Smartproxy Review: Affordable, Competent & Safe

A few years ago, only a handful of companies had the capacity to offer proxy services on the market. Today’s tale is however very different – we have many proxy services that provide a wide range of handy proxy features.

Although far too many of them are exorbitantly costly, there are still excellent proxy services available at a reasonable cost. Smartproxy is one such service.

Founded in 2018, Smartproxy is a relatively new proxy service that has quickly grabbed a huge market share due to its cutting-edge, inexpensive, and useful proxy solutions that include residential proxies, data center proxies, search engine proxies, and several other web scraping tools for personal, business, and commercial demands.

Since its inception, the company has amassed a massive proxy pool with over 40M+ residential IPs from 195+ countries – and a separate proxy pool with over 40K+ datacenter IP addresses in over 100 subnets.

With that said, it is clear that this much-hyped proxy provider is laser-focused on small-time web scrappers, Instagram hustlers, and small businesses – thanks to their low-priced product offerings, which have made them more approachable for those on a budget. In fact, they were just recently awarded the Win Price–Performance Award for being an affordable and fast residential proxy provider.  

In this review, we’ll go over what Smartproxy does well and why you should choose them as your next proxy service. But before we get into the nitty-gritty, let’s take a look at the strengths and drawbacks of this much-touted proxy service.

Smartproxy’s Offering

Smartproxy offers proxy services for your various web scrapping needs. These proxies include some of the best residential proxies, shared datacenter proxies, and SERP proxies.

Rotating Residential Proxies

Rotating residential proxies are Smartproxy’s main proxy offering. Since its inception in 2018, the proxy service provider has been continuously appending to its pool of IP addresses.

Today, the company claims to offer 40M+ IPs from over 195 cities around the Globe including 50 geo-locations just for U.S states alone. According to the information available on their website, all of these residential proxies are real IPs that come from real devices such as smartphones and desktop computers.

Interestingly, Smartproxy doesn’t price its residential proxies per proxy which means it doesn’t limit the number of proxies you can use. Instead, it offers users an entire pool of shared proxies that are limited only by traffic.

While this sharing of IPs can bring about a significant uncertainty of your scraper getting banned or blocked in the middle of a loop because of another user’s suspicious activities, Smartproxy’s fast rotation policy coupled with the fact that all their IP addresses do not share any subnetwork makes their residential IPs hard to ban or flag. Lastly, these can also be used for copping shoes as seen in our sneaker proxies top, where Smartproxy is ranked as the best provider for such tasks.

Shared Datacenter Proxies

Datacenter proxies are Smartproxy’s second main offering.  However, unlike their residential counterparts, Smartproxy’s datacenter proxy servers are located in the U.S to ensure a fast and reliable connection to your targets.

As is common with most datacenter proxies, Smartproxy’s datacenter IPs are shared and their network offers hundreds of subnet and consists of over 40K US IP addresses which make it extremely hard for web scrappers to get cloaked, blocked, or flagged.

While shared IPs generally get flagged especially when scraping unprotected websites, Smartproxy claims that the number of users that can use a single IP at a time is very limited. This ensures performance for all types of websites and services accessed by clients on its network. The company also claims it has data centers located close to major Amazon and Google servers so traffic loads are kept small.

What’s more, Smartproxy does not limit the number of domains you can access provided it stays within your monthly bandwidth cap. There are no restrictions on connections or the number of requests as long as they stay under that limit.

Search Engine Proxies

Search Engine Proxies is a specialized tool for scraping Search Engines that was launched in early 2021. The tool uses the provider’s residential proxy network to achieve 100% success rates on data retrieval.

Unlike the typical residential proxies, Smartproxy’s Search Engine Proxies comes with a variety of features that aid in data scrapping and data parsing. These features include JavaScript rendering, bypassing Google ReCaptcha, automatic proxy filtering, fingerprint management, and user agent management.

With this tool, you can pull all kinds of data from Search Engines including organic results and paid ads as well as hotels, maps, etc.  Note also that this scraping tool also supports state and city level targeting and regular back connect proxy format. Furthermore, if you need an open connection, you can send requests via URL.

Smartproxy’s Tools and Features

Aside from proxies, Smartproxy has been working assiduously on new and existing features to provide a better experience for its customers, which we are undoubtedly so proud about.

Some of these features include the X-Browser, the Chrome Proxy extension, the Firefox proxy add-on, and the proxy address generator.  

In this section, we lay down a few details about each of these tools.

The X-Browser

The X-Browser is an anonymity tool that was launched recently by Smartproxy. This new anti-detection and multi-profile management tool allow web scrappers to use more than one browser simultaneously to scrap the web without getting detected.

This unique tool works by changing your IP and at the same time giving each profile its own fingerprint, so all of them can be traced back to different users instead of just one person.

That said, The X Browser opens up the potential to run multiple social media, affiliate, and merchant accounts safely and securely without being flagged or blocked. Interestingly, Smartproxy offers this tool for free for all its users.

Browser Extension for Chrome and Mozilla Firefox

Smartproxy has extensions available for Chrome and Firefox to help you browse the web anonymously. These add-ons or extensions build upon the provider’s residential proxy network which means the IPs come from real devices.

With these additional features you can navigate through the settings; choose the type of proxy you want – rotating or sticky – as well as choose a country. Once done, you need to choose an authentication method. This can either be with a user: pass or with a whitelisted IP.

Proxy Address Generator

With Smartproxy’s proxy address generator, you can generate proxies that fit your scrapping needs and then download them as a list for your bot or scrapper. You’ll easily integrate the service to all of today’s most popular tools and bots with their documentation.

Smartproxy Pricing

Smartproxy offers several different price plans for both data center and residential proxies as well as search engine proxies. Important to note is that these plans are priced based on a monthly subscription model and come with limited bandwidth but you still get access to thousands if not millions of IPs.

Datacenter Proxies

Smartproxy offers four different plans for their datacenter proxies. The plans are namely; Clever, Smart, Wise, and Genius. The Clever plan is the most basic and starts at $50/month ($0.5/GB) for 100 GBs of traffic and $1/GB for extra traffic. You can check the features of the other datacenter plans here.

Residential Proxies

On the other hand, Smartproxy offers four residential proxy plans. Namely, Micro, Starter, and the Regular plan. However, it does not end there. With Smartproxy you can purchase additional bandwidth at the price/GB of your plan.

With that in mind, Smartproxy’s residential proxy plans start from $75/month ($15/GB) for the Micro plan which gives you a traffic limit of 5 GBs. The Regular plan on the other hand goes for $400/month ($8/GB) and has a traffic limit of 50 GB while the Starter plan is priced at $200/ month ($10/GB) and has a 20 GB traffic cap.

Search Engine Proxies

Smartproxy’s SERP proxies are priced based on requests but also billed monthly. The most basic plan, Lite, is priced at $100/ month and includes 35,000 requests which translate to $2.86 per 1000 requests. There is also the Basic plan and the Standard plan.

The Basic plan goes for $250/ month ($2.5/1K requests) and offers 100,000 requests while the Standard plan is capped at 250K requests and goes for $500/month ($2/1K requests).

Recurring Monthly Subscription

Smartproxy has a recurrent monthly subscription that starts when you first buy it. Once a new proxy plan is purchased, automatic renewal is created and the next billing cycle happens at the beginning of every month after your purchase date. If you don’t want to renew just before this time comes around, cancel beforehand so you’re not charged again.

3-Day Money-Back Guarantee

There is no free trial period with any of Smartproxy’s plans. Moreover, you are required to pay upfront before having access to their services.

However, if you want a quick way out without bad consequences for yourself and your wallet, Smartproxy also offers a 3-day money-back refund guarantee that will save those who just wanted to try it out from losing their hard-earned cash.

Smartproxy’s Performance

When choosing a reliable residential proxy provider, response time and connection speed are two crucial factors that you need to consider. Response time in this case is the total amount of time it takes for users to receive a response after they’ve submitted their request.

That said, response time is understandably longer in residential proxies than datacenter ones. This is because of the pings and latency involved with them. Interestingly, Smartproxy’s residential proxies are incredibly fast.

From our tests, it took an average of 3.9 seconds to get a server response, which was a purely astonishing result considering that Smartproxy is seen as a cheap residential proxy services provider.

Another important parameter that we tested was the proxy connection speed. This is the speed at which you can upload and download data through your connection using Smartproxy proxies in a second.

From our speed tests, with the Speedtest tool, we found the average upload speed to be of Smartproxy proxies from Chicago to be 16.41 Mbps while the average download speed was 29.11 Mbps. This was overly impressive compared to its competition.

Smartproxy’s Ease of Use

One of the key highlights of a reliable proxy service is its ease of use and this is one area that Smartproxy aces.  For one, the clean and intuitive interface makes the dashboard feel simple and user-friendly, which is great for beginners who are looking into testing the service.  

What’s more, the installation process is simple, straightforward, and doesn’t require much from you. You can learn how to use the Smartproxy service by checking out their documentation on connecting your account as well as what steps are involved in using this tool for managing multiple social media accounts simultaneously.

Also, we found Smartproxy to be compatible with a wide variety of computer and smartphone operating systems, including Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, and iOS.  And while it lacks robust tools like Bright Data and Oxylabs – we found that this proxy service offers exclusive features at a fair price point.

Smartproxy’s Customer Support

Being able to fix issues quickly is a priority for customers. Luckily, Smartproxy understands this and does its best to provide a perfect service in this matter since people don’t generally enjoy long wait times- but it seems as if not every company takes such claims seriously.

But Smartproxy obviously has taken them very much so. They’ve made sure everyone at their HQ works towards one goal: resolving all user queries with incredible speed. Their customer support is available 24/7 through live chat and they also have a comprehensive FAQs page that provides answers to most of the client’s questions.

What’s more, the company also offers email support. However, most customer reviews have depicted their email support to be extremely slow which is a big letdown.

Conclusion

Compared to the heavyweights, Oxylabs and Bright Data, their features are limited but still useful in many situations. Of course, some corners had to be cut at the expense of some nice–to–have features hence the low entry price.

While Smartproxy has quickly won the hearts of many web scrappers, the service still leaves a lot to be desired. That notwithstanding, Smartproxy’s affordable plans make it a good option for any use case.

But what good is a service if it does not focus on the functionality that is gainful for all users? And that’s what Smartproxy is all about. So if you are looking for a reliable datacenter and residential proxy service – and are willing to balance between price and features, we’d recommend Smartproxy.