in its pool. Soax does come with geo-targeting support for the countries on its list. For the geo-targeting option, you can either select IPs country, state, and cities.

Excellent Location Coverage and Geo-Targeting Options of Soax Proxy

It is important for you to know that as you move down from country to city-level targeting, the actual number of IPs available to you becomes smaller. For this reason, you should only make use of the lower-level geo-targeting options when you have no other options than to use them.

It is also important you know that some regions are unpopular in the pool and as such, the total number of IPs from the region might be too small to allow an efficient IP rotation in the case of web scraping.

Simple Pricing Plan

First off, your mind is to be prepared — Soax is not a provider for small proxy users as you need a minimum of $99 to get started with their proxies. The minimum monetary commitment has been set to keep small users away. For the users who can afford to pay for their proxies, Soax is one of the cheapest proxies you can use based on its cost per GB.

For the smallest plan that costs $99, the cost per GB is $6.6 — this is the cheapest you will get among the premium proxy providers. Interestingly, the higher plans provide more discount as the price per GB can get cheap to as low cheap as $2 per GB.

But this affordability is not what makes the pricing simple. What makes it simple is that their residential proxies, mobile proxies, and ISP proxies share the same pricing structure and are all based on bandwidth or traffic. This means that you wouldn’t be making your choice based on pricing but instead, your choice will be based on the best one that will suit your task requirement.

Extended Session Period

By default, Soax proxies are rotating and will switch IPs for you after every request. When you need to maintain sessions, this won’t work and as such, you will have to use their sticky session support. For this, you won’t be creating a new proxy address or port.

Instead, you will just make changes to the username parameter to include the sessionId and session length parameters. The sessionId is a random string that tells the system that you need to maintain a session. The session length is basically the session duration after which a new IP is assigned.

The default session duration is 3 seconds. The service allows you the freedom of customization, allowing you to set the rotation time between 10 seconds to 60 minutes. However, you don’t specify the timing in minutes, rather, you do that in seconds.

The 60-minute session is the longest you will get in the market as most are just up to 30 minutes, so that is what makes this impressive. If you want to maintain a session for a longer duration, then you can use their ISP proxies instead.


Residential Proxy Performance

In this section of the review, the focus will be on the performance we recorded based on some of the tests we carried out which are important when making a proxy purchase decision.

Proxy IP Geo Test

There are over 155 million residential IPs in the pool of this service. While this is a great thing as none of the providers on our watchlist has this number of IPs, the location distribution is also an important thing to note. This is because websites are becoming localized with some tier-one-based websites even blocking access for users from other locations.

According to the information on the Soax website, it has IPs from over 180 countries. However, a closer look at the number of IPs from the top 10 popular countries reveals they account for over 25% of the total IPs. Below is a chart showing the distribution for the popular countries.

Proxy IP Geo Test of Soax Proxy

Even for the top countries, the distribution is not even as Brazil alone has a pool of over 13.7 million while Australia has just over 600K IPs. The US has the second largest pool in the network with over 6 million IPs.

Generally, the service has a large pool enough to power your proxy need for tier-one countries and some tier-two countries like Brazil. For other countries, the detail is not made public and as such, I recommend you speak to their support to know how big their pool is for that country before making a purchase.

Proxy Success Rate Test

When you use proxies, the chances of some of your requests failing either due to connection errors or blocks are there. However, you will want to pitch your tent with a service that can keep the failure rate as low as possible. Most providers will promise you a 99.99% success rate and from experience, this is more like a marketing gimmick and a misrepresentation of fact. The Soax service is one of the services that makes claims like that.

We decided to test this claim by sending 300 concurrent requests multiple times to some of the popular websites on the Internet to see the success rate across industries. Below is the result of the test.

Proxy Success Rate Test of Soax Proxy

The Soax service has an average success rate of 95%. As you can see above, the success rate is as high as 97% on bing.com. The lowest success rate is 94%. Interestingly, the is the second highest in the market as only Bright Data offers a success rate higher than this.

With this value, you can tell the Soax service invested a lot into its infrastructure and built it not to fail. One of the reasons for the success is due to their constant monitoring of their pool which keeps it clean and reduces the chances of retries.

Response Time Test

The response time test seeks to measure the time taken between sending a web request and getting back a response. This is an important test to carry out as proxies have shown to be a bottleneck in the applications they are used since they can be slow especially residential and mobile proxies.

A slow residential proxies will cost you more in terms of waiting time and as the project size increases, so does the duration you will have to wait. Testing the response time is simple — we send multiple web requests to multiple websites and record the response time, the average is what we use in preparing the chart below.

Response Time Test of Soax Proxy

As you can see above, the chart shows the average response of Soax and that of the other popular providers in the market. From the above, you can see that the average response time of their proxies is 0.58 seconds — making it one of the fastest residential proxies in terms of response time.

With this speed, your web scraping or automation tasks will get done faster compared to using any of the other alternatives that will take longer time. However, it is not the fastest, the fastest is Bright Data at a speed of 0.48 seconds. But for a second, you need to overlook this as it might not make any much difference in a production environment.

Unique IP Test

The secret power of rotating residential proxies is how it switches IPs after every request. And most of the providers promise to provide you with new IPs per request. However, under the pool having a finite number of IPs, it wouldn’t take long before you get an already assigned IP reassigned.

The unique IP test otherwise known as the duplicate IP test seeks to find out the duplicate IP rate. This is especially useful for web scraping as you need as many IPs as you can get. To test this out, we sent 500K web requests to an IP lookup website and recorded the IPs assigned to each of the results. Below is the result of the test.

Unique IP Test of Soax Proxy

From the result, the IP duplicate rate for Soax is 11.54%, directly behind Bright Data which has the lowest duplicate rate at 10.31%. This IP duplicate rate here is the second lowest in the market which shows you will be getting over 88% unique IPs. This number is not surprising though, as the service has a large pool with over 155 million.

It is important you know that the test was carried out without using any geo-targeting option. If you use the geo-targeting option, there is a high chance the unique IP rate will be lower as geo-targeting reduces the number of IPs available to you.


How to Use Soax

The Soax service is an advanced proxy provider. However, it has an easy-to-use interface. This is because it does not provide you with many tools, enough to increase the learning curves. So if you have used any other residential proxy before, you can be sure you know how to make use of this one.

First, it is a paid proxy service and as such, you will need to pay in other to use it service. To do this, you will have to register, go through their KYC, and purchase a plan. The minimum plan here can be expensive as it requires a minimum of $99.

Usage of Soax Proxy

I recommend you start with their trial offer which requires $1.99 for 100 MB. You will need to get the proxy credentials to use. If you want to use username and password authentication, you should keep the IP filtering section empty. To whitelist IPs for IP authentication, you can enter the IPs there. However, IP authorization requires other details including the domain name you want to access and enter a port starting from 10000.

Before getting your proxy details, you can tweak the configuration option, so you get IPs from a specific country, state, or city in case your tasks require geo-targeting. If you need to maintain a session, go for session proxies or else, sticky to the rotating option so you can get a new IP after every request.


Customer Support

Being a service used by enterprise customers and businesses with large projects, customer support is one of the key areas this service invests in. To be frank with you, if you go over to their website with the thought of getting support like you will with small providers, you will be disappointed.

Instead, it tends to be more professional. Once you visit the site, there is the live chat support feature available with about 3 or so agents ready to provide you assistance. I did make use of this and got a response after waiting for just a minute and a few seconds.

Customer Support of Soax Proxy

Unfortunately, the support is not usually online as they are only online during work hours. For days like Saturday and Sunday, they are not usually online. You can reach out to them by filling out the contact sales form with your contact details and the help you need, and the best way you want to be reached.

The supported contact method here includes email, phone, and social media such as WhatsApp, Telegram, WeChat, Skype, and Twitter (X). When they resume on Monday, an agent will be assigned to you and will reach out to resolve your issue.


Source of IP Addresses

The Soax service does not own the IPs in its residential proxy network. This is not only unique to it as all other providers including Bright Data, Oxylabs, Smartproxy, and Proxy-cheap don’t own theirs. The IPs are sourced via P2P networks. However, the Soax service is one of the residential proxies that prides itself as a responsible provider, offering only ethically sourced IPs and following its own ethical guidelines regarding the sourcing and usage of IPs.

It operates a Peer to Peer (P2P) network where regular Internet users consent to their device known as a peer to be part of the P2P network. When a device is part of the network, its IP address and bandwidth are used for routing requests and requests sent through it will appear as if the device was the client used for sending the request.

This is what makes residential proxies undetectable. The Soax service follows the ethical approach and uses the devices responsibly to the best of our knowledge.


Conclusion

Soax is a great performer and offers incredible results in terms of response time, scraping success rate, and unique IP rate. It has one of the largest residential proxies with extensive location support and offers precise and granular location targeting. It is generally built to perform at the scale of enterprise usage and its pricing reflects that.

I recommend their proxies for mid to large-scale scraping and automation projects as they are suited for that. Just be aware that you will need to do a KYC and the minimum you can spend on their proxies is $99.


Alternatives to Soax

Below are some of the alternatives you can use if Soax falls short of your requirements with each alternative having the issues it was recommended.

Proxy-Cheap — Recommended as the budget alternative

Proxy-Cheap Overview

If you are on a tight budget and need residential proxies that have good performance, then Proxy-cheap is the option here. Its pricing starts from $5 per GB and features a pool, sizeable enough for small-scale tasks. I seriously wouldn’t recommend it for large-scale projects — the scale that Soax handles with ease.

Smartproxy — Best cost-effective alternative

Smartproxy Overview

The Smartproxy service is equally a premium provider and has a sizeable pool for handling large scraping and automation projects. It has more responsive customer support and offers powerful proxy management tools, and its pricing can be termed as the best in terms of being cost-effective, making it cheaper for enterprise customers and affordable to small proxy users.

Bright Data — Our overall best choice

Bright Data Overview

Bright Data is arguably the best residential proxy network. It offers slightly better performance than Soax and has extensive location support and a large proxy pool. It also offers session control, with it being regarded as the best session control in the rotating residential proxies. Interestingly, it is cheaper and more affordable because of its pay-as-you-go payment support. However, it KYC procedure can be more stringent.


Our Expert's Review
  • Scaping Performance - 9.6/10
    9.6/10
  • Proxy Network - 9.7/10
    9.7/10
  • Proxy Functions - 9.7/10
    9.7/10
  • Customer support - 9.4/10
    9.4/10
9.6/10

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