What do you know about the ProxyEmpire service? If you know little about this provider, then read my ProxyEmpire review to learn all you need to know about ProxyEmpire residential proxies. You’ll learn about its actual proxy performance, location coverage, and where it stands in terms of web scraping.
When I first read about the ProxyEmpire from a senior colleague at work, I took an interest in testing them out. At that time, this provider was new in the market, and it is something I like to do in other to discover the new big thing in the proxy market to help my readers get the most out of the amount they spend on proxies.
To be frank, it was an average provider at launch. However, as time passes, it has been able to improve and redefine itself. Currently, it is one of the popular providers among marketers because of its undetectable nature. But being undetectable is not all that matters. In this ProxyEmpire review, I will reveal to you all of the details you need to know.
Table Of Contents
Official Website: https://proxyempire.io
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Over 6 Million Residential IPs | ProxyEmpire offers access to over 6 million residential IPs worldwide |
| Over 3 Million Mobile IPs | The service provides over 3 million mobile IPs for users |
| Unlimited Rollover Bandwidth | ProxyEmpire offers unlimited rollover bandwidth for all proxy types |
| Over 200,000 Datacenter IPs | The platform has over 200,000 datacenter IPs available for users |
| Country, Region(State), City, and ISP-level targeting | ProxyEmpire supports targeting options at the country, region, city, and ISP levels |
The ProxyEmpire service is a proxy provider with an eye on rotating proxies. It does offer rotating proxies in the datacenter, mobile, and residential proxy categories. Aside from these, you can also purchase static mobile and residential proxies from them. In this article, my focus is on their residential proxies. I am quite conversant with it as I have used them a couple of times before doing the research and test for this article. The network has a fairly large proxy pool and a good location coverage. The proxies offered in this network change IPs randomly or at a specific period of time.
One thing you will come to like about the ProxyEmpire service is its pricing system. Yes, pricing is based on bandwidth, but there is the privilege of bandwidth not expiring as it gets rolled over when you next purchase a plan. However, it still does have its problems — first, the city targeting option is not as robust and efficient as it should be. There is also the issue of no free trial, and the speed is not one of the fastest you will get. The pricing is also in the range of what the top providers offer, while effectiveness is not at the same level. There are also a few issues you will discover as you read deep into the article. But in all, it is a decent proxy network.
Overall, ProxyEmpire offers a large pool of residential proxies with unlimited rollover bandwidth and affordable pricing. However, there are some drawbacks, such as the lack of a free trial, refunds, and high rotating proxies. Users should consider the pros and cons before deciding to use ProxyEmpire residential proxies for their specific needs.
ProxyEmpire residential proxies, according to the information, has web scraping and data collection as its most important use case. If this is what the service is meant for, then it needs to have a large proxy pool to accommodate users that need hundreds of thousands and even millions of IP addresses to get their tasks done. Having a large proxy pool is seen as a flex for most big proxy providers. While ProxyEmpire does not have one of the largest proxy pools in the market, it does have a sizeable proxy pool. Currently, there are over 5.3 million IP addresses in its pool.
However, you need to know that it does not own these IPs as they are sourced via P2P networks. As a user, you are not sold specific IPs to use. It is a rotating proxy pool, and as such, you are given access to the whole pool with the potential to use any available IP. However, you need to know that not all of the IPs are available at any given time. At any given time, some of the IPs will be offline, while others will be in use by other users of the network. And if you make use of the geo-targeting feature, the IPs available reduce drastically.
It might interest you that just having a large pool of IP addresses is not all that matters nowadays. Scraping from a single location can quickly give you away and get blocked, especially if the site is not meant for users from a specific location. For ProxyEmpire, it understands the need for having an extensive location coverage. According to the information on the ProxyEmpire website, there are over 170 countries you can get IPs from when you use their network. Testing this isn’t something easy, but I found something interesting. As with the case of the proxy networks, ProxyEmpire does have top locations.
These are popular countries in North America, Europe, and Asia. For these countries, you can use geo-targeting to choose IPs from a specific country. Some even allow you to choose IPs from specific states and cities. But away from these top locations, things get ineffective. First, for some countries, you can even have less than 50 IPs which makes them pretty useless. Some smaller countries are not even captured in the geo-targeting system since they do not have enough IPs for IP rotation. Except these smaller countries are your target location, you shouldn’t have an issue with ProxyEmpire in terms of location support.
Proxies are known to reduce your Internet speed, but when it comes to residential proxies, they are worse. For these types of proxies, even 15 Mbps is considered as fast. Looking at the information on ProxyEmpire’s website, it claims to offer fast residential proxies. Are they telling the truth?
From the information, I stated that the speed is not one of the fastest, right? Well, that's me downplaying the performance result. Now you are here, I will give you the full gist. I tested the ProxyEmpire residential proxy network speed on 5 popular website targets to see how it works in real life away from just getting random download, upload, and ping rates. Below is the result of the test.
| Website | Download Speed (Mbps) | Upload Speed (Mbps) | Ping |
| Amazon | 12.43 | 13.82 | 99 |
| 10.38 | 21.09 | 83 | |
| YouTube | 11.95 | 15.33 | 89 |
| Google Search | 14.85 | 19.48 | 77 |
| Booking | 9.94 | 11.17 | 103 |
Looking at the result above, you will see that ProxyEmpire is not as fast as the provider wants you to think. As stated earlier, residential proxies are not known to be fast. But the result up there isn’t one of the best. There are other providers, including Bright Data, Smartproxy, and even Soax, among others, that offer a faster proxy speed. But on a general note, the result above is average of what you will get from smaller providers like ProxyEmpire. My only problem with it is how it is priced like a top provider and then provides an average speed, as this is like a small provider.
The issue of IP rotation for residential proxy networks is when, not if, as IPs must change by design. And IP rotation goes hand in hand with session management. This is because a session is terminated, and a new one is started when a new IP is assigned to the port you are connected to. The proxies offered in this type of proxies are rotating proxies — the type that provides you a port that allows you access to their whole pool and changes IP randomly. But the ProxyEmpire proxy rotation system is not the best out there.
This is because there is no support for high-rotating ports that changes IPs after every request. The way the proxy rotation system of ProxyEmpire work is quite simple. It follows the natural rotation pattern where an IP is changed for you only when the node goes offline or gets its IP changed. While not having high rotating ports is bad for this provider, it does have a good side. One of which is its support for session proxies. Session proxies maintain the same IP address for a specific period of time before switching.
You can set the IP rotation period between 90 seconds to one hour from the user dashboard. For the period you maintain the same IP address, you also maintain the same session. It is important you know that there is no guarantee that the session last as long as you want, as the node you connect to can go offline, thereby triggering a new session.
A look at the ProxyEmpire homepage, as you will see it claims to be one of the best for web scraping and data collection. Considering their proxies of interest here are the rotating residential proxies, it is right to test how best you can use this for web scraping.
The test I carried out for this section is the scraping success rate test and response speed, which were carried out concurrently using the same custom script developed in-house. Scraping tests reveal a lot about a proxy network, including its unique IPs, the speed in a production environment, and whether the proxies are detectable or not. I used 5 popular web targets for this test. The result of the scraping test is displayed in the table below.
| Site | Success Rate (%) | Avg. Response Rate (sec) |
| Amazon | 97.15 | 1.97 |
| 95.87 | 2.65 | |
| YouTube | 93.89 | 2.16 |
| Google Search | 97.49 | 1.87 |
| Booking | 92.89 | 2.87 |
Looking at the above, you can see that most of the scraping requests went through. This is because the proxy network is undetectable since it makes use of the IPs of real Internet users. From the result of the test, the requests that didn’t go through were as a result of captchas or connection timeout. The script used was developed by an experienced web scraper, and thus, this level of success. You could get something slightly lower. Where there is a problem is in the response speed, which is quite slow. I am not alone in this. If you read the review of independent individual users, you will notice they all claim the network is slow, which confirms the result of my test.
Pricing is an important factor when deciding on the proxies to use. And to be frank with you, I wouldn’t say ProxyEmpire got it right in this regard. At best, I will describe ProxyEmpire’s pricing of their rotating residential proxies as competitive. And at worse? It is quite overpriced if compared with the pricing of the top providers. This provider models its pricing to mimic the pricing of Bright Data and Oxylabs. But in terms of performance, proxy pool, and even location coverage, it is nowhere close to these top providers. Below is the screenshot of ProxyEmpire’s pricing.
The first package, which is the most affordable, is the Pay-as-You-Go plan. This plan offers 1GB for $15. This plan is for those that do not want any form of commitment. Also good for small users. However, you will be paying the highest price per GB. If you go for their package plans, you will have to purchase bundles of more than 1GB but at a reduced price per GB. Take, for instance, in the starter plan, you purchase 3GB at $40, making the price per GB $13.3 per GB. Generally, as you purchase more GB, the price per GB reduces. ProxyEmpire does not have a free trial period and no friendly refund policy.
Customer support is one key area that tells a lot about how a service operates. Regardless of how good or easy to use a proxy network is, good customer support is supposed to be in place. When it comes to customer support, 3 things matter — channels, helpfulness, and responsiveness. ProxyEmpire is one of the services that stands tall in all of these. In terms of channels, this provider has live chat support. I have made use of this, and it was swift. I used this on Saturday afternoon, and the response I got was swift and quite helpful.
I haven’t had time to use the email support system, but from those that have used it, you should get a response within one hour. But for the most part, you will not have the need to make use of this except for periods when no customer support agent is available. One thing you will come to like about ProxyEmpire is its documentation and knowledge base documents. With this, you might not even need to make use of customer support, as you can get help if you have the time to go through the documents.
If there is one thing, you have to give to the ProxyEmpire, that has its simplicity. The ProxyEmpire provides you with the basic features you expect from a rotating residential proxy network.
While this might mean it has not been different from the other providers out there, it does have the upside of providing you with just want you need. The user dashboard is quite simplistic and intuitive, even for non-technical users. There is little to be done in other to configure proxy ports from the user dashboard or even set IP rotation time, choose a specific IP location period, or set up IP authentication.
With the proxy details gotten from the user dashboard, it is no longer in the hands of ProxyEmpire how you make use of their service. The proxies from this provider can be used with your favorite tools, including Multilogin, ScrapeBox, and any custom script, among others.
Are you a developer looking for a proxy network to interact with programmatically? Then a developer-friendly proxy network is what you need, and ProxyEmpire is not one of such. ProxyEmpire does not have a developer API.
You must log in to the user dashboard to carry out your task. This makes it difficult to use if you are a developer looking to integrate it into your code programmatically. Some of the best proxy providers you can integrate into your code includes Bright Data, Oxylabs, Smartproxy, Soax, and Proxy-cheap.
ProxyEmpire does not offer a developer API — and this does not make it not good enough. It is one of the best residential proxy networks in the market. It does have a pool with over 5 million IPs and extensive location coverage.
The proxies are undetectable proxies that can be used for a good number of tasks, including web scraping. The only major problem with this provider is its pricing which mirrors that of the top providers, while its feature is like that of mid-scale proxy providers. Aside from this issue and the lack of a developer API, it is good enough and, thus, recommended.
FAQsWhat is ProxyEmpire?
ProxyEmpire is a proxy service provider that offers access to millions of rotating residential and mobile proxies across more than 170 countries. Their advanced proxy network enables clients to access granular data with advanced filters to target specific countries, regions, cities, and ISPs. They offer a range of proxy types including rotating and static residential proxies, rotating and dedicated mobile proxies, and rotating datacenter proxies. ProxyEmpire also boasts high-speed connections and ensures security and anonymity for its users
What types of proxies does ProxyEmpire offer?
What is the coverage of ProxyEmpire's proxy network?
ProxyEmpire provides access to over 9 million proxies with worldwide coverage spanning across more than 170 countries
What is the refund policy for ProxyEmpire's proxies?
ProxyEmpire does not offer a free trial, but it does offer a $1.97 trial that provides users with 100 MB of Residential Proxy Data and 50 MB of Mobile Proxy Data. All payments and subscriptions made by users are strictly non-refundable, but if a user believes that there are special circumstances surrounding their case, they can contact ProxyEmpire. The company will then decide on a case-by-case basis if the user qualifies for a refund
Is ProxyEmpire a legitimate proxy provider?
Yes, ProxyEmpire is a legitimate proxy provider that offers residential, mobile, and datacenter proxies. They have a large pool of IPs and provide various features, such as unlimited rollover bandwidth, targeting options, and rotating and sticky proxy sessions
How fast are ProxyEmpire's proxies?
ProxyEmpire offers high-speed connections for its proxies, you can check our speed test
Is ProxyEmpire secure?
Yes, ProxyEmpire provides secure and anonymous proxy services
Can I target specific locations with ProxyEmpire's proxies?
Yes, ProxyEmpire's advanced proxy network allows clients to use advanced filters to target specific countries, regions, cities, and ISPs1
Can I test ProxyEmpire's services before making a purchase?
Yes, ProxyEmpire offers a $1.97 trial that provides 100 MB of Residential Proxy Data and 50 MB of Mobile Proxy Data for users to test their services