Read on because we’re revealing the secrets of the best rotating proxies, ensuring you navigate the web without restrictions in 2024.

If you’ve ever felt like you’ve hit an invisible wall while exploring the internet or found yourself in a tangle of restrictions when managing multiple social media accounts, know that those are the digital world’s “Keep Out” signs. But here’s the secret- those signs aren’t necessarily the end of the road. Thanks to a handy tool known as rotating proxies, you can move past these barriers and roam the web freely.

Rotating proxies work by assigning a different IP address from a large pool of proxies for each connection or request made by you, the user. This constant rotation makes it hard for web servers to identify and block you. So whether your goal is to supercharge your web scraping or maintain your anonymity online, rotating proxies can be your ace in the hole. 

In this guide, we’ll dive into the best rotating proxies of 2023 and highlight how they can boost your online activities. While there are some great new providers out there offering proxies at an affordable price, this article is going to focus on more established brands with solid online reviews.

Let’s dive in!

Key Takeaways

• Best Rotating Proxy Network for Large Businesses: Oxylabs
• Best Rotating Proxy Network for Small Businesses: IPRoyal
• Best for SEOs and Marketers: Smartproxy
• Best for Affordable Web Scraping: Webshare
• Best for Data Collection: Bright Data 

Best Rotating Proxies: Side-by-side comparison

Here’s a quick comparison of each provider:

*Please note: Starting price is for residential plans

Best Rotating Proxies for 2023

In this section we’ll highlight some of the top rotating proxies on the market today, comparing their features, capabilities, pricing, and overall effectiveness. Whether you’re a data scientist, a market researcher, or simply someone interested in harnessing the power of web scraping, this section will help to guide you toward finding the best rotating proxy service that fits your needs.

Let’s take a look.

1. Smartproxy

While Smartproxy hasn’t been around as long as some of their competitors, they’ve quickly become a reliable partner for businesses and individuals that rely on web data gathering. What sets them apart? They offer a massive network of over 50 million unique IP addresses from more than 195 locations, with their datacenter IPs available in the US and Europe. Best of all, their products seamlessly integrate with all sorts of software, automation scripts, and web scrapers.

Top Features

• Residential, mobile, datacenter, and dedicated datacenter proxies
• Scraping APIs
• Datacenter IPs available worldwide
• Advanced targeting with 195+ locations in the country

Pricing

Smartproxy has flexible pricing options, each with different data allowances and features. For residential proxies, their “Pay As You Go” plan costs $8.50 for 1 GB of data. Their “Nano” plan is $14 per month for 2 GB of data ($7 per gigabyte). Both these plans offer one username and one whitelisted IP. 

There are a few more residential plans offered that increase in data allowance and monthly cost, but the price per gigabyte is discounted the more you pay. Higher-tier plans also include some extra features, like more usernames, more whitelisted IPs, and for the highest-tier “Advanced” plan, a dedicated account manager. 

In addition to residential plans, Smartproxy also has mobile proxies starting at $50 a month, datacenter proxies starting at $10 a month, and dedicated datacenter proxies starting at $7.50 a month.

Smartproxy Pros

• Huge IP Pool
• Global Coverage
• Nice set of tools, like Chrome Extension and Firefox extensions
• Good and flexible prices (compared to comparable premium providers)
• Easy to use, with a user-friendly dashboard and solid documentation

Smartproxy Cons

• No free trial for their proxies services (only for their Scraping APIs)

At a Glance

2. Oxylabs

Oxylabs is another major player in the world of proxy services that you’re bound to find on any Top Rotating Proxies list. They’re a global provider of premium proxies and web scraping solutions. With a huge network of over 100 million residential and datacenter proxies spread across all countries worldwide, they offer a high level of anonymity and are especially known for their dedicated tools for web scraping, like their Scraper APIs and Next-Gen Residential Proxies. 

Oxylabs comes with advanced features, reliability, and great customer support. They cater to a wide range of applications like SEO monitoring, price intelligence, ad verification, and much more.

Top Features

• A comprehensive suite of proxy solutions, like residential proxies, mobile proxies, rotating ISP Proxies, and more.
• Web scraping tools like their AI-powered Web Unblocker performs human-like browsing, bypass CAPTCHAs, adapt HTML parsing, and more
• Scraper APIs like SERP Scraper API, eCommerce Scraper API, and more

Pricing

Oxylabs offers an impressive variety of plans for individuals and enterprises, each with its own set of features. Pricing begins at $15 per GB for their “Pay as you go” plan, and the cost goes up incrementally as you move to more robust plans, like their “Starter”, “Advanced”, and “Premium”, which offer additional benefits like increased traffic allowance. All plans include unlimited concurrent sessions, city-level targeting, and 24/7 support, with Enterprise plans also offering dedicated account managers. 

In addition to their residential proxy plans, Oxylabs also offers Mobile Proxies starting at $250 a month, Rotating ISP Proxies starting at $340 a month, Datacenter Proxies starting at $50 per month, Web Unblocker starting at $75 per month, Dedicated Datacenter Proxies starting at $180 per month, and finally, SOCKS5 Proxies, starting at $180 per month​​.

Oxylabs Pros

• Wide range of products and features
• Large proxy pool with 195 countries
• Advanced web scraping tools
• Good quality customer support 
• Yearly plan discounts

Oxylabs Cons

• Higher prices than competitors
• No free trial for individuals (only companies)

At A Glance

3. Bright Data

Bright Data is a prominent player in the proxy service industry. With a vast network of over 72 million residential, mobile, and datacenter proxies, Bright Data has a wide geographic coverage and is known for their high reliability and performance. The company caters to a multitude of use cases, like web scraping, ad verification, price comparison, and more. Its comprehensive suite of proxy management tools, top-notch security measures, and commitment to ethical data collection practices, make Bright Data a popular choice.

Top Features

• Proxy services include residential, mobile, ISP, and datacenter proxies
• Proxy manager makes organizing proxies easy and allows users to set custom rules for optimal results
• Proxy Browser extension with easy one-click IP rotation
• Sophisticated API and tools

Pricing

Bright Data has a variety of pricing plans for their proxy services. The “Pay As You Go” plan offers a flexible, no-commitment option with Residential proxies priced at $15 per GB. For a more substantial need, the “Growth” plan costs $500 with a reduced rate of $12.75 per GB and a cap on 39 GB of traffic. The “Business” plan, their most popular offering, costs $1000 and further discounts the per GB price to $11.25, allowing for 88 GB of traffic. 

For larger or custom needs, they offer an “Enterprise” plan with unlimited scale, a premium Service Level Agreement (SLA), free Proxy Manager, and a custom price per GB.

They also offer Datacenter plans starting at $.110 per GB for Pay as You Go, ISP plans starting at $15 per GB, and Mobile proxy plans starting at $40 per GB.

Keep in mind, you can also save 10% when signing up for annual billing rather than monthly.

Bright Data Pros

• Massive IP pool
• Intelligent Proxy manager 
• Solid proxy IP speeds (99.99% network uptime) and fast output
• Good documentation for developers
• 10% discount for annual plans

Bright Data Cons

• The dashboard lets users do a lot (which is a pro) but it can have a bit of a learning curve
• Some of the features can be more technically complex
• Higher cost than competitors

At A Glance

4. IPRoyal

IPRoyal offers over 6 million ethically sourced IPs from around the globe (about 2M for residential). They have rotating residential proxies for anonymous, unrestricted data access worldwide, and static residential proxies that combine the speed of datacenter proxies with residential IP anonymity.

Their datacenter proxies are a great choice for activities like scraping and streaming, with unlimited bandwidth and thread numbers. And for the sneaker enthusiasts, IPRoyal’s sneaker proxies promise high success rates, reliability, and speed, making any sneaker drop reachable.

Compared to other names on this list, IPRoyal is much more affordable, but it’s more “no frills”, so don’t expect all the bells and whistles some of their more premium competitors offer.

Top Features

• Rotating and static residential proxies, datacenter, private, mobile, and sneaker proxies
• Some nice extra tools like their Google Chrome Proxy Manager, Firefox Proxy Manager, and Proxy Tester
• Wide country selections

Pricing

When it comes to pricing, IPRoyal has just one residential plan. How it works is you buy as much data as you need which gives you access to the pool of proxies. Pricing starts at $7 for 1 GB (with no expiration), with the price discounting significantly the more data you buy. So buying 100 GB’ll cost $455, coming out to $4.55 per GB. They also offer further bulk pricing for those who need more data (their website advertises $1.75 per GB, but this is only for bulk buying.)

They also offer datacenter, sneaker, and static residential plans, with bulk prices from $1.39/proxy, $1/proxy, and $2.40/proxy, respectively.

IPRoyal Data Pros

• Affordable pricing and a straightforward pay-as-you-go style plan
• Simple and intuitive dashboard that makes it easy to get started
• Bulk pricing

IPRoyal Data Cons

• Small residential pool size compared to competitors
• Speeds not as fast as competitors
• Website advertises only bulk pricing for their plans – you have to sign up to see the actual starting price for 1 GB.

At A Glance

5. Webshare

Let’s talk about Webshare. Webshare sets itself apart from other proxy providers by offering free proxies, albeit with restrictions on bandwidth and thread concurrency. They offer a wide array of affordable datacenter proxies and even private proxies, ensuring that users avoid IP bans due to other individuals’ activities.

While Webshare doesn’t disclose the size of their IP pool, their customer service agent disclosed that for their proxy servers, the pool is 100,000+ proxies and if you get residential proxies, the pool is 10M+. Not too bad.

They have data centers across over ten countries, including the US, UK, and South Africa. After signing up, users get instant access to 10 proxies (with some data usage limits, of course). While they don’t explicitly offer a free trial, these freebie proxies can be seen as a free test drive of their offerings.

Top Features

• Rotating and static residential proxies, dedicated, private, and SOCKS5 proxies
• 10 free IPs
• Users can customize and download their proxy list or use their API
• An affiliate program with up to 25% payout

Pricing

Webshare currently offers three main types of proxy products (all with rotating proxy endpoints included). The “Proxy Server” or Datacenter proxy, known for its speed and affordability, starts at just $0.01 per proxy. Their “Static Residential” proxies offer high-speed internet with unlimited bandwidth, starting at $1.79 per proxy. Finally, there’s their “Residential Proxy” plan, which comes from real residential devices and is best suited for tasks requiring smaller bandwidth, with prices starting at $4.80 per GB.

Webshare Data Pros

• Free proxies (with limited data)
• Affordable proxy servers
• 7/24 Speed monitoring
• Rotating proxy endpoint included in all plans

Webshare Data Cons

• Free proxies are shared and may get blocked from many sites (plus they are limited to 1GB a month)
• No Contact Us section on their website
• Limited customer support options
• Limited location coverage

At A Glance

Summary

So let’s sum it all up.

These rotating proxy providers are all superstars in their own league — each catering to a variety of needs for all kinds of users. Smartproxy stands out with a large IP pool and an interface that’s easy to navigate, while Oxylabs offers robust web scraping tools and a wide range of products at a slightly higher price point. Bright Data offers an extensive IP pool and an intelligent proxy manager, although it may be slightly more complex for novice users. For smaller businesses or individuals looking for affordability, IPRoyal serves up a smaller proxy pool with straightforward, cost-effective plans. Lastly, Webshare stands as a unique option offering free proxies and affordable proxy servers, although it may fall short in terms of features and location coverage. 

All of these services have unique strengths that make them worth considering in 2024.

FAQs

Jessica Cotzin

Jessica Cotzin is a Senior Engineer at a global digital agency. She is also a freelance writer in the tech industry, offering insights into the ever-evolving digital landscape.

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