Smartproxy Review 2024: Is it worth the hype?

As per a recent report by Precision Reports titled “Proxy Server Service Market 2023,” the proxy server market is expected to hit multimillion levels by 2030. With more and more enterprises and SMEs preferring proxy servers, exponential growth is to be expected in the next few years.

With that being said, the proxy server market has grown bigger – so customers now have more options to choose from. The general purpose of a proxy server is to provide the users with a gateway to the internet, creating a private network. They serve between the end users and the websites they visit.

But getting the right service is easier said than done. Ideally, a proxy server should meet all the necessary requirements without breaking the budget.

Fortunately, there are some high-quality yet affordable proxy services like Smartproxy that should serve your purpose. Then, you have to look at the proxy pool, compare prices, and purchase a subscription. You can get a full refund in the first 14 days if you are not completely satisfied!

Founded in 2018, Smartproxy has grown to become one of the top brands in the industry, and it is often compared to the likes of Bright Data. Smartproxy is known for delivering efficient services accompanied by a budget-friendly price tag.

Due to this, the proxy service attracts entrepreneurs, SMBs, and individuals and businesses who scrape data and manage multiple accounts. This audience still forms a large chunk of Smartproxy’s customer base, but the company now has a much wider reach.

Smartproxy Plans and Costs

As mentioned earlier, Smartproxy is known for providing quality services at a reasonable price. You can have a look at the current plans:

Types of Proxy

Let’s take a look at the types of proxies offered by Smartproxy in brief.

Smartproxy Datacenter Proxies

Primarily, Smartproxy specializes in residential, static, and rotating data center proxies, which is an entry-level service. For customers who are looking for an efficient and cheap web scraping tool, Smartproxy can be a great solution.

To enhance its services, Smartproxy takes proactive measures against bans – thanks to its rotational and sticky support sessions. Further, the proxy service has a vast pool of over 100,000 IPs across 400 subnetworks in the US and Europe, making it reliable. Moreover, Smartproxy offers support for SOCKS5, which encompasses UDP as well as HTTPS protocols.

Users can also opt for dedicated data center proxies, which offer enhanced control over browsing history, which, in turn, provides better security. With dedicated data center proxies, you also get unlimited data network requests and unmetered traffic.

Smartproxy Residential Proxies

Residential proxies can be considered as Smartproxy’s flagship product – which is a tool designed to enable users to navigate stringent websites without raising suspicion.

The product comes with an IP pool of 55 million across 195 countries. These IPs belong to real mobile and computer users. These help in targeting various countries, precisely to the extent of particular cities.

The residential proxies respond in <0.6s, have a 99.47% success rate, and are ethically sourced from real mobile and desktop devices. With no shared subnetworks, there is a lesser risk of getting banned with the product, and it lets a user launch unlimited connections.

Smartproxy residential proxies also offer sticky and rotating sessions. Sticky sessions help in maintaining a connection for a predetermined duration, currently with three options- 1 minute, 10 minutes, and 30 minutes. On the other hand, rotating sessions enable automatic changing of IPs for a particular connection.

Smartproxy has 55M+ residential proxies with HTTP(s) and SOCKS5 protocol support.

Static Proxies

Static proxies are an extremely efficient combination of data center proxies and residential proxies. With the help of Smartproxy static proxies, a user can use the anonymity of a residential proxy at the speed of data center proxies.

Smartproxy Mobile Proxies

One of the premium products from Smartproxy is its Mobile Proxies, which comes with a pool of 10 million IPs. These are dedicatedly made for mobile devices and strict websites, capable of running on 3G, 4G, and 5G networks.

Bundled in with the mobile proxies are other premium services like unlimited threads, rotating or sticky sessions, OS filtering between Android and iOS, and country-wide coverage. It is also equipped with a robust and secure SOCK5 protocol.

However, the only drawback is its inability to target cities.

Site Unblocker

One of the unique services of Smartproxy is its site unblocker tool, which allows users users to visit restricted websites, bypass strict bot measures, and extract data. It boasts a 100% success rate, which is quite impressive. Alongside the main product, users also get features like fingerprinting, proxy rotation, pool management, JavaScript rendering, and more.

Smartproxy Scraping Solutions

Intro

SERP Scraping API

Smartproxy also helps users gather real-time SERP information (both paid and organic) from search engines with the help of its SERP Scraping API tool. It is a unique and efficient combination of the functionalities of a web crawler and proxies – and it’s said to have a 100% success rate.

The tool makes use of the residential proxies of Smartproxy and fully supports rotational sessions. It helps the users gather keyword rankings and other SEO metrics from its results. What’s more is that the tool can geotarget to the city level, which lends it higher accuracy. The data gathered is available in both HTML and JSON format.

eCommerce Scraping

Along with SERP Scraping, Smartproxy also offers an e-commerce scraping tool, which helps users collect intelligent market data against competitors. With this, users can monitor real-time prices, gather customer information, compare market trends, and do much more across various locations. The tool can easily bypass IP blocks and CAPTCHAs and has a 100% success rate. For Javascript websites, the eCommerce Scraping tool features headless scraping.

Web Scraping API

Sometimes, the collection of information from certain websites gets tough for users. The Web Scraping API tool from Smartproxy comes with the ability to extract information from any website. Smartproxy powers the API with its residential proxies, ensuring a 100% success rate. 

With such functionality, it is even capable of easily snooping on heavy JavaScript web pages.

The tool can be applied to detect malicious websites, collect real-time data, and quickly deliver structured data.

Social Media Scraping

For brands, gathering public data from several different social media platforms is a crucial part of any business strategy. As a solution, Smartproxy offers Social Media Scraping API, which is powered by Smartproxy’s Residential and Datacenter proxies. The tool gathers data from Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms. The collected data can be viewed in HTML or GraphQL format.

Signing Up and Getting Started on Smartproxy

In this section, we will look at the general process of signing up on Smartproxy

Here’s an overview of what the signing up process looks like:

• Install the Smartproxy app and log in to your account with email. If you haven’t signed up yet, create an account first.
• On the dashboard with plans, choose one as per your requirements and budget.
• Choose a location, session type, and method of authentication to establish a connection with the respective proxies.
• You can also install the free Chrome extension from the webstore

In addition to this quick process, Smartproxy has a simple user interface, which makes the whole process easier.

Smartproxy Features

Let’s quickly look at some of the most remarkable features of Smartproxy:

• Ease of payment: Apart from a wide range of payment options, Smartproxy offers a non-subscription model to its users- Pay As You Go. This allows users to invest once and purchase as much traffic as needed. However, this is only available on Smartproxy’s residential proxies and mobile proxies. Payments can also be made through its Smart Wallet, where users can store their proxy dedicated budget for a certain period.
• No bans on IPs and Captchas: Proxies from Smartproxy are highly immune to geo-blocks or Captchas, hence enabling customers to get rid of such issues.
• No need for coding skills: Smartproxy comes with a No-Code Scraper tool for users without prior knowledge of coding. With its help, they can easily collect data without having to write a single line of coding.
• Wide coverage: Smartproxy allows access to 195 locations, up to city levels. This includes 50 states of the USA.

Smartproxy Customer Support

Smartproxy provides 24/7 customer services to its users. The customer service can be accessed via live chat or email.

Smartproxy’s customer service is prompt and delivers instant replies. The main mode of communication is English and Chinese. However, it also supports other languages with the help of Google Translator.

Apart from that, there is an option of availing Smartproxy’s Discord community, where you can drop your issue, and a fellow user should help you with your problem.

There is also an FAQ segment that has well-categorized questions and answers. It also covers a wide range of topics. 

Conclusion: Is Smartproxy worth it?

Let’s weigh the pros and cons:

Pros

• 40 million proxies
• Reasonable cost
• Over 10 million mobile proxies
• 24/7 responsive customer support
• Dedicated mobile app
• Comparatively simpler user interface
• 3-day free trial

Cons

• Relatively lesser customization
• Not many discounts

Based on the details we have seen so far, it can be said that Smartproxy is a cost-effective and efficient solution for general users. If you’re not too much into customizations, then Smartproxy might be a good fit. Plus, you get a raid and prompt customer service, if you run into any problems.