BEST PROXY SERVICES
Smartproxy is a relatively new proxy service that has come to make a name in the proxy world. They were just recently awarded the Win Price-Performance Award for being an affordable and fast residential proxy provider.
Smartproxy is best compared to Bright Data (Luminati) which is a leading proxy provider in the proxy market today. In fact, Smartproxy is often said to be the cheaper version of Bright Data.
If you are new to the proxy world with a list of top-performing proxies to pick from, you should have Smartproxy in that list.
This Smartproxy review will help you find out more about Smartproxy and its services, including pricing, residential IP address distribution, data scraping performance and speed, and customer support.
Smartproxy Review 2023
Smartproxy is a fantastic proxy provider with one of the best proxy features and services in the proxy market. Their service is very affordable and equally reliable, offering the best value for your money.
This proxy provider combines all the unique use cases Bright Data offers and the essential use cases of other proxy providers. Smartproxy offers one of the best residential proxies for data scraping on the web, with an impressive connection speed.
Their use cases are just as effective as Bright Data’s use cases; however, Smartproxy surpasses Bright Data in some other use cases. Smartproxy is also a cheaper option to Bright Data, making them more accommodating for both big corporations and small marketers.
Smartproxy offers users both residential and datacenter proxy types with multiple affordable subscription plans and varying traffic allowance. They also provide users multiple monthly subscriptions options and give them access to automatically set their subscription for seamless use.
Smartproxy residential proxies are a great option for many proxy users because it ensures that its users can easily overcome IP-based restrictions which enable effective marketing. They are pretty safe, reliable, unblockable, and undetectable.
They uses the best security encryption to protect users when they surf the internet and support top-rated protocols like IPv4 and HTTPS. Smartproxy is easy to set up, integrate and use.
They even provide new users a quick help guide to enable them to navigate their service better. They have a fair location coverage and an impressive proxy pool.
A unique feature that gives them an edge in the proxy world is their flexible payment options and excellent cheap payment plans. They also have a reputable money-back policy to compensate any unsatisfied user of their services.
An in-depth analysis of Smartproxy’s features will let any new proxy user decide on reasons to use their services.
Pros and Cons
Features
Smartproxy is a proxy provider that offers a large number of features. This makes them a user-choice proxy provider available in the market. Here are the main features of Smartproxy.
Affordable Pricing
Smartproxy is an award-winning proxy provider for being the most affordable effective residential proxy provider in the market. This is one of their major selling points. Smartproxy can be thought to be expensive compared to the cheapest proxy provider in the market in terms of cost.
However, when the value they offer is compared with the price a user would pay for their services and the price of top proxy providers who can be classified as their equals, they are cheap. The beauty of Smartproxy’s pricing is that the more bandwidth you buy, the more the price goes down.
For example, the cost of 1 GB basic in their plan goes for $15, but it goes down to $6 in their advanced plan. It will interest you to know that most cheap proxy providers are very ineffective and have little to offer.
They are ranked among the worst proxy providers in the market, as they don’t provide good use cases and can be termed a waste of money. Smartproxy don’t fall into this category.
Enough Residential IPs and Location
A unique feature that Smartproxy has, which attracts a lot of proxy users, is that it has a large residential IP proxy pool. Smartproxy currently has more than 40 million real IPs in their proxy spread across over 195 locations worldwide.
The advantage Smartproxy also offers with these large pools of real IPs is that they hardly get blocked because they are real IP addresses.
Any of Smartproxy’s IP address that gets abused to the point of getting blocked is sieved out and removed from the IP pool. This keeps the IP pool clean and safe users from being at any risk associated with the unclean IP address.
Smartproxy has its servers in eight countries globally, covering over 195 locations, including all 50 US states. Although the number of locations covered is fair, the number of countries available is pretty poor.
This makes geo-targeting with Smartproxy limited. The list of countries Smartproxy covers includes the UK, US, Russia, and Germany.
Easy to Use
Smartproxy is one of the most straightforward proxy providers in the market. This is a great selling point and a significant advantage their users enjoy.
They boast of one of the most exceptionally detailed dashboards among their peers, giving them the upper hand. One way Smartproxy ensures users can easily use their services and navigate their dashboard is by providing user guide documentation.
With this, their users can integrate their proxies with numerous software and tools to make usage easy. This includes integration guides for social media automation, popular web crawlers, and SEO tools.
Smartproxy has provided users with a great Firefox add-on and Chrome extension. This ensures that users can easily access their proxy session features without even logging into the dashboard.
Smartproxy also introduced the X Browser for easy usage. This new tool is specifically designed to help users manage multiple accounts. With X Browser, multiple unique fingerprints are generated, allowing users to use lots of different browsers without any risk.
Best Search Engine Proxies
One thing that also made Smartproxy easy to use and loved by many because it never stops surprising its users. The company recently launched a new Search Engine Proxy tool that is very effective and efficient with searching the web.
With this new tool, Smartproxy users are 100% guaranteed delivery success from popular search engines like Google Search Engine, either in parsed JSON format or raw HTML. This helps them perfect their SEO tool feature, makes price monitoring a walk-in pack, and retrieves both organic and paid searches.
Excellent Scraping Performance
They are highly rated because of its residential proxies. These residential proxies have been proven over the years to be one of the best proxies in the market for scraping data on the Internet.
With their over 40 million residential IP addresses, Smartproxy’s residential proxies have shown to be more functional and efficient when compared with several other top proxy providers with a larger proxy pool.
The only proxy provider that is better than Smartproxy’s proxies in terms of scraping performance is Bright Data (Luminati). Based on this, Smartproxy is ranked as the second-best residential proxy provider for web scraping in the market.
Acceptable Proxy Speed
The time difference between when you get a response from the server for a request initiated is called response time. Response time is a significant factor used to rate proxy speed.
It is understandably longer in many residential proxies compared to datacenter proxies because of the pings and latency involved in residential proxies.
However, it is interesting that their residential proxies’ response time is impressively fast and beats most of their counterparts. Also, their download speed is impressive, as large files can be downloaded in seconds.
Users can test Smartproxy’s proxy speed using the Speedtest tool for its response, upload, and download speed from any part of the world and see for themselves.
Good Session Control
Another unique feature that Smartproxy possesses is that it provides two different IP session types for its users. Each of these IP session types has the area where they are best suitable and most efficient.
Smartproxy is ideal for many applications because of the diversity in IP session types it possesses. Here are the two IP session types they offer.
Rotating Proxies
Smartproxy residential proxies offer users the option of using rotating proxies with an entry point that can be used to access proxies in their IP pool. Users’ will be assigned a new IP address in this session type whenever they make a new connection request.
This gives their proxies the edge for scraping because rotating sessions are the best sessions for both data aggregation and web scraping from websites. This is so because when IPs are rotated, they are difficult to be flagged off no matter how potent the website’s anti-spam protocol is.
Sticky Proxies
Smartproxy also offers users the sticky session type, which allows them to select the duration of each proxy usage. Their users can choose to use a particular proxy assigned to them for as long as 1 minute, up to 10 minutes, and up to 30 minutes before automatically assigned another proxy.
Sticky proxy is best for social media automation because it can use a particular IP session for a long time. This helps avoid web server security systems from being triggered, especially websites that require login.
Great Customer Support
Smartproxy boasts of one of the best customer support amongst proxy providers. This is because they are a very customer-centric proxy provider.
Their customer support consists of live chat support, which is available to users 24/7. Their representatives are also speedy, responsive, and helpful. Besides their live chat support, they also offer a comprehensive FAQs page.
Their FAQs page is beneficial and provides answers to the most frequently asked questions. Most times, this is all users need to get started. Another valuable part of Smartproxy’s customer support is its email support.
The only downside to this is that their email support is deemed slow according to some customers.
Flexible Monthly Subscription Plans
Smartproxy is a premium proxy provider known for its flexible subscription plans. Their plans are more flexible than many top proxy providers, which comes at a very cheap rate.
Users can buy micro plans as little as 1 GB for $15 and 5 GB at $75, as Smartproxy ensures they cater to more minor proxy use cases.
Unlike proxy providers like Oxylabs, whose most minor plan is 50 GB of bandwidth, going for $600. Their users also have access to make recurring monthly subscriptions, which ensures its users can never run out of bandwidth.
Coupled with this, their users can have access to a monthly auto subscription renewal option designed to make monthly subscription seamless.
Flexible Payment Options
Not only does Smartproxy have a flexible subscription plan, but it also has a flexible payment option. Users can make payments with PayPal, credit cards, and even cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. This makes payment seamless.
3-Day Money-Back Policy
A feature that some users love is their 3-day money-back policy. Smartproxy doesn’t offer its users any trial period, and users are expected to make payment before having access to their services.
However, if a user doesn’t like the service rendered, the user is entitled to request a refund. Smartproxy’s refund system is speedy and will get users’ money refunded in days.
Top-level Anonymity
One of the main reasons proxy users subscribe to proxy services is for anonymity. Smartproxy offers one of the best anonymity in the proxy market, as they are undetectable and unblockable.
They use the latest security protocols to hide users’ identities from their service providers, government agencies, and website security systems when surfing the internet.
Top Quality Secure (IPv4 and HTTPS enabled)
Another important reason people use proxies is because of security. Smartproxy offers its users top-quality protection. This is possible because they use the latest next-generation security protocols to encrypt its servers.
Smartproxy also uses protocols like IPv4 and HTTPS to protect its users from malicious activities on the web. With this, their users can feel secure when surfing the internet.
Proxy Address Generator
Smartproxy proxies are fantastic to use not only because of their large proxy pool or their session types but also because of the proxy address generator feature they offer. This is a unique feature that few proxy users provide to give them an edge in the proxy market.
The proxy address generator tool allows users to generate their proxy addresses at will. The kind of proxies generated are rotating proxies, and Smartproxy can generate that for you.
However, if you want to generate them yourself, you will need a proxy list to use.
The Downsides
Smartproxy is a proxy provider with lots of amazing features. They are ranked amongst the best proxies in the world and have delivered. However, Smartproxy is not a complete proxy provider; therefore, they have their downsides which they need to improve on.
These areas they are lacking are significant disadvantages and affect users’ decisions. Here are the downsides to their features.
Email Support is Slow Sometimes
Smartproxy is a proxy provider with a sound customer support system; however, its email support unit doesn’t live up to the reputation. Their users have complained that their email support has an insufficient response time.
It could take hours or days to get a response to a query. However, they compensate for the delay in response because when they get the answer, it’s always helpful and worth it.
Geo-Targeting Limitations
Another area where Smartproxy lacks is the number of countries they cover, which makes geo-targeting very poor for their users. Although they have over 195 locations to choose from, which is fair, they are present in only eight countries.
Some of the countries they cover include The UK, United States, Russia, and Germany. This is very poor and doesn’t give room for diversity in terms of cities and countries.
This also leaves them at a disadvantage when users need their services for specialized tasks that are city-dependent processes like sneaker copping. For such tasks, Smartproxy users will have to use another proxy provider.
The good thing for Smartproxy is most proxy users are not necessarily interested in a granular targeting option, and therefore, don’t see geo-targeting as a problem. They have the option of choosing locations from more than 195 areas in the world, including all 50 cities in the United States, and this will do just fine.
It doesn’t Support SOCKS5
This really is a fantastic proxy provider in terms of security and technological support. They support some of the best and next-generation protocols, including IPv4 and HTTPS.
However, they don’t support SOCKS5, a popular and essential protocol in the proxy market. This is a disadvantage of using their services, and it gives their competition a competitive edge over them.
No Free Trials
Most top-rated proxy services in the world offer their users the chance of enjoying a free trial. Some offer between three days to a one-month free trial, depending on the proxy providers. However, due to Smartproxy’s policies, they don’t provide users a free trial.
Users who wish to use their services must purchase a plan to test run their services. However, to compensate for this, Smartproxy offers a 3-day refund policy. When users buy any plan, if they are not satisfied with their services, Smartproxy will refund within three days of purchase.
Top-Rated Proxy Providers
These proxies providers have been voted as the best consistently in user ratings across various websites.
First we collated the user review data, then we performed our own tests to ensure 100% legitimacy of the proxies.
These are by far the best proxy providers on the market today.
| Rank | Service | More Info |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Oxylabs | Visit |
| 2 | Bright Data | Visit |
| 3 | ProxyEmpire | Visit |
Review Verdict
A complete review of Smartproxy features and services has shown them to be an excellent proxy option. They provide top-notch proxy service at affordable prices and have the best scraping performance in the proxy market.
This is a fantastic selling point when you consider that Smartproxy is among the best proxy providers globally, and most of their equals don’t come cheap.
However, they still have a lot of work to improve its email response rate and geo-targeting options. They also need to support the SOCKS5 protocol to give users more options and consider providing users with some days of a free trial.
Still, Smartproxy remains one of the best proxy providers in the world. If new to using proxy services, I will strongly recommend you give Smartproxy a trial.
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Written by Trevor Cooke
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