SmartProxy Review

SmartProxy pretty quickly made a name for itself by bridging the gap between cheap low quality proxy networks and higher quality providers who had priced many lower budget proxy users out. Our SmartProxy review reveals they are still satisfying users at a lower cost.

SmartProxy Review: Pricing

SmartProxy has all of the standard proxy types: both static and rotating residential proxies, mobile proxies and datacenter proxies. Their rotating residential pay as you go plan is $7/GB, slightly less than enterprise level solutions, however they have significantly lower prices at lower commitment levels, which is where the savings come in.

For example, you can get down to $6/GB for just $12 for a 2 GB plan for small projects. Or, for a 25 GB plan you get down to $5.20/GB at just a $130 commitment. And this is where we see the cost gap is still being filled by SmartProxy and the savings start to become evident. With larger providers who target enterprises, you’re still stuck on the higher Pay As You Go pricing for this amount of data. And as far as the cost per GB, you might still be paying more, even if you $2,000 per month on a plan over 300 GB.

When it comes to shared Datacenter proxies, the savings for plans comparable to other providers is not as evident and in some cases, SmartProxy comes in a little higher. However, again, they fill a gap by offering lower get in levels as low as 50 GB (at $0.60/GB) whereas with other providers you are starting at a TB to get off the Pay As You Go plan.

With our SmartProxy review for dedicated Datacenter proxies, however, we see massive savings come back in because they don’t cap or charge you for the amount of usage – only for the number of IPs you select.

So, whereas with other companies, you might need to pay almost three dollars per IP address and another $0.10 per GB on top of that if you need, let’s say 50 GB, with SmartProxy you only pay per IP address so you could get 20 IPs for $2.50 or 200 IPs for $2 each. That $400 commitment won’t even get you in the door for 200 IPs before you pay for usage with other providers.

Mobile has some savings as well: $6/GB for 50 GB or as low as $4.50/GB for 500 GB which would save you about $1 per GB vs enterprise offerings.

There are older and newer companies offering lower prices than SmartProxy but again, it’s the solution for balancing performance with cost.

SmartProxy Review: Network Quality and APIs

SmartProxy’s network doesn’t get the rave reviews of the enterprise solutions, however, user’s seem to agree it is acceptable. From our perspective and depending on your project specifications, you can take SmartProxy from “Almost Enterprise” to “Enterprise” by using their API.

For example, if you are using rotating residential proxies and implement one of their APIs correctly, it may not matter if the network is not quite as good because your application can simply retry with a different IP address.

Because of the affordable pricing of their proxy subscriptions, it still allows room in your budget to subscribe to one of their APIs and you do get enterprise level performance for less. This is not a good solution if you need constant updates and need them NOW, but if you are running a project overnight or for a short amount of time, the added time for your script to renew proxies may not matter and that would gain you some savings.

SmartProxy Review: X Browser and APIs

In addition to APIs for their SOCKS5, residential and datacenter proxies, SmartProxy has APIs specifically designed for scraping Search Engines, eCommerce and Social Media sites.

These are standard APIs offered by enterprise providers, but in this Smart Proxy review we’re going to dig a little deeper into their free X Browser product. It requires a paid proxy plan to use.

X Browser is a powerful tool designed to simplify and streamline multi-account management across various online platforms. This browser gives you a virtual browser environment where you can create individual browser profiles, each with its own fingerprint. And of course if add their proxies, you are on your way to multi-accounting tasks while minimizing the risk of detection.

Each of your profiles acts in a different virtual environment that looks and acts like individual, separate users on the web, while isolating identifiers like cookies, cache, and browsing history of each profile.

It also has tools for automating certain tasks like account creation and allows you to sync your data across devices so you have a seamless experience no matter where you go.

Use cases for X Browser include:

1. Social Media Management: For businesses or agencies managing multiple social media profiles, X Browser enables safe handling of multiple accounts, reducing the risk of suspension.
2. E-commerce and Marketplaces: Sellers with accounts on different platforms like Amazon or eBay can use X Browser to manage them without running the risk of being banned due to duplicate IP addresses or shared browser settings.
3. Web Scraping and Research: Researchers and marketers can use X Browser to avoid getting blocked when gathering data from multiple websites, as it keeps each browser profile distinct.
4. Ad Verification: Digital advertisers can use X Browser to check ad placements across different regions or devices while maintaining complete anonymity.

So even though we’ve been talking about how SmartProxy is filling gaps between the lower end providers and enterprise solutions, innovations like this are bringing them are really giving them a way to run with the bigger providers. Hopefully this doesn’t change the pricing plans!