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Smartproxy Review
News about Smartproxy
News about Smartproxy
- Country: International
- Founded: 2018
- Proxy networks: Datacenter, ISP, residential, mobile, proxy API (Site Unblocker)
- Web scrapers: APIs for general unblocking, search engines, e-commerce & social media
- Supporting tools: Antidetect browser, Chrome & Firefox extensions
- Price segment: Mid-market
- Starting price: $7
- Payment methods: Credit card, PayPal, Bitcoin, Apple Pay, Google Pay
- Trial: 3 days, 14-day refund
Smartproxy was founded in 2018 by “a group of four international entrepreneurs”. It started out in reaction to premium proxy providers like Luminati (now Bright Data) and GeoSurf, which were only accessible to business customers and had cumbersome onboarding procedures.
The company first resold addresses from others. Nowadays, it has a diverse pool that combines proxies from various sources. According to Smartproxy, they’re carefully vetted, but the provider doesn’t go into much detail about the topic.
Smartproxy built its business on residential and rotating datacenter proxies. At the time, they managed to fill a gap between premium providers and cheap yet mediocre services like Storm Proxies. The IPs performed well while costing less than the high-end counterparts. It also helped that Smartproxy heavily invested into customer experience: quality documentation, responsive support, and user-friendly interface.
This, along with some targeted marketing efforts, allowed Smartproxy to quickly sweep up many of the sneakerheads, Instagram managers, and small-time scrapers that were looking for affordable residential addresses. While its website is still heavily oriented towards these audiences, the company has been gradually expanding its reach.
Today, Smartproxy can be considered one of the largest proxy providers, probably the third after Bright Data and Oxylabs. Rotating proxies remain the backbone of its service, but there are now more products to choose from, including several web scrapers.
Smartproxy Proxy Networks
Smartproxy sells access to all major types of proxy servers:
- Datacenter proxies in shared, dedicated, and pool-based formats.
- ISP proxies, which come in a dedicated list or a large rotating pool.
- Residential proxies with global country coverage.
- Mobile proxies from real people’s devices around the world.
- Proxy API (Web Unblocker) that integrates as a proxy server but handles unblocking and JavaScript rendering remotely.
Rotating residential proxies are Smartproxy’s flagship service made for accessing strict websites.
Pool Size & Coverage
- Advertised pool size: 55 million
- Locations: Global
- Targeting options: Global, country, state, city, ZIP code
Smartproxy’s pool comprises 55 million IPs borrowed from real people’s devices. To give you some context, this is among the larger proxy networks on the market, at least looking at advertised numbers.
The residential proxy pool covers all countries in the world. You get precise filtering tools out of the box, which allow specifying a city and even ZIP code (though only in the US).
Features
- Rotation: Every request, up to 24 hours
- Traffic: Plan based
- Concurrency: Unlimited threads & ports
Smartproxy’s residential proxies can rotate with every connection request, and you can also establish sticky sessions. You can specify any duration up to 24 hours – of course, the real uptime depends on the IP source. The connection also drops if you stop making requests for a minute.
Smartproxy imposes no limitations on concurrency, meaning that you can make as many parallel requests as you like – or your hardware can handle.
Integration & Use
- Connection method: Gateway address
- Connection format
- Primary: USERNAME:PASSWORD@us.smartproxy.com:10001
- Secondary: user-USERNAME-country-COUNTRY-city-CITY-session-ID:PASSWORD@gate.smartproxy.com:7000
- Protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS5
- Authentication: Credentials, IP whitelisting
Smartproxy’s residential proxy network uses gateway servers. They route requests through the closest load balancer before reaching the end user’s device.
You actually get two integration formats: endpoints with different port numbers and a single backconnect gateway.
Endpoints are the preferred method used in Smartproxy’s setup widget. They give you slightly different addresses based on the country you choose, and then generate ports for sticky sessions. This way, you don’t need to modify the username to target particular locations.
The endpoint approach also supports city targeting, though it’s not always consistent. Major cities like New York have their own designated ports (city.smartproxy.com:21000, 21001, etc.), but smaller designations still add a username parameter: gate.smartproxy.com:10001:user-USERNAME-country-us-city-kansas_city.
The backconnect entry always sticks to the same gateway, and you can filter IPs by appending parameters to the username. This method is more flexible, but it may not be compatible with scenarios where credentials can’t be used. It’s also the only means to use location targeting with SOCKS5.
Pricing Plans
- Model: Pay as you go, subscription
- Format: Pay per traffic
- Modifiers: Number of whitelisted IPs, sub-users
- Starting price: $7 for 1 GB
- Trial: 100 MB for 3 days or 14-day refund
Smartproxy’s residential proxies used to have the highest starting price out of the provider’s three proxy networks, but now you can pay as you go. It’s not cheap compared to competitors like Dataimpulse but beats most premium and mid-range alternatives. So, these residential IPs can be a viable choice for small projects that need quality addresses.
To avoid getting stuck between pricing tiers, Smartproxy allows topping up each plan at the same rate per gigabyte. This is limited to 80% of the plan’s worth, at which point it makes sense to simply buy a bigger plan.
The proxies can be a solid option for large projects, as well. Smartproxy scales very competitively into hundreds of gigabytes, and some premium options fail to catch up even at a terabyte of data.
Performance Benchmarks
We last tested Smartproxy’s residential proxies in March 2024, for the annual Proxy Market Research.
#1: Pool size & composition
- Requests: Global pool – 1.2M, 21 days; country pools – 560k, 14 days; Australia – 140k, 7 days
- Residential percentage: IP2Location database, Usage type data point (ISP, ISP/MOB, MOB IPs)
| Gateway | Unique IPs | Residential % |
| Global | 832,922 | 97.22% |
| US | 281,956 | 93.38% |
| UK | 114,491 | 97.64% |
| EU* | 461,864 | 97.92% |
| Brazil | 354,106 | 97.75% |
| India | 410,581 | 98.38% |
| Australia | 33,977 | 98.06% |
* Combines Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands.
Smartproxy proved to have a very large proxy pool. Over 280,000 IPs in the US should be enough for scraping at any scale, and even the Australian endpoint generated over 30,000 proxies. This is among the largest proxy networks we’ve tested. Furthermore, most of the IPs were indeed identified as residential, which isn’t always the case with the competition.
#2: IP quality (IPQualityScore data)
- Global pool: 20,000 checks
- US pool: 10,000 checks
| Avg. fraud score | Proxy % | Frequent abuser | |
| Global | 32.72 | 35.33% | 561 |
| US | 42.97 | 44.88% | 1,020 |
Smartproxy’s IPs were among the least abused, both in all locations and only the US. There were also very few proxies classified as frequent abusers, which suggests that the provider’s residential network is clean.
#3: Infrastructure performance
- Parameters: Same as the pool test
- Target: Nearest server of a global CDN (<10 KB)
- Our server locations: DE for Global & European pools, US for American & Brazil pools, Singapore for Indian & Australian pools
| Gateway | Avg. success rate | Avg. response time |
| Global | 99.68% | 0.54 s |
| US | 99.67% | 0.49 s |
| UK | 99.71% | 0.39 s |
| EU | 99.64% | 0.43 s |
| Brazil | 98.13% | 1.28 s |
| India | 98.30% | 1.23 s |
| Australia | 99.72% | 0.65 s |
Smartproxy’s residential proxy pool was not only big but also performant. The infrastructure had no problems routing requests successfully over 99% of the time. The response time was faster than all other providers but Oxylabs, beating direct competitors like IPRoyal several times.
#4: Performance with popular targets
- Requests: ~2,600 for each target
- Script: Custom non-headless Python scraper; social media – Puppeteer Extra Stealth
- Proxy location: US
- Our server location: US
| Website | Avg. success rate | Avg. response time |
| Amazon | 97.29% | 4.02 s |
| 83.34% | 1.99 s | |
| Social Media | 98.31% | 3.08 s |
| Total | 92.98% | 3.03 s |
The residential proxies handled most websites we threw at them admirably. The only target to give them a hard time was Google where every fifth request failed. Not ideal but we’ve seen much worse.
Mobile proxies are Smartproxy’s premium service made for mobile-first or most hardened websites. It borrows IPs from phones and other devices on a cellular connection.
Datacenter proxies are Smartproxy’s entry option. They’re made for cost-efficient web scraping when your target doesn’t care about IP reputation or precise location targeting.
Smartproxy offers three datacenter products:
- A list of shared IPs with customizable traffic and ability to rotate.
- A list of dedicated proxies in the US.
- A large pool of rotating proxies in the US and Europe.
Smartproxy Web Scraping APIs
Proxy networks aside, Smartproxy offers four web scraping APIs. You can pass them an URL, and the APIs will return its contents without fail. You won’t have to worry about managing proxy networks or overcoming website protection mechanisms.
Web Scraping API is Smartproxy’s general-purpose scraper – it can extract any page without structuring the output. The other three have parsers for specific website groups, namely search engines, e-commerce stores, and social media networks.
Features
- Targets: Universal
- Structured data: Google, Amazon, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit
- Locations: All countries (+ coordinates for Google, ZIP code for Amazon)
- Headless browsers: JavaScript rendering, browser instructions, screenshots
- Concurrency: Unlimited
- Integration: Real-time API, async API (with batch requests), proxy API
- Output formats: HTML, JSON (for targets with parsers)
- Other features: Device type, custom headers, sessions
Smartproxy’s scrapers are rich with features. You can select any country, specify a device type, add custom headers, and pass on cookies with a session ID for multi-step scraping.
The general-purpose API accepts any URL you send it. Smartproxy’s specialized APIs use a parametrized request structure, meaning you can simply enter a search query, ASIN, or hashtag without forming URLs yourself. They also have target-specific parameters like domain language or co-ordinates for localized Google results.
In addition, Smartproxy has built specialized scrapers for various properties of major targets. For example, there’s an endpoint optimized for Google ads, Amazon product pages, or TikTok hashtags.
All three tools integrate as an API or proxy server. The first method works over an open connection, or you can fetch results via webhook with an option to send batch requests.
Pricing Plans
- Model: Subscription
- Format: Successful requests
- Starting price
- General-purpose & social media: $50 for 25k requests ($2 CPM)
- SERP & E-Commerce: $30 for 15k requests ($2 CPM)
- Trial: 1k requests over 7 days
Performance Benchmarks
We last tested Smartproxy’s APIs in January 2023, for our research on web scraping APIs.
Test #1: Google (10,800 requests over 7 days)
| Avg. success rate | Avg. response time | |
| Unparsed | 100% | 6.09 s |
| Parsed | 99.85% | 6.04 s |
Smartproxy’s SERP scraper performed flawlessly with Google: it returned nearly all of our requests, and enabling data parsing had no effect on the response time.
Test #2: Amazon (1,000 requests)
| Avg. success rate | Avg. response time |
| 100% | 4.69 s |
Amazon posed no challenge as well. The scraper was even faster compared to Google, despite Amazon having much bigger page sizes.
Test #3: Photo-focused social media network (500 requests to each)
| Avg. success rate | Avg. response time | |
| GraphQL | 100% | 8.95 s |
| Headless | 100% | 29.09 s |
The results with social media were also perfect. One weak spot was response time with JavaScript rendering enabled – it slowed down the scraper significantly.
How to Use Smartproxy
Smartproxy is one of the easier providers to use. It supports self-service, doesn’t take long to set up, and has user-friendly tools to help you work with proxies.
Registration
To register with Smartproxy, you’ll need to enter an email and password, select a use case from a provided list, and then verify your email address. Alternatively, you can sign up with your Google account.
Smartproxy does have a KYC procedure, but you only need to interact with someone if you trigger the provider’s safeguards. It’s possible to access the dashboard without verifying an email address, but you won’t be able to buy anything until you do.
Dashboard
Smartproxy’s dashboard includes all the necessary functionality to manage proxies yourself. You can:
- add money to the Smartproxy wallet,
- buy and upgrade plans,
- authorize access to proxies,
- set up the proxy server,
- create sub-users,
- track your traffic use,
- and contact customer support.
Most of the controls are separated by service. There are sections for datacenter, residential proxies, and web scraping tools which lead to individual products. For example, to reach mobile proxies, I’d need to click on the Residential proxies drop-down and select them from the available options.
You can get a quick overview of your services on the dashboard’s main screen: see your current plan, top targets, and traffic use. However, it’s once again dedicated to one product at a time, requiring you to open different tabs for other services.
There are introductory tutorials and guidance all around to help you get acquainted. However, they don’t feel overbearing.
Subscription Management
Smartproxy supports full self-service for each product. You can buy a plan in two ways. The first is by making a direct purchase with your credit card, PayPal, or another payment method. Alternatively, you can add money to the Smartproxy wallet first and then use it for purchases. This lets you pay as you go.
Before purchasing a plan, you can use Smartproxy’s Smart Plan Recommendation tool. It requires completing three steps: entering a target, selecting headless or non-headless scraping, and usage frequency. The dashboard then recommends a suitable plan. This tool is available for the residential proxies and scraping APIs.
Smartproxy has a separate Billing section where you can see payment history, download invoices, overview and modify all active plans. It’s also the place to top up your wallet balance.
Proxy Management
The proxy setup is pretty straightforward:
- Create a user or whitelist an IP address.
- Use a convenient widget to filter the proxy servers you need. The widget asks you to choose your preferred authentication method, set up the filtering options (location, OS), rotation time, protocol, and output format (endpoint:port or cURL formatted).
- Select how many endpoints you want to generate. Or, in the case of dedicated proxies, select your assigned IPs. Once you’re done, you can copy this list to the clipboard, export it into .csv or .txt.
Smartproxy also automatically generates code samples in cURL and multiple programming languages. You can copy-paste this into your web scraping script.
Overall, the setup procedure is well thought out. My only gripe is that you can’t set a custom password for a proxy user. The system generates them automatically.
In addition, Smartproxy offers a fleshed-out API for controlling its proxies programmatically. The API is available for every user, not only resellers. Its functions include creating and managing sub-users, setting traffic limits, viewing usage reports and subscription status, and filtering available endpoints.
If you need proxies on your web browser, Smartproxy provides browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox. In the settings, you can choose a country, whether you want the proxies to be sticky or rotate, and authorize them either with a whitelisted IP or user:pass credentials.
Usage Tracking
Smartproxy’s dashboard includes visual graphs where you can see how much traffic or requests you’ve expended. You can filter the graphs by sub-user or date, and they also display statistics for each target. The timeframes are 24 hours, week, month, or custom.
Alternatively, you can fetch traffic expenditure statistics using an API call.
Documentation
Smartproxy has got the documentation part down. You’ll find a plethora of instructions covering various aspects of the service:
- a detailed start guide that explains all the concepts and features,
- an FAQ divided into multiple sections by topics,
- integration guides for major bots and automation tools,
- and configuration guides for web browsers and operating systems.
There’s also a separate hub for technical documentation with tips & tricks, code samples, and troubleshooting. Some of the content has become outdated, but the documentation is handled well in general.
For users of its scraping APIs, Smartproxy has an interactive playground to try out the service.
Hands-On Support
Smartproxy’s customer service is available round the clock via email or live chat. The main language is English, though the support can also speak Chinese – and, of course, other languages via Google Translate.
Whenever we’ve had to interact with the support agents, we received quick (think nearly instant) and competent responses. In 2020, we even gave Smartproxy an award to acknowledge its customer service. It remains excellent to this day and can be considered one of the provider’s strongest points.
Conclusion
Having read this far, I hope you can see where I was coming from in the introduction.
Smartproxy really has struck something great. The company has responsive customer support, performant proxies, and everything set up for convenient self-service.
To be fair, compared to something like Bright Data or Oxylabs, it’s nothing special. But this is without considering Smartproxy’s final ace – it somehow manages to achieve all this while keeping prices very competitive.
Of course, not everything is perfect. Some corners had to be cut, and you may find services like Smartproxy’s dedicated proxies – or in some cases, its web scraping APIs – limited.
But that’s the whole point of Smartproxy: the company focuses on the functionality that is good enough for the majority of users at the expense of some nice-to-have or niche features. And it is damn good at that.
Based on my experience with Smartproxy, I can recommend it to anyone looking for a great proxy provider.