BEST PROXY SERVICES
In a hurry?
The best web scraping proxy service in 2023, as found in our independent testing, are from Oxylabs!
Why would you need proxies for scraping?
Well, what if you scrape a website without using proxies?
How did it turn out?
What happened?
Did you succeed?
Or were you blocked from accessing the website for a time?
You will usually be blocked from accessing the website unless you only scrape a few pages.
This is due to websites setting request limits to combat web automation bots like crawlers and spiders.
Website owners don’t like scraping their websites as it could cause site overload if the device is not powerful enough.
Some people don’t like the idea because they consider it content theft.
Web scraping, regardless of what site owners think, is legal.
However, sites are fighting web scraping, so you need to do extra work to get the data you want.
This article will provide recommendations for the best proxies for scraping web services.
If you don’t want the hassle of managing proxy servers, you will also find recommendations for the best web scraping proxy APIs below that.
Best Web Scraping Proxy Services in 2023
Web scraping proxies are best when they work on the target website. Because each website is different, every website has an anti-spam and anti-scraping system.
What works on Twitter may not work on YouTube.
Top proxy providers have proxies compatible with the most complicated websites.
We will be making recommendations for residential and datacenter proxy services.
Although mobile proxies may be the best, they can be expensive and not as cost-effective as residential proxy services.
Residential Proxies for Scraping
Because they are nearly undetectable, residential proxies are best for web scraping. Below are some of the top providers.
- Oxylabs – 🏆 Winner!
- BeeProxy
- Bright Data
- Smartproxy
1. Oxylabs
- IP Pool Size: More than 100 Million
- Locations: More than 100 locations around the world
- Unlimited Concurrency
Although Oxylabs‘s residential proxy service was only established recently, it has since grown to be one of the most trusted residential proxy providers on the market.
The Oxylabs residential proxy network can be used to provide proxies to assist with scraping.
Their proxy pool includes over 100 million residential IPS from more than 100 countries around the world.
The proxy is a rotating proxy that changes the IP address it assigns you.
Its proxies work with all automation bots, including SEO tools.
2. Bright Data
- IP Pool Size: More than 72 Million
- Locations: All countries around the globe
- Concurrency allowed: Unlimited
- Bandwidth allowed: Starting at 40GB
- For 40GB, the cost starts at $500 per month
Bright Data, formerly Luminati, is the most popular residential proxy provider.
It has over 72 million residential IPs within its IP pool.
This makes it one of the largest residential proxy networks on the market.
In addition, it offers the most advanced session control system on the market, allowing you to manage your sessions in total control.
Bright Data provides web scraping proxies for all countries and most major cities around the globe.
It works with any website, and we found it to be one of the most reliable proxies on the market.
In addition, it offers many advanced settings, and its IP rotation system is excellent.
3. BeeProxy
- IP Pool Size: More than 2 Million
- Locations: 100+ Countries
- Unlimited Concurrency
- From just $2.00 per month
BeeProxy is another residential proxy service that allows you to use their proxies with scrapers.
It has more than 2 million residential IPs. This number of proxies will more than suffice unless you are actively scraping on an extremely large scale.
BeeProxy is affordable in terms of pricing. You can buy proxies for as little as $2.00
BeeProxy’s pricing does not depend on bandwidth. You can choose between sticky IPs and rotating proxy servers.
4. Smartproxy
- IP Pool Size: More than 10 Million
- Locations: There are 195 locations around the world
- Concurrency allowed: Unlimited
- Bandwidth allowed: 5GB
- Cost: 5GB Starts at $75 per month
Smartproxy is a top residential IP pool provider.
In addition, Smartproxy allows you access to their pool for only $75, unlike Bright Data’s $500 minimum.
Pricing for Smartproxy as well as Bright Data is based on bandwidth.
Smartproxy uses high-quality rotating proxy servers that change their IP after each request.
This makes them ideal proxies to use for scraping. In addition, with their sticky IPs, you can keep a session running for up to 10 minutes.
Datacenter Proxies for Scraping
Web scraping can also be done with datacenter proxy servers.
However, they can only be used for web scraping if you are careful and selective.
They are more detectable than the residential proxy and can be easily blocked.
Importantly, they don’t work on complex websites such as Instagram.
There are not many datacenter proxy pool options on the market. These are the most popular right now.
Here’s a quick look at the best datacenter proxies for scraping:
- Smartproxy – 🏆 Winner!
- Stormproxies
- Blazing SEO Proxies
- Webshare
1. Smartproxy
- IP Pool Size: 70,000+
- Only in the USA
- Unlimited Concurrency
- Prices start at $50 per month for 100GB
Smartproxy is well-known for offering residential proxy services.
They are a strong force in the residential proxies market.
However, they also offer datacenter proxies that can be used for scraping websites.
They have vetted and verified the data centers that use their IP addresses to ensure they only use high-quality IPs.
You can currently use more than 40K of their datacenter IPs.
The pool is not yours alone – you’ll have to share it. The number of IPs that can be used at once is very small, allowing for optimal performance.
Contrary to other datacenter proxies that offer unlimited bandwidth, the bandwidth you receive is limited to what plan you have.
You can subscribe to a plan for as low as $50, which would provide you with 100GB.
This is a great deal considering that you have access to 40K IPs. Only US addresses are supported.
2. Stormproxies
- IP Pool Size: 70,000
- Locations: The US, EU, and a few other places
- Concurrency allowed: Available at 40
- Cost: $50 per month for five ports
Stormproxies is one the largest proxy providers in terms of the types of use their proxies can be used for.
The proxy pool for their datacenter proxies has over 70,000 IPs.
It is priced according to threads. This refers to the maximum number of concurrent requests that can be made.
Although it is affordable, the number of locations is very limited.
For example, it has US and EU proxy servers with only a few locations.
In addition, Stormproxies’ datacenter pool supports both session-based and time-based IP rotation.
3. Blazing SEO Proxies
- Locations: 9 Countries
- Concurrency allowed: Unlimited
- Bandwidth allowed: unlimited
- Prices start at $11 per month
Blazing SEO Proxies are very cheap, just like the other datacenter proxy services on this list.
Their proxies have unlimited bandwidth and let you create as many threads as you wish.
Blazing SEO LLC is a web service company that is interested in servers, VPS, and proxies. Blazing Proxies was developed.
Their cheap proxies for scraping, are used particularly in the SEO area, which is a major focus of their developers.
- Locations: Worldwide
- 500 threads are allowed to use concurrency
- Bandwidth allowed: unlimited
- Cost: 5 ports per month starting at $5.44
Webshare, a proxy service provider for datacenters, offers free proxies to its users.
Apart from the free proxies they offer, they also have premium paid proxies which are more efficient and better as a proxy for scraping.
We don’t recommend the use of free proxy services as they often come with unfavorable clauses. In addition, Webshare doesn’t have any high-rotating proxies.
Instead, their IP rotation system is based on time. This can be either 5 minutes or 1 hour.
Best Web Scraping Proxy API
If you’re new to proxy management and don’t want to manage it yourself, web scraping proxy API providers can help.
You should know that you’ll be paying more because of the management involved.
- Scraper API – 🏆 Winner!
- Apify Proxy
- ScrapingBee
- Zyte
1. Scraper API
- Proxy Pool Size: 40 million-plus
- Allows Geotargeting based on the selected plan
- Cost: API calls of about 250,00 for $29
- Free Trials of about 1k API calls
- Special Features: Takes care of Captcha and browsers
The name Scraper API already gives it out as a viable tool for web scraping.
There are about 40 million IPs domiciled with Scraper API.
It offers a mix of residential, datacenter, and mobile proxies. One high point about Scraper API is its unique feature for solving Captcha.
Also, it handles headless browsers, thereby giving users unlimited bandwidth enjoyment.
Lastly, it’s also good to know that it supports geotargeting.
2. Apify Proxy
- Proxy Pool Size: Residential IP Pool & Datacenter
- Geotargeting is supported but not specific
- For 200,000 requests, the cost starts at $99
- Free Trials: Get $5 monthly platform credits and a 30-day trial of the proxy API request
- Special Functions: Allows you to download Google Search results pages
Apify Proxy offers a large pool of quality residential and datacenter proxies.
You can use the proxy service on Apify or your servers.
You can also download Google Shopping results pages or Google Search engine using the unique Google SERP proxy.
Apify Proxy supports HTTPS and geolocation targeting. It also allows for intelligent IP rotation based upon machine learning.
Apify’s proxies are specifically designed for web scraping, data extraction, and bandwidth optimization.
In addition, they offer the best combination of flexibility and geographical freedom.
3. ScrapingBee
- Proxy Pool Size: Not disclosed
- Geotargeting Supported
- Price: 250,000 API credits starting at $29
- Free Trials: 1000 API Calls
- Special Functions: Handles headless browser for JavaScript rendering
ScrapingBee, a web scraping API, can help you manage headless browsers like Chrome.
It also handles proxy management for you. It works in the same way as Zyte and supports geotargeting.
ScrapingBee can render JavaScript for you using Chrome’sChrome’s latest version in headless mode. ScrapingBee can be used for SEO and web scraping, as well as lead generation.
4. Zyte
- Proxy Pool Size:
- Geotargeting Supported
- For 200,000 requests, the cost starts at $99
- No cost trial: Request 10,000 within 14 days
- Avoid Captchas for Special Functions
Zyte is a popular proxy API for web scraping.
It uses its proxy pool to help you avoid detection and ban. It does not contain a Captcha solver, but it tends to avoid it.
Zyte’s pricing model is different from other proxy APIs. You will only be charged for successful requests.
Zyte is a smart downloader that you can use to send API requests through and receive the page requested.
Proxies Are Necessary for Web Scraping
Once, I worked as a freelancer to extract the death data from Game of Thrones. I was able to do this for all death cases without using a proxy.
This was possible because all data is loaded simultaneously, but each page requires JavaScript to render.
Other times, I was able to scrape small sites and pages with no need for a proxy server.
My device IP address has also been responsible for larger projects being blocked or blacklisted.
Why Do You Need Proxy Services for Scraping?
Exceeding the Requests Limits
Each website can limit the requests it accepts from an IP address.
If there are attempts to exceed this limit, it will block any further requests.
Therefore, you have a limit on how many times you can scrape websites with your device.
Proxies may provide more IP addresses that you can use to surpass the limit.
Access Location-Specific Data
Imagine that you live in Norway and want to get the Google UK listing.
How can you do this?
Keep in mind that listings can vary depending on where you live.
Either you can move to the UK, or you can use UK proxy services.
Proxies from the UK are the best choice as they cost less and take up less time.
However, you still get the same result as one who lives in the UK.
Block IP bypass
Proxy services will allow you to access websites blocked by your IP address.
This is usually because you spammed the website or another person on the same network.
This is especially important for web scraping if you didn’t use a proxy and blocked your true IP address.
How Many Proxies Do You Need for Scraping?
The number of requests that a website allows within an hour of one IP address and the pages you wish to scrape is factors that determine how many proxy servers you will need.
Websites have different request limits.
There seems to be an average of 10 requests per hour and 600 requests per minute.
The number of pages you can scrape per hour will vary depending on which programming language you use, what libraries you use, and how you optimize your code.
The average page count you can scrape per hour is 600,000.
Let’sLet’s say that you need to scrape 600,000.00 pages in 60 minutes. So the number of proxies needed is 1000. The formula is as follows.
(“Number” / “Request limit”) = “Proxies Required”
600,000 / 600 = 1000 Proxy
Why Use a Proxy Pool?
You can see that the above analogy requires 1000 proxy servers. Therefore, to avoid blocking, you need to manage them effectively.
A proxy pool is an option that allows you to manage proxies and is managed by a proxy network.
If you use a proxy pool, there will be one entry point.
The proxy pool system will then decide at random which proxy/IP will route your requests through. It will also take care of IP rotation.
Proxy pools don’t require you to consider how many proxies are needed. Providers of proxy pool services can give you access to all or part of the pool.
Pricing is based on bandwidth and ports.
The majority of proxy pools have proxies that number in the thousands for residential proxy pools and millions for datacenter proxy pools.
FAQs
What’s the Difference Between In-house and Outsourced Proxies?
In-house proxies are rated as the best as they guarantee data privacy and customization to specific needs.
However, it is not financially prudent to build an in-house proxy, and even big companies try to avoid doing such due to the vast engineering requirement and associated cost.
This makes outsourced proxy the best option as they offer a better financial cost with great features like the ones we have reviewed.
Just do extensive research before choosing one to ensure it protects your data.
Which Should I Choose Between A Proxy and A Proxy API?
Both bring about the same result, but you might probably prefer proxies if you are on a tight budget.
However, if you are looking at extra features like Captcha and proxy management handling, you should choose a proxy API.
Also, note that proxy API is recommended for those just starting our web scraping and those finding it difficult to manage proxies.
On the other hand, experienced web scrapers should choose proxies as they can save costs.
Which Proxies are the Best for Scraping?
The answer is not definitive, as the site you intend to scrape will significantly determine the best proxy to choose.
But, a general rule of thumb is to choose a proxy that guarantees your privacy and is difficult to detect or block.
Your proxy of choice also needs to offer great speed and an excellent level of security.
All the premium proxies we reviewed here have all these qualities and more. So, you should choose any of these for your web scraping needs.
Conclusion
Proxies play a vital role in web scraping as they offer protection against IP bans and allow access to geo-targeted online content.
However, you need to choose carefully as some proxies do not provide excellent web scraping protection and features.
Consider your project’s need, experience, and budget before selecting any of the best web scraping proxy providers from the list.
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Written by Trevor Cooke
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