Are you looking to purchase a proxy plan, and you want to read an unbiased review on the proxy provider to see whether they will be good for you or not? Then come in now and read our expert Smartproxy review to know all you need to know about Smartproxy, including performance tests.
Smartproxy remains one of the popular proxy providers out there, first known for its super-fast residential proxy network. As with the case with other popular providers, you only get to know more of their upsides, with most reviewers singing their proxies. For some, there are some subtle facts you should know about them to help you make the right decision, as not all proxies are good for your specific tasks. Our focus in this Smartproxy review is on unveiling and shredding Smartproxy apart, revealing all of its features and downsides you should be aware of.
Table Of Contents
If one visits the homepage of Smartproxy, the idea one gets is that it is a data collection infrastructure. But this has not always been the case — Smartproxy started as a proxy service provider, and the present content on their page is a rebranding attempt. And till date, proxies still remain their top service. From this provider, you can purchase different types of proxies ranging from residential, datacenter, and mobile proxies. This provider is seen as one of the top proxy providers out there for obvious reasons. Their residential proxies, which would be the focus of this Smartproxy review, are some of the most undetectable proxies in the market.
They are some of the fasts with millions of IP addresses available for you to use at any time you choose. Smartproxy has got extensive location coverage with a good geo-targeting feature. Going by the description you just read, I bet you already want to pay for it. But not as fast as with other providers; Smartproxy also does have its cons, and supporting only the HTTP protocol is the number one con of this provider. As we go into details below, you will get to learn some of the other pros and cons of the Smartproxy service.
The headquarters of Smartproxy can be found in Vilnius, the capital city of Lithuania. The company serves a global customer base, offering proxy services to individuals and businesses in numerous countries and regions.
Yes, Smartproxy is considered safe. As a reputable proxy service provider, Smartproxy takes the security and privacy of its users seriously. They offer secure connections and a reliable proxy network that can help users maintain anonymity and bypass IP restrictions online. However, like any other online service, it is essential to use it responsibly and adhere to the terms of service to ensure a safe and secure experience.
Yes, using Smartproxy or any other proxy service is legal. Proxies are tools that can be employed for various legitimate purposes, such as web scraping, accessing geo-restricted content, online anonymity, or managing multiple accounts.
However, it is essential to remember that while using proxies like Smartproxy is legal, how you use them could potentially violate the law or the terms of service of specific websites. Always ensure that you are using proxies responsibly and ethically, and respect the rules and regulations of the platforms you interact with.
The proxy pool size of a residential proxy network is the number of IP addresses they have in its proxy network. This gives you an idea of the number of IPs you could potentially use and will determine whether they have got a good number of IPs for your project. In terms of proxy pool size, Smartproxy can be said to be one of the largest out there, having over 40 million IP addresses in its pool that you can potentially use. However, it is important you know that not all of the 40 million IP addresses are available to you as a sizeable percentage are usually offline at every given time.
This is because of the way Smartproxy acquires the IPs for its residential proxy network. You see, all rotating residential proxy networks do not own the IP addresses they utilize. These IPs are sourced via P2P from devices of real Internet users, and as such, Smartproxy does not have control over when the IPs will be active or not. This is the reason users occasionally experience disconnection, especially when the owner of the device turns its Internet connectivity off. However, Smartproxy monitors its associated devices and quickly switches your connection through another active device.
From the above, you can see that Smartprpxy has got over 40 million IP addresses, and I stated that these IPs are for real Internet users across the globe. Where and these users located, and what does that mean for the Smartproxy network? You see, one of the important attributes of an IP address is the geolocation of that IP address, as websites use it to determine the location of its user. And for an Internet that is increasingly becoming localized as the day goes by, a proxy service needs IPs from as many locations worldwide as possible. This will help their users access more localized/geo-targeted and geo-fenced content.
Where does Smartproxy stand in the scheme of things here? According to the information on the Smartproxy website, this provider has got IPs in all countries of the world. Currently, Smartproxy has got IPs in 195+ countries, major cities around the world, and 50 US states. This makes its geo-targeting feature robust, providing you geo-targeting support across country-level, state-level (only the US), and city-level. With this, there is no locational restriction to your activities online if you use the Smartproxy residential proxy network.
A regular proxy user knows he will have to compromise a little on speed, as proxies are generally designed to reduce your speed because of the way they work. However, this does not mean you should settle for low speed. And if a proxy network is too slow, then there is a problem with their setup, and that shouldn’t be blamed on proxies as a whole. Smartproxy claims to be the fastest in the market. This claim can be weighty, and we need to test it out to even see if it is actually very fast for a rotating residential proxy network. We tested the speed performance using our custom script on 5 popular sites. Below is the result of the test result.
| Website | Download Speed (Mbps) | Upload Speed (Mbps) | Ping |
| Amazon | 33.74 | 35.67 | 33 |
| 27.85 | 30.46 | 20 | |
| YouTube | 35.88 | 27.95 | 17 |
| Google Search | 37.67 | 41.98 | 26 |
| Booking | 21.94 | 28.87 | 29 |
From the above, you can see that the download and upload speed obtained from using Smartproxy is actually impressive. Except if you are in a location where Internet connectivity is slow, you shouldn’t have a problem with Smartproxy. In terms of concurrency, Smartproxy allows you to create an unlimited number of threads and sessions at no extra cost. And from our test, you do not need to worry about number of threads except if they are becoming too much. Anything below 50 and performance should still be up.
The residential proxy network of Smartproxy is a rotating proxy network. This type of proxy, also known as backconnect proxy, changes your IP address frequently. For Smartproxy, they have got what is called high-rotating residential proxies. These are proxies that change the IP address assigned to them after every request, and they are the best for automation tasks that require no session login. In theory, you are made to believe you will get a new IP address for each request. But in practice, we found out that if you start sending hundreds of thousands of requests, the network becomes repetitive, reassigning you IPs it has already assigned to you earlier.
This is because of the limited number of IPs in their pool. But it is not only peculiar to Smartproxy as other providers are the same. Aside from these high-rotating proxies, Smartproxy also has sticky ports. These proxies do not rotate IP for you after every request. Instead, the IP sticks for a period of time up to 30 minutes. You can configure the IP rotation time, but it can’t be more than 30 minutes. For most users, 30 minutes session period, especially for automation, is OK.
Another test we carried out was scraping tests. We needed to check the success rate and response speed tests. From the information on the Smartproxy website, Smartproxy is undetectable to sites. That is to say, sites you visit, including the popular websites on the Internet, will not know you are making use of proxies. In theory, this is acceptable since they route your requests via devices of real Internet users, making it difficult for detection. However, sites have device some sophisticated means to identify IP addresses used as exit nodes and then block them. We carried out a test to find this out, and below is the result obtained using our custom script.
| Site | Avg. Success Rate (%) | Avg. Response Speed (sec) |
| Amazon | 98.67 | 1.54 |
| 96.13 | 1.18 | |
| YouTube | 99.01 | 1.37 |
| Google Search | 97.55 | 1.08 |
| Booking | 95.34 | 1.98 |
I sent hundreds of thousands of requests to each of the sites to get the above result. For a rotating residential proxy, this level of success is quite impressive. Aside from the above tested using an automation bot. I manually visited some sites using their proxies to see whether my IP address would be detected as a proxy, but nothing like that happened.
Pricing is an important factor as far as proxies are concerned, as users can only purchase the proxies within their budget. Being a top residential proxy network, Smartproxy pricing is expected to be high. Interestingly, this is not the case. It is said to have the best quality-to-price ratio among the top residential proxy networks. With Smartproxy, you have the option of going for their packaged proxy plans or the Pay-As-You-Go option. For the packaged option, pricing starts from $80 monthly with 8GB ($10 per GB). The higher plans have lower prices per GB as the Regular plan is sold for $400 with 50GB ($8 per GB).
The network also does offer an enterprise plan with a custom price quote and a dedicated account manager. For the Pay-As-You-Go option, there is no bandwidth commitment, as you can purchase 1GB at a flat rate of $12.5 monthly. There are multiple payment options supported by Smartproxy, ranging from credit card, PayPal, Google Pay, and Apple Pay. The Smartproxy does offer a limited trial version for intending customers to try out their service. It has also got a 3-day money-back guarantee to help you get your money within 3 days if you are not satisfied with the service rendered.
How a provider treats you when you run into issues while using their service is a big indicator of the standard and reputation of that provider. A proxy provider shouldn’t just be interested in getting your money, but they should also be available when you need help, even after making payment. Smartproxy is one of those services that understand the need for helpful and responsive customer support, and it has put in place systems to respond to customers quickly. If you visit the Smartproxy website even without creating an account, you can access their live chat support system. Using this, you get responses faster. But this does not end here.
The customer support agents are not always online to help out. In this case, you can open a support ticket or send them an email, and you are sure to get a response. The only major problem I see with the customer support of Smartproxy is that even for their $400 monthly plan, you are not assigned a dedicated account manager. Only enterprise users have access to dedicated account managers, which isn’t the case with Bright Data, as big mid-level proxy users are assigned dedicated account managers too.
One of the areas you will come to like Smartproxy is in terms of ease of usage. This provider is an advanced proxy network, providing you with a good number of advanced features such as geo-targeting, multiple authentication options, and even a proxy list generator. However, it has been able to make your workflow easy for you. Compared to the likes of Bright Data, Smartproxy is one of the easy-to-use proxy networks out there. It has a user dashboard with an intuitive User Interface. For the most part, you wouldn’t need the help of anyone to carry out the task you need with their proxies.
And when you hit a dead end, you can trust on their documentation and help guides to put you through. This, coupled with their responsive customer support, make them one of the best among the top proxy networks out there. To make it even easier for users to use their proxies and switch IPs conveniently in the browser, Smartproxy provides a proxy extension that will save you time and effort.
Smartproxy is one of the best proxy services when it comes to providing support for developers. But how does it do this, and how well will you compare this with what is obtainable from other providers? Smartproxy does offer a developer API that you can use as a developer to access your proxies and take complete control of your account programmatically. With this developer API, you can filter and list all of your proxy endpoints and their ports, get the report of your traffic usage and balance, create and remove whitelisted IPs for authentication, and even check the status of your subscription.
The API can also be used to create, update, and delete proxy users, as well as set traffic limits for your proxy users. In all, the developer API can serve as another entry point to the Smartproxy network, but this time, using an API rather than accessing your account from the dashboard. One thing you will come to like about the Smartproxy developer API is the availability of a comprehensive, easy-to-read documentation. This makes it easier for new users to hit the ground running with less hassle.
Using Smartproxy is quite straightforward, thanks to its user-friendly tools and self-service system. Here's an overview of how to get started with Smartproxy,
By following these steps, you'll be able to successfully set up and use Smartproxy for your proxy needs.
From the above, you can judge for yourself. Smartproxy has a sizeable number of IP addresses with all countries supported, making it perfect for localized data access. In terms of performance, Smartproxy is also a beast and can be said to be one of the fastest residential proxy networks in the market. These, together with its affordable pricing and ease of use, make it one of the best residential proxies out there. This makes it good enough, and for this reason, we recommend them as a provider.