Soax Review 2023: In-Depth Performance Tested & Complete Guide to SOAX Proxies

Are you looking to purchase proxies from Soax but do not know much about them? Then you are on the right page. In our Soax proxy review article, you will learn all you need to know about the Soax residential proxies, including their performance.

In most of our proxy recommendation articles, Soax has maintained a consistent position at the top. But it might interest you to know that this provider was only recently established but has been able to make its way through to the top to become one of the best.

However, this does not mean it is the best all-round provider for you. It does have its pros and cons that you should be aware of before purchasing a plan from them. I will discuss speed performance, proxy pool size, IP rotation system, location coverage, compatibility test, developer support, and pricing, among others.

Soax — An Overview

Soax is one of the best proxy providers in the market. It does have proxies in 3 proxy categories — residential proxies, mobile proxies, and ISP proxies. In this Soax review, the focus will be on their residential proxy network, which is their most popular product.

This service has a sizeable IP pool perfect for small to medium-scale projects. One interesting thing I discovered about this pool is how this provider monitors and refreshes it to remove bad and prolonged-inactive IPs from it. This reduces the number of dropped connections you get. The network provides you a granular targeting option consisting of country-level, state-level, and city-level targeting.

Currently, this provider has got support for almost all countries in the world. The proxies offered by this provider are rotating proxies, but there is an option for maintaining the same IP address for session management. With my experience using Soax proxies, I can tell you the proxies are undetectable to most websites on the Internet. However, you need to know that just as they have good sides, things are not all rosy for them. The Soax network does have its own cons, which you’ll discover as you read through the review.

Proxy Pool Size

The proxy pool size of a provider is the number of IP addresses a provider has that it uses to route requests of its users. Usually, how big the proxy pool size is will determine the size of the project you can use the proxy network for. Soax has got over 5 million IP addresses in its pool that you are given access to. But this is only in principle.

The reality on ground is that not all of these IPs are available to you, as not all are online at the same time. And if you sent many requests, you began to get the same IPs assigned to you again. This is why I won’t recommend Soax for projects that need to scrape millions of pages.

But for a few million and below, it works well. Generally, from my test, I found out that over 60 percent of the IPs assigned are unique IPs. It is important you know that Soax does not own the IPs in its pool — they are sourced via P2P networks. This is the reason it is unable to offer real static IPs for its residential proxies, as it does not have control over the devices that own the IPs.

Location Coverage

While having a large proxy pool is important, the spread of these IPs across different regions is equally important. This is because even for IP rotation sake, which has no locational requirement, sending requests via IPs from different regions makes it even more difficult for detection. There is also the case of accessing geo-targeted and localized content. Soax is one of the providers out there that understand the need for having this spread. Currently, Soax has got IPs from over 150 countries across the globe from which you can get IPs from.

It has got support for a feature known as geo-targeting, which allows you to choose the location for the IPs assigned to you. One thing you will come to like about this feature is its granular nature. With Soax, you do not just get support for selecting the country to get IPs from, you can also select the state and cities you get IPs from. This is especially useful for tasks that require IPs from a specific city, as in the case of classified ad sites like Craigslist.

However, you need to know that as you geo-target down to states and cities, the number of IPs available to you drastically reduces. While you can get a good number of unique IPs when you geo-target the US, going down to a city might bring the number of unique IPs you get to less than even 20 percent in some cases.

Does SOAX have any restrictions on the use of their proxies? 

Yes, SOAX has some restrictions on the use of their proxies. Check the available and restricted use cases on their website. Ports 25 and 465 are closed by default, but you can reach out to Live Support if you are interested in 25 and 465 port usage.

Where is SOAX LTD. located?

SOAX is a UK-based company established in 2019, Their headquarters is located at 71-75 Shelton Street, London, Greater London, United Kingdom, WC2H 9JQ and run by an international staff. SOAX provides residential and mobile rotating back-connect proxies that can help your team deliver on the goals for web data scraping, NOW run a sister scraping app, named as scrapein.app.

SOAX Speed & Performance Test

Speed is an important aspect of all projects, but it is unfortunate that you will have to compromise on that a little when dealing with residential proxies. This is because the extra routing and rerouting will always slow things down. However, there is a benchmark that we can refer to as too slow for it. According to the information on the Soax website, Soax is efficient and fast. But how true is that? To test this out, I needed to run a custom script for testing the download, upload, and ping speed to get the result. I choose 5 popular websites to use to get a fairly accurate result of the speed. And below is the result from the test carried out.

Looking at the result above, you will feel it performs poorly right? Well, for a residential proxy network, this performance data is acceptable, and it might interest to you to know that this is the average performance. This is because you’ll have to share the IP with the real user. Generally, it is advisable to keep the number of concurrent requests you send to 30. Anything above this and performance will be greatly impacted negatively. It is important you know that your own test result can vary from what is written above, as there are a good number of factors that determine the result.

Proxy Rotation and Session Management Reviews

IP rotation and session management are two important aspects of a residential proxy network that you must be aware of before buying proxies. This is important because IP rotation for residential proxies is mandatory. Remember I mentioned in the proxy pool section that Soax does not own the IPs and, as such, can’t control its active status. So IPs go offline, and some come online, so a change of IP is mandatory. IP rotation for Soax is between 90 seconds to 600 seconds. And you are given the ability to choose the specific rotation period you want, which should be between this bracket. If you need to change IP after every request, then you will need to pay extra.

This is different from some of the top providers like Bright Data and Smartproxy, which offer high rotating proxies at no extra cost to you. Soax does have support for session management, and the working model is simple. So far as you maintain the same IP address, you maintain the same session. When your IP change, it becomes a new session. This means that session management, as Soax has it, is based on IP rotation. There’s no separate setting for sessions; once you set the IP rotation time, the session will follow suit.

Scraping Success Rate and Response Speed Test

Botting is one of the major use cases of residential proxies and also one of the methods that can quickly reveal how bad at performance a provider is. This is because of the too many requests you will have to send, with some of them being sent concurrently. I will be using web scraping as a form of botting exercise to test the success rate one will get when setting many requests in their hundreds of thousands to see its performance in this regard. I am not testing the success rate alone, I will be testing the response speed to see how fast the response is. Below is the result gotten for Soax proxies for scraping our 5 popular website targets.

As you can see above, you can see that over 90 percent of the requests were all successful. This is because of the undetectable nature of their IPs because they route requests via devices of real Internet users, making them difficult to detect. The response speed is also impressive as the response speed is an average of below 2 seconds. On average, you can see that Soax is perfect for web scraping. You only need to be careful when geo-targeting because as the pool gets smaller for you, you would start getting blocked.

Plans and Pricing Compare And Recommendations

Obviously, you can only use the proxies you can afford, and this makes pricing an important factor to consider. Residential proxies are known to be more expensive compared to datacenter proxies. However, they have become cheaper for the average proxy user. But how affordable is the Soax residential proxy network? This is one of the areas I have a problem with Soax. With a pool of 5 million IPs and no special feature that makes it unique from the other providers, I see no reason why the minimum amount you can spend on Soax proxies is $99.

Generally, Soax pricing is priced based on bandwidth and ports. The $99 will give you 8GB and 300 ports. If you need more bandwidth or ports, you will need to upgrade to higher plans which obviously will cost you more from the screenshot above. It is unfortunate that Soax does not provide support for the Pay-As-You-Go payment method — this is something big players like Bright Data, Oxylabs, and Smartproxy support. Also important for you to know is that Soax does not offer a free trial. You need to pay $1.99 to test the service.

Customer Support

Customer support is an important part of the proxy business — but you wouldn’t know until you hit a brick wall. When it comes to customer service, there are two faces to it — the channels of communication and how helpful the agents are. If a service misses any, it becomes an issue. For Soax, the channels of commutation are there — live chat support, support ticket, and email support. If you subscribe to the Pro Residential Plan or any of the higher plans, then you are assigned a dedicated customer support agent.

But how helpful are the agents? From my experience using their customer agents, I can say they have a grasp of the proxy and botting world. If you go with their live chat support, you get a quick response — but they are not always online. If they aren’t online, you can drop a message, and you will get a response within 24 hours. In some instances, you will not even need to speak to support. This is because there is a help center on the website where you get instructions and answers to most of the everyday questions they get.

Ease of Use

Soax is a simple proxy network that does not bore you with all of the complex details and offers you the tools that you do not need. And the result is a proxy network that even a first-time user will get a grasp of without having to read a long page of documentation. For this service, you do not need to install any proxy client — not even a browser extension to make use of it. All you need is to register an account, purchase a plan and get the proxies from the dashboard. The user dashboard is quite user friendly and intuitive.

From the user dashboard, you can get the proxy endpoints and configure the IP rotation and geolocation of the IPs. Aside from the user dashboard, you can also use the developer API to get these done. In general, you are unlikely to hit a rock while finding your way around this proxy network compared to the likes of Bright Data which is too big to a fault in terms of ease of usage.

Developer Support

Soax is one of the proxy networks that do have support for a developer API. Some of the things you can do with the Soax developer API include retrieving your bandwidth balance, retrieving the list of cities and regions as well as whitelisting IPs for authentication. You can also retrieve proxy credentials to use. While there is a developer API in place for this service, there is one issue that needs to be resolved. There is no good documentation for the developer API.

There is no mention of the API on the homepage, nor was it linked to from the homepage. The documentation is found on the help center page. Even at that, what is available is not enough. You only get documentation for less than 10 if the endpoints are available. This only shows a lack of interest in the developer API, and such neglect could cause them to lose customers to more developer-focused proxy networks.

Verdict: Is Soax Good Enough?

Soax is one of our favorite residential proxy networks on this blog. And this is not without reasons. It does have one of the cleanest proxy pools in the market, has a sizeable IP pool for small and medium scale use, does offer undetectable proxies, and can be said to be fast.

Even though it can be said to be expensive for small proxy users because of its minimum monetary commitment and other payment issues, there is no doubt that Soax is good enough for many use cases. If in doubt whether their proxies will work for your specific use case in case your use case is quite unique, you can speak to their customer support agent.

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