Bright Data Review 2023: In-Depth Performance Tested & Complete Guide to Bright Data Proxies

Justin Shin

Are you looking for the best review of Bright Data to help you make a purchase decision? Then come in now and read our expert review and performance testing to help you know whether they are the best for you or not.

There is hardly any other provider that has better PR than Bright Data. For most reviews you will read online, especially by review blogs, the image painted of Bright Data is the provider that is built on a rock-solid infrastructure that possesses all you need. But is this true, or are they just selling you a product?

In this Bright Data review, you will learn all you need to know about the Bright Data proxy provider, including the location coverage, speed, how they get their IP address, request success rate, and pricing, among many others.

Table Of Contents

Bright Data — An Overview

Official Website: https://brightdata..com

Bright Data is currently a market leader in the proxy market. This provider has got proxies in most of the proxy categories ranging from the datacenter, residential, ISP, and mobile proxies. However, the proxies we will focus on today are their residential proxies which are the standard nowadays. Bright Data’s residential proxy network is a rotating residential proxy network that randomly switches IPs to mask your activities online. It has got extensive location support with the perfect geo-targeting support.

This provider can be said to be the fastest in the market, with some seeing it as a performance beast as it can scale to up to even enterprise-level request demands. Their proxies are undetected and compatible with most websites on the open web. However, things are not always rosy with Bright Data — the service is not always easy to use, even though it comes with many tools. The pricing, at best, can be termed as competitive, and you are forced to do a KYC before accessing their proxies.

Pros and Cons of Bright Data Residential Proxies

Bright Data Pros

Bright Data Cons

Overall, Bright Data offers a large pool of residential proxies with a high success rate and extensive global coverage. However, there are some drawbacks, such as the higher cost and limited free trial. Users should consider the pros and cons before deciding to use Bright Data residential proxies for their specific needs.

Where is Brightdata (Formerly Luminati) located?

Luminati, now known as Brightdata, is located in Netanya, Israel. The company's headquarters are situated there, and they provide data collection services, including residential, data center, and mobile proxies to clients worldwide.

What is Brightdata used for?

Brightdata is a leading data collection platform utilized by top Fortune 500 companies. It enables businesses to gather crucial structured data from millions of websites using proprietary technology. With Brightdata's data collection networks, you can access target sites using precise geo-targeting.

Is Brightdata legit?

Yes, Brightdata is a reliable data collection platform that businesses and influencers can trust to provide accurate and relevant data quickly and efficiently.

Is Brightdata free?

Brightdata offers a free trial for registered companies only. The free trial can be used for all proxy networks, Web Unlocker, SERP API, and Web Scraper IDE. Other networks are not eligible for a free trial. Contact your account manager for assistance with trial configurations.

Is Brightdata safe to use?

Yes, Brightdata (formerly known as Luminati) is generally considered safe to use. They are a reputable data collection platform used by many businesses, including some Fortune 500 companies. Brightdata takes the privacy and security of its users seriously, and they implement strict measures to ensure the integrity of their services.

However, it's important to always follow best practices and guidelines when using any data collection service, including Brightdata. Make sure you comply with the target websites' terms of use and adhere to relevant data privacy regulations.

Bright data claims to use public web data to drive positive change and has created the Bright Initiative to provide data to public bodies, non-profit organizations, and academic institutions. However, the company requires a KYC process and prohibits certain use cases. It is important to do your own research and carefully consider the risks and benefits before using Brightdata.

Proxy Pool Size

One of the greatest power of the residential proxy networks is their pool size — and it is a flex for them. Being rotating proxies, the number of IPs in their pool will determine the number of unique IPs you will get when you start sending a considerable number of requests. According to the information on the Bright Data website, they have got over 72 million IP addresses in their pool. Unfortunately, proxies do not run an open system, so there is no way we can verify this claim.

However, there is something interesting about Bright Data — it returns the most number of unique IPs compared to any other provider in the market. This is a fair indicator that they have got a huge proxy pool. One important thing for you to know is that Bright Data does not own the 72 million residential IPs in its pool.

The IPs are sourced from multiple P2P networks, some hosted by them using their free apps as baits, as in the case of Hola VPN and Bright VPN, or hosted by third parties using their SDKs. Its methods of acquiring these IPs have been ethical on the surface, but controversies over some ethical practices still exist.

Location Coverage

Having a huge proxy pool size of over 72 million IPs can be impressive, but the distribution of those IPs in terms of location is even more important. This is especially true as we move towards the localization of the web, where content is available to you based on your geo-location. Bright Data understands this need and has been able to provide one of the most extensive location support you can get in the market.

Currently, Bright Data has got IPs in all countries of the world, most states, and major cities around the world. This extensive distribution makes it possible for you to scrape localized data for any region of the world. Bright Data has got the geo-targeting feature available to support this. Using the geo-targeting feature, Bright Data will only provide you IPs from your selected location.

The geo-targeting feature support country-level, state-level, and city-level targeting. Bear in mind that as you go down from the country to the state level, the number of available IPs drastically reduces for most regions.

Bright Data Speed & Performance Test

Proxies are known to reduce the Internet speed of their users. And for residential rotating proxies, this can be worse. So when purchasing rotating residential proxies, you need to purchase from a provider that will provide you with an acceptable speed for your task. According to Bright Data, they are the fastest in the market right now. But are they telling the truth, or it just mere marketing gimmicks? When it comes to speed testing, the only way to know how fast a service is is to test it. Fortunately, I already have a subscription with them, so I do not have to purchase one in other to test. I used a custom ping and speed testing tool to test Bright Data's performance in terms of speed and got the below.

Website Download Speed (Mbps) Upload Speed (Mbps) Ping
Amazon 34.74 37.65 40
Instagram 32.96 33.45 27
YouTube 20.43 31.46 28
Google Search 27.34 38.97 21
Booking 34.54 33.98 34

The above speed testing result, when compared to what is obtainable from other providers, will reveal to you that Bright Data is one of the fastest-rotating residential proxy networks in the market. One of the features of Bright Data is that it allows you to create unlimited concurrent threads. But what happens to performance when you do so? From the performance test carried out, I found out that just creating a few threads do not affect performance. However, once you begin creating concurrent threads above 50 to 100, you will start noticing a drop in performance.

Proxy Rotation and Session Management reviews

From the beginning of the article, I stated that the proxies are rotating proxies. These proxies, also known as backconnect proxies, give you a proxy gateway or endpoint, and using this endpoint, you are given access to the whole pool of IPs or a subset of it. Each time you send a web request, you are randomly assigned an IP address. Because Bright Data has got one of the largest pool sizes, you can get a larger percentage of IPs to be unique. While the network is highly rotating, it also does support sticky ports for session management. With this, you can maintain sessions for some time. This is known as time-based IP rotation.

Bright Data allow you to set the period you will want to maintain sessions for up to 30 minutes to even an hour. The fact that it provides you full control over the session and makes the setting quite flexible makes it one of the best when it comes to session management. Supporting high rotating proxies with session proxies makes it quite useful for a range of proxy use cases ranging from web scraping to account management, among others.

Scraping Success Rate and Response Speed Test

Scraping is one of the major tasks proxies are meant for. This is because they are automated and the kind of task that will easily be flagged by most anti-spam systems. So how well does Bright Data stand in this regard? Are their residential proxies undetectable, or are they easily identifiable? We ran a test using a custom script to see how it performs in a web scraping environment, and below is the response we got for the 5 site targets. The metrics of interest to us in this section are the success rate and response speed.

Site Avg. Success Rate (%) Avg. Response Speed (sec)
Amazon 97.65 1.09
Instagram 95.76 2.08
YouTube 97.87 1.07
Google Search 98.87 1.53
Booking 94.79 2.34

As you can see from the above, Bright Data has proven to be a beast. It has remained successful for the most part without getting detected. The average success rate varies by target, but nothing really under 95%, which is quite impressive. The speed obtained for web scraping in terms of response rate was also good, as response time is kept below 2.50 seconds. The unsuccessful requests were a result of dropped connections, a few timeouts, and captchas appearing. But these were largely insignificant compared to the number of successful requests

Plans and Pricing review & recommendations

Pricing is an important factor when choosing a proxy provider to purchase proxies from. On the other hand, it is a major indicator of the quality of service you should expect. It also tells us the class of users a provider targets. Bright Data is basically the provider for mid-level and high-end proxy users like enterprises. In the past, you needed a minimum of $500 to get started with their proxies. But this is no longer the case. The service has introduced a Pay-As-You-Go option that makes it affordable to small proxy users as well.

The pricing for Bright Data is charged based on consumable bandwidth. The price per GB for the Pay-As-You-Go option is $15. Apart from this, they have got a plan you can purchase to get the price per GB cheaper. The starting price for the starter plan is $500 monthly and comes with 43.5GB. Bright Data also has the advanced, advanced +, and enterprise plan available. You can pay for proxies with your PayPal, Payoneer, Wire Transfer, credit/debit card, Google Pay, and Alipay. One thing you will come to like about Bright Data is the fact that it does have a trial option with a customer-friendly refund policy.

Customer Support

There is no flawless service or software, and this is where customer support comes in. And no matter how well-written your documentation is, users of your service will still need some clarifications, and failure to get someone to support them at that point could cause you to lose them. Bright Data, as a leader in the market, should have this sorted out. If you look at their website, you will see that they have got 3 different support contact — general inquiries, sales contact, and report abuse.

While this is good, there is one problem I find with the Bright Data customer support system — there is no real-time or live chat support. This means that you will have to wait until they reply to your email or support ticket. On the flip side, if you subscribe to one of their packages starting from $500 monthly, you are entitled to a dedicated account manager. This makes contacting support and getting personalized support easier for you. But against if you use the Pay-As-You-Go option, you lose the feature.

Ease of Use

Ease of use is one of the areas you will say Bright Data hit the rock — it is not one of the easy-to-use proxy providers out there. First, you are going to start finding it a little difficult, even from the registration phase. For compliance's sake, each user of their residential and mobile proxies is expected to go through their KYC process. While there is nothing wrong with this, it takes time, and not many people are comfortable providing their details online for different reasons.

Once you are done registering, you move to the next phase of the hurdle. Their proxies are not available straight out of the box, as you will get from other providers. You will need to create zones and then go through some steps not usually straightforward with beginners to access your proxies.

The difficulty with using their proxies stems from the fact that they have got a good number of advanced features other providers do not have. Being that as it may, this has made it difficult to use for beginners. In some instances, you will have to dig into their documentation.

Developer Support

While non-coder have their uses for proxies, any proxy server that does not have support for developers will not get the traction it expects. This is because developers are heavy users of proxies, as automation is one of the major uses of proxies. How well can a provider benefit from this if they are not developer friendly? Bright Data focuses majorly on heavy proxy users, and as such, they have got good support for developers. Firstly, Bright Data offers a developer API that you can use to retrieve your proxies and get information about your balance, whitelist IPs, and many others.

The Bright Data API is not programming language specific. You can use the API together with any programming language of your choice, including Python, C#, Java, NodeJS, PHP, Ruby, and even Shell. This provider does not just provide you with a developer API; it also provides you an API documentation so you can understand what each API endpoint is and how best to make use of it. The API can handle any number of requests and is built to scale, and you do not have to pay any extra fee to make use of it.

Verdict: Is Bright Data Good Enough?

Bright Data is the kind of service you will call, talk and do. The service promise to offer high-quality proxies, and from our performance test, we can attest to this. First, it has a sizeable IP pool with over 72 million IPs from all countries and most cities around the globe.

It offers high-rotating proxies with session support, and you get to enjoy unlimited sessions and threads with less impact on performance. The only major problem you will face when dealing with Bright Data is the forced KYC process, and it has not been easy to use compared to other providers. Aside from these few cons we can associate with Bright Data, Bright Data is good enough and, thus, recommended.

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