Smartproxy is a leading provider of web scraping and proxy solutions, offering over 65 million IPs in 195 locations worldwide. Known for its fast connection speeds (<0.3s avg speed), 99.99% high uptime reliability, and user-friendly experience, Smartproxy has earned a strong reputation in the industry. It has won Proxyway’s Best Value Provider award for four consecutive years and earned recognition for data collection performance. These accolades solidify Smartproxy’s reputation as a high-quality, efficient, and reliable proxy service provider.

While Smartproxy excels in many areas, users often seek Smartproxy alternatives for better pricing, enhanced features, and other specialized services tailored to their various needs. In this article, we’ve compiled a list of the top five alternatives. We also highlighted the types of proxies each alternative offers, their key features, best use cases, strengths, weaknesses, and pricing details. By the end, you’ll have a clear understanding of which provider might be the best fit for your web scraping and proxy needs.

Why Look for Smartproxy Alternatives?

Though Smartproxy is a strong player in the proxy and web scraping market, it may not be the perfect fit for all users. You might encounter the following limitations that may prompt you to explore other alternatives:

• Limited Customization: Smartproxy offers a solid set of proxy features, but its customization options can be somewhat limited compared to some competitors.
• Pricing for Small Businesses: Smartproxy’s pricing is too costly for individuals, startups, or small businesses with limited budgets.
• Lack of flexibility in certain use cases: Smartproxy has fewer advanced features compared to other providers, and this affects flexibility in certain use cases.

However, Smartproxy alternatives can help address these limitations by offering:

• Better pricing plans: Some providers offer more cost-effective plans, particularly for small-scale users.
• Unique features: Some alternatives have more unique and advanced features that enable greater flexibility depending on the use case.
• Specialized solutions: Certain providers offer customizable plans for customers who need specialized solutions beyond standard offerings.

Aside from small businesses looking for budget-friendly proxy solutions, developers and enterprises looking for a better fit can also benefit from the Smartproxy alternatives.

Top 5 Alternatives to Smartproxy

Here are the five Smartproxy alternatives worth considering:

1. Live proxies
2. Oxylabs
3. Webshare
4. SOAX
5. IPRoyal

Selection Criteria

To determine the top five Smartproxy alternatives, we evaluated several important factors that affect both performance and user satisfaction. These factors allow us to assess which alternatives best meet user needs in terms of reliability, affordability, and flexibility.

• Reliability: Ensures consistent uptime, minimal downtime, and secure connections.
• Proxy Variety: Availability of different proxy types such as residential, mobile, and data center proxies.
• Pricing: Offering cost-effective and flexible pricing plans to suit different user needs.
• Scalability: Ability to handle increasing demands, including high-volume requests and enterprise-level demands.

What Are the Best Alternatives to Smartproxy?

Considering the numerous features offered by Smartproxy, there aren't many alternatives that provide the same range of services. However, after conducting thorough research, we found that popular providers such as Live Proxies, Webshare, Oxylabs, IPRoyal, and SOAX are excellent alternatives to Smartproxy.

Before we dive into detailed reviews, let's take a look at a comparison table of the top six Smartproxy alternatives. This table will help you make an informed decision by comparing key aspects like proxy types, key features, use cases, strengths, weaknesses, and pricing.

1. Live Proxies

Live Proxies is a top alternative that offers over 10 million private IPs across 55 countries. It provides top-notch residential proxies, ranging from rotating residential to rotating mobile and static residential proxies.

Live Proxies offers secure, reliable, unblocked, fast proxy solutions that are great for both individual users (B2C) and large enterprises (B2B). Let’s look at Live Proxies' key features, proxy types, advantages, drawbacks, ideal use cases, and pricing.

Key Features:

• Private IP allocation: Live Proxies ensures each client gets exclusive IPs that are not shared with others on the same target site.
• Flexible session options: Live proxies offer rotating and sticky sessions, which enables greater flexibility depending on the use case.
• 99.9% uptime: Live Proxies source proxies from real ISPs, which provide reliable speeds and connectivity and reduce the risk of downtime.
• Global IP coverage: They offer access to a large pool of residential IPs from different regions, which makes it ideal for geo-sensitive tasks.

Proxy Types:

• Rotating residential proxies: Live proxies offer rotating residential proxies that are suitable for web scraping and market research because they provide better anonymity. The frequent IP changes ensure that websites do not track usage patterns or detect the proxy.
• Rotating mobile proxies: Live Proxies also offers rotating mobile proxies with IPs from real mobile carriers, making them suitable for mobile geo-targeted ads and mobile testing.
• Static residential proxies: They also offer static residential proxies, which allow users to keep the same residential IPs for 30 days or longer. The stability of static residential proxies are convenient for tasks that need the same IP address and consistency, such as tracking rankings (SEO) and account management.
• Enterprise Solutions: Tailored pricing for high-volume IP distribution, API integration, and extensive operational needs.

The Pros and Cons of Live Proxies:

Pros

• Wide proxy variety: Live proxies offer various IPs, from rotating IPs to static residential IPs and rotating mobile IPs. They have a proxy pool of over 10 million IPs that spans across 55 country locations.
• Customizable plans: Live Proxies offers customizable plans for customers who need specialized solutions beyond standard offerings. For instance, they have custom proxy plans that cater to larger B2B clients with a minimum budget of $2,000 per month. These pans provide more specialized solutions like ASN carrier proxies, large bandwidth commitments, and larger IP allocations.
• High anonymity: Live Proxies offers rotating IPs that change within specific schedules. This provides high anonymity, as frequent IP changes make it difficult for websites to detect the proxy to track usage patterns or activities.
• Excellent support: Live Proxies provides outstanding 24/7 customer support with quick response times. They are committed to client satisfaction.

Cons

• Limited free trial: Free trials are restricted to enterprise-level clients only.
• Regional coverage gaps: Proxy availability may be limited in specific geographic areas compared to broader networks.

Ideal Use Cases:

• Web scraping: Extract large-scale, valuable web data seamlessly without getting blocked.
• eCommerce: Monitor pricing, track competitor trends, and manage multiple online store accounts.
• SEO/SERP monitoring: Analyze search engine rankings and keyword performance with accurate location-based results.
• Social media automation: Manage multiple accounts, schedule posts, and engage audiences without detection.
• Market research: Collect real-time consumer insights and competitor intelligence.
• Brand protection: Detect and prevent brand misuse, counterfeiting, and unauthorized sellers.
• Ad verification: Ensure ads appear exactly where intended and are not subject to fraudulent impressions.
• Mobile app testing: Simulate user behavior from different locations and devices for app development
• Travel fair aggregation: Track airline, hotel, and travel prices across different websites and multiple regions.

Pricing:

Rotating Residential Proxies:

• Metered pricing plans start from $70/Plan.
• Unmetered pricing plans start from $130/Plan.

Static Residential Proxies:

• Metered pricing plans start from $65/Plan.
• Unmetered pricing plans start from $150/Plan.

Rotating Mobile Proxies:

• Metered pricing plans start from $70/Plan.

Enterprise plans:

• Begin at $2,000 per month for 1TB and scale up to $25,000 per month for 25TB.

2. Oxylabs

Oxylabs is a premium proxy provider that is known for its extensive global IP network of over 100 million residential IPs across 195 countries worldwide. Aside from being a high-quality proxy provider, Oxylabs also provides data scraping solutions for large-scale web data extraction. Let’s explore its key features, proxy types, pros, cons, ideal use cases, and pricing.

Key Features:

• Advanced rotation options: Oxylabs offers automatic IP rotation, which ensures each request is routed through a different IP address. The rotation option enhances anonymity and reduces the risk of detection.
• AI-powered tools: Oxylabs leverages its AI-powered "Web Unblocker" to bypass sophisticated anti-bot systems and extract high-quality public data with minimal effort.
• Geo-targeting: Oxylabs provides geolocation capabilities that make it possible for users to specify the desired location for accessing particular websites. This includes options to target by country, state, city, or even specific coordinates and radius.

Proxy Types:

• Residential Proxies: These proxies utilize IP addresses assigned by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to real residential devices. They are ideal for mimicking genuine user behavior and reducing the risk of detection.
• ISP Proxies: Oxylabs offers fast ISP (static residential) proxies from trusted ASNs, built for traffic-intensive web scraping tasks.
• Mobile Proxies: These proxies provide IP addresses from mobile devices connected via 3G, 4G, 5G, or LTE networks. This makes them effective for tasks requiring mobile-originated traffic.
• Datacenter Proxies: These proxies are sourced from data centers and are known for their high speed and reliability. They are designed for high-volume scraping.
• Dedicated Datacenter Proxies: Oxylabs' Dedicated Datacenter proxies provide the key advantage of unlimited bandwidth. This makes them ideal for data-intensive tasks such as market research and brand protection.

The Pros and Cons of Oxylabs:

Pros

• High reliability: Oxylabs' advanced rotation tools, like Rotating Residential Proxies and the Proxy Rotator, help lower the risk of IP bans and detection. These tools ensure optimal performance and reliability.
• Enterprise-grade tools: Oxylabs offers cutting-edge tools like its AI-powered "Web Unblocker" and HTTP & HTTPS (SSL) Proxies. These tools are designed to support large-scale operations, which makes them a perfect fit for businesses and enterprises.

Cons

• Higher costs: Oxylabs is a premium provider, and its pricing reflects the high quality of service, extensive IP pool, and advanced features it offers. However, this can be a drawback for some users, especially individuals as well as businesses with limited budgets.

Ideal Use Cases:

• Enterprise-level data collection and web scraping: Oxylabs provides powerful proxy solutions for businesses that need to extract large amounts of data from websites.
• SERP monitoring: Oxylabs' proxies allow seamless tracking of keyword rankings, search trends, and localized results without detection.
• Market Research: Companies use Oxylabs' proxies to gather insights about competitors, consumer trends, and industry developments to help them make data-driven decisions and stay ahead in the market.
• Ad Verification: Digital advertisers use Oxylabs residential proxies to check if their ads are displayed correctly across different regions and platforms. This ensures ad placements are fraud-free and reach the intended audience without worrying about blocks.
• Price Monitoring: E-commerce businesses monitor competitor pricing to adjust their pricing strategies. Oxylabs' proxies help scrape real-time pricing data without getting blocked.
• Brand Protection: Companies use Oxylabs proxies like Datacenter proxies to detect and prevent online brand abuse and counterfeit product listings. These proxies enable businesses to monitor and enforce brand integrity online.

Pricing:

• Residential Proxies: Starting from $4/GB (pay as you go).
• Datacenter Proxies: Starting from 5 IPs for free and 10 IPs at $12/month ($1.20 per IP).
• ISP Proxies: Starting from $1.6/IP (min. 10 IPs).
• Dedicated Datacenter Proxies: From $2.25/IP (min. 3 IPs).
• Mobile Proxies: Starting from $9/GB (pay-as-you-go).
• Enterprise Proxies: Residential: 1TB at $2,000/month, Mobile: 600GB at $3,000/month, Dedicated and Standard Datacenter plans – custom pricing.

3. Webshare

Webshare is another top Smartproxy alternative known for its secure, fast, and anonymous online browsing with high reliability and performance. Webshare offers a reliable global proxy pool of over 30 million IPs from 195 countries globally, which enables effortless large-scale and public web data gathering. It also provides a range of proxy solutions, including Datacenter, Static residential, and Residential proxies. Let’s explore its key features, proxy types, pros, cons, ideal use cases, and pricing.

Key Features:

• Global Coverage: Webshare boasts a proxy pool of over 30 million IPs across 195 countries, which enables effortless public web data gathering.
• Free proxy server option: Webshare provides a free proxy server option, which enables users to try out the service before committing.
• Exceptional Performance: It provides highly stable proxies with a 99.7% uptime.
• Seamless Proxy Dashboard: Webshare offers a seamless and user-friendly proxy dashboard for managing your proxies, which allows easy adjustments and configurations.

Proxy Types:

• Datacenter Proxies: Webshare offers fast and cost-effective datacenter proxies suitable for general browsing and data scraping.
• Static Residential Proxies: They also offer high-speed static residential proxies, which makes them perfect for tasks requiring stable connections.
• Residential Proxies: Webshare also provides real IP addresses from real users, which makes it ideal for bypassing restrictions and accessing geo-blocked content.

The Pros and Cons of Webshare:

Pros

• Free Plan: Webshare offers a free plan with 10 proxies, which allows users to test services before committing to a paid plan.
• Flexible Pricing: Webshare offers multiple proxy products and pricing tiers to enable users to find plans that fit their specific needs.

Cons

• Limited Support: Webshare direct contact is limited to email. It does not offer telephone or live chat support options.

Ideal Use Cases:

• Web Scraping: Efficient data extraction from websites without bans.
• Social Media Management: Managing multiple social media accounts and gathering analytics simultaneously without triggering security alerts.
• E-commerce: Monitoring prices of your competitors and growing online sales.
• SEO: Conducting keyword research and tracking rankings.
• Market Reserach: Providing access to geo-restricted content to enable research in different markets that may be restricted from user's original location.

Pricing

• Proxy Server (Datacenter Proxies): Free plan with 10 proxies, or starting from $2.99/month for 100 proxies.
• Static Residential Proxies: Starting from $6/month for 20 proxies.
• Residential Proxies: Starting from $7.00/month for 1GB of traffic.
• Enterprise Plan: Custom pricing based on volume and requirements.

4. SOAX

SOAX is a reputable proxy service provider known for its clean and frequently updated proxy pools. The proxy service provider offers a vast pool of IPs, which is over 191 million. SOAX provides different proxy types ranging from Residential to Mobile, Datacenter and ISP proxies.

It emphasizes ethical sourcing and provides a range of features tailored to various data collection needs. Here's a detailed breakdown of SOAX's key features, proxy types, benefits, drawbacks, ideal use cases, and pricing.

Key Features:

• Flexible rotation options: SOAX offers a flexible IP rotation option that enables users to set up a flexible rotation that suits their needs. With this feature, users can set up the same IP up to rotation (IP address will be available for use within the particular time specified). If the IP goes offline before the set time, a new one is automatically assigned.
• Precise geo-targeting: With this feature, users can target proxies by country, region, city, and even specific Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
• Global coverage: It offers a wide network of proxy servers in 195 countries (excluding Texas, USA).
• Ethical sourcing: Emphasizes ethical sourcing by ensuring that all its proxy IPs are obtained with explicit user consent and comply with legal and ethical standards.

Proxy Types:

• Residential Proxies: These proxies use real IP addresses from legitimate devices worldwide, making them ideal for web scraping, ad verification, and market research without getting blocked.
• Mobile Proxies: SOAX provides fast and reliable 3G, 4G, and 5G mobile proxies for managing multiple social media accounts, verifying ads, and scraping public data without interruptions from CAPTCHAs or blocks.
• Datacenter Proxies: They also offer fast and reliable datacenter proxies, which makes them perfect for high-traffic data scraping of public web data.
• ISP Proxies: They also offer both rotating and static ISP proxies. SOAX's ISP proxies help mask your scraping activities and make your traffic appear human-like, which is perfect for bypassing blocks and IP bans.

The Pros and Cons of SOAX:

Pros

• High-quality proxies: The high-quality proxies SOAX offers lowers the risk of an encounter with blacklisted or flagged IPs.
• Geo-targeting options: The geo-targeting option is useful for tasks like localized web scraping, SEO monitoring, and ad verification, where accessing content from a particular region is essential.
• Flexible IP rotation: This helps avoid bans and maintain stable connections for tasks like web scraping.

Cons

• Limited free trial: Its free trial options are more limited compared to some alternatives.

Ideal Use Cases:

• SEO Monitoring: Monitor search engine rankings and performance effectively
• Localized scraping: Gather localized data without restrictions.
• Ad verification: Ensure advertisements display correctly across different regions.
• Brand protection: Safeguard your brand’s reputation by identifying counterfeit goods and unauthorized use of intellectual property.
• Price comparison and monitoring: Get accurate, compare, and monitor global product pricing information to stay competitive in the market.

Pricing:

• Residential Proxies: From $90 per month for 25 GB, or $4.00 per GB with flexible pay-as-you-go pricing.
• Mobile Proxies: Choose a monthly plan at $90 (includes 25 GB) or pay as you go at $4.00 per GB.
• US ISP Proxies: Starting at $3.00/GB — equal to $90/month for a 30GB plan.
• Datacenter Proxies: Starting at $0.62 per GB, or $90/month for 145GB.
• Enterprise Plan: Offering proxy rates from $1.90/GB.

5. IPRoyal

IPRoyal is an affordable and ethical proxy provider that offers a variety of proxy services to cater to different user needs. It boasts a proxy pool of over 34 million IPs across 195 countries and provides different proxy types, from Residential to Datacenter, Mobile, and ISP proxies. Due to its affordability and flexible payment plans, both individuals and enterprises can benefit from IPRoyal services. Let’s look at its key features, proxy types, advantages, disadvantages, ideal use cases, and pricing.

Key Features

• Pay-as-you-go pricing: IPRoyal offers flexible pricing models, in which users can pay only for the bandwidth or number of proxies they need without long-term commitments.
• Unlimited simultaneous connections: Users can create as many concurrent sessions as required with no restrictions or limits.
• Global coverage: Provides access to over 195 countries and over 32 million IPs.

Proxy Types

• Residential Proxies: Use real residential IPs for genuine browsing and data collection, minimizing the risk of detection or blocking.
• Datacenter Proxies: Take advantage of high-speed datacenter proxies for tasks where anonymity is less of a concern.
• Mobile Proxies: Access websites and apps from a mobile perspective, perfect for mobile-focused data collection and testing.
• ISP Proxies: Combine residential IPs with the speed of data center proxies, offering authenticity without compromising performance—ideal for web scraping.
• Enterprise Proxies: Designed for large-scale needs, these proxies offer large IP pools, high performance, and dedicated support, making them perfect for demanding tasks where scale and reliability are essential.

The Pros and Cons of IPRoyal:

Pros

• Cost-Effective: Competitive pricing makes IPRoyal accessible for both individuals and businesses.
• 24/7 customer support: IPRoyal's expert team is always available to assist clients with setup and optimization to ensure they get the most out of your proxies.

Cons

• Smaller network size: Compared to some competitors, IPRoyal's proxy pool is relatively smaller, which may affect tasks that require extensive IP diversity.

Ideal Use Cases

• Social media management: Helps manage multiple accounts securely while avoiding detection and constant IP blocks.
• Localized scraping: Enables data extraction from region-specific sources without restrictions.
• Travel fair aggregation: Collects real-time pricing data from all possible travel and accommodation websites without bans.
• Brand protection: Identify possible brand infringement, patent violations, or intellectual property misuse without geographic restrictions to protect your brand image and strengthen customer trust.
• Ad verification: Ensure your marketing campaigns appear correctly to your target audience and are not subject to fraud.
• Market research: Gather valuable market insights from anywhere in the world without restrictions.
• Budget projects: Provides cost-effective proxy solutions for small-scale data needs.

Pricing

• Residential Proxies: Start at $3.68 per GB (pay-as-you-go).
• Mobile Proxies: Starting at $10.11/GB per day.
• ISP Proxies: Starting at $1.80/proxy/day.
• Datacenter Proxies: Starting at $1.57/proxy/month.
• Enterprise Proxies: Starts at $1.75/GB for residential proxies (10,000 GB+), $1.39/proxy for ISP proxies (250+), $2.40/proxy for datacenter proxies (250+), and $117/month for unlimited mobile access.

How Do These Alternatives Compare?

To help you understand how these alternatives compare, we’ve created two tables (feature and pricing comparison tables). The feature comparison table outlines the types of proxies each provider offers, their key features, and the best use cases for their services. The pricing comparison table, on the other hand, breaks down the different pricing models, costs for residential proxies, and mobile proxy pricing to help you find the best fit for your needs.

Feature Comparison Table:

Pricing Comparison Table:

Common Challenges with Smartproxy and How Alternatives Address Them

Smartproxy has limitations such as high costs for small users, and a smaller IP pool. Alternatives likeIPRoyal and SOAX provide more affordable pricing for small businesses, while Oxylabs offers larger IP pools for scalable, enterprise-level scraping.

• Limited Proxy Variety: Smartproxy provides fewer proxy types compared to some competitors, which might limit its effectiveness for specialized tasks.
• High Costs for Small Users: While Smartproxy is affordable compared to premium providers, its plans might still be expensive for freelancers or small businesses. Its alternatives, IPRoyal and SOAX, provide cost-effective pricing models tailored for budget-conscious users.
• Smaller IP Pool: Smartproxy has a smaller IP pool compared to industry leaders, which potentially affects scalability for enterprise needs. But Oxylabs provides extensive IP pools to ensure reliability for large-scale scraping and enterprise projects.

How to Choose the Right Smartproxy Alternative?

To choose the right Smartproxy alternative, assess your primary use case, such as web scraping or market research, and look for providers with the necessary features like IP rotation, anti-detection, geo-targeting, and uptime. Compare features, scalability, and support, while considering your budget. Take advantage of free trials from providers like IPRoyal, Oxylabs, and Webshare to test their services before committing.

• Assess your needs: Determine your primary use case. For instance, if it is web scraping, you’ll need a provider with high IP rotation and anti-detection features. If it’s market research, look for proxies with geo-targeting and reliable uptime.
• Compare Features: Evaluate different providers based on functionality, scalability (can the service handle increasing demands), and support (does the provider provide 24/7 customer support).
• Budget Considerations: Go for a provider that fits your budget.
• Free Trials: Test the provider's products before committing. Some proxy providers, like IPRoyal, Oxylab, and Webshare, offer free trials, which allow you to test their service before committing.

Conclusion

Live Proxies excels in customization and high anonymity, while Oxylabs and Webshare offer enterprise-grade solutions with vast IP pools. SOAX stands out for its ethical sourcing and geo-targeting, while IPRoyal provides budget-friendly flexibility.

To make an informed decision, align your choice with your goals, whether it’s web scraping, market research, or brand protection. Take advantage of free trials where available to test performance and compatibility before committing.

FAQs

Why should I consider alternatives to Smartproxy?

While Smartproxy is a reliable option, other alternatives might suit your needs better, depending on various factors. If you have budget constraints, some providers offer more affordable plans. Additionally, if you have specific use cases, other providers may offer better features or more specialized solutions.

Which providers are best for enterprise use?

For enterprise-scale operations, Oxylabs and Webshare are top choices due to:

• Extensive proxy networks that offer high uptime and fast speeds.
• Strong compliance measures and robust data security.
• Geo-targeting options for location-specific data collection.

Are there affordable alternatives for small businesses?

Yes, there are budget-friendly alternatives for small businesses:

• IPRoyal offers competitive pricing with residential, datacenter, and mobile proxies, plus flexible pay-as-you-go options.
• SOAX provides high-quality, affordable rotating residential proxies with precise geo-targeting capabilities.

Do these providers offer free trials?

Yes, several proxy providers offer free trials to let you test their services:

• Oxylabs
• IPRoyal
• Webshare

How secure are these alternatives?

These alternatives implement strong security measures, such as:

• Encryption protocols to protect data.
• IP whitelisting to prevent unauthorized access.
• Compliance with privacy regulations to ensure user data protection.

Can these proxies integrate with scraping tools?

Yes, these proxies are compatible with popular scraping tools, including:

• Python
• Selenium
• Puppeteer

How do I avoid hidden costs?

To avoid hidden costs, ensure you:

• Check bandwidth limits.
• Be aware of overage fees.
• Review any optional add-ons in the pricing models.