Bright Data Proxies: An Overview, Features, and Pricing in 2024

Accessing accurate and timely information is crucial for several reasons, including informed decision-making, risk management, and competitive advantage. With a vast and varied proxy network, Bright Data, a leader in the web scraping industry, caters to diverse needs and enables businesses to collect reliable data from multiple sources while minimizing the risks of IP blocks. They have various web scraping tools and features tailored to meet the demands of modern data-driven applications, making them frontrunners in the proxy service industry.

This article takes a deep dive into the Bright Data proxy solutions, exploring their standout features, and providing a comprehensive analysis of their pricing model.

Bright Data overview

Bright Data is a data collection platform that offers web scraping solutions such as proxies, scraping APIs, and ready-to-use datasets, suitable for a wide range of applications, from web scraping to market research. The provider, once primarily known for its residential IPs, has evolved into a diverse proxy network, responding to the ever-changing needs of businesses.

They offer specialized web scraping services and features tailored for specific data collection applications. Bright Data, Oxylabs and Smartproxy are the leaders in the proxy service industry, offering a vast proxy pool sourced from almost every country and city worldwide. A large proxy pool reduces the chances of IP blockages and enables precise geo-targeted web scraping.

Its prices might be a sticking point, especially for individual users or smaller companies. The premium features and capabilities justify the pricing for those who prioritize quality and privacy in their scraping tasks. They offer free trials for proxies and web scraping tools. Instead of relying solely on user reviews or customer testimonials, you can test the product first-hand to understand its interface and capabilities.

Features of Bright Data proxies

In this section, we’ll delve into the specific features that set Bright Data proxies apart, highlighting the capabilities of each proxy server type. 

Product offerings

Comparison table showcasing the monthly-based pricing structure of Bright Data proxy servers, detailing different proxy types and their associated costs.

Residential proxies

• Offers 72 million residential IPs from 195 countries.
• Targets any country, city, ZIP Code, carrier, & ASN level targeting

Source: Bright Data ¹

• Provides shared and dedicated residential IPs. The cost per user is lower than dedicated residential IPs.
• Supports long-session peers. You can maintain the same residential IP for an extended period of time. Their stable nature makes them suitable for continuous data collection or monitoring tasks.

Datacenter proxies

• Has a network of 1.6 million shared and dedicated datacenter IPs from 98 countries. The USA, Canada, UK, Germany, and France are significant hubs for datacenter proxies. Datacenter proxies originate from data centers and are not associated with internet service providers(ISPs) like residential and ISP proxies. 

They are known for their speed and cost-effectiveness, making them suitable for tasks where speed and cost are primary concerns such as managing multiple social media profiles or accessing websites that are not employing advanced blocking measures.

• Offers four different types of IP:
  • Shared (Pay per usage): A pool of 20,000 datacenter IPs that can be rotated. Users are charged only for the usage, allowing them to monitor their bandwidth consumption and adjust activities accordingly.
  • Shared (Pay per IP): Users are charged a set fee for each IP address they access. For high-volume tasks like large-scale web scraping, the unlimited bandwidth option could provide more value.
  • Dedicated IP: The datacenter IP is assigned to a single user, no other user can engage in questionable activities on the same IP address.
  • Premium IPs: Better uptime, speed, and lower risk of being detected. Charges are based on actual usage.
• Allows users to target a specific country or city using a shared (pay-per-IP) or dedicated proxy network.
• Supports HTTP and HTTPS protocols.

Mobile proxies

• Offers a network of 7 million 3G/4G/5G mobile IPs distributed by ISPs, suitable for websites that require mobile device access. They originate from regular consumer Internet Service Providers (ISPs) rather than data centers. For example, when a real user opts-in, their mobile device becomes a node in a P2P network, allowing the IP to be used by others in the same network.
• Enables users to rotate mobile IPs at regular intervals or after a certain number of requests to the target website.
• Provides shared and dedicated mobile IP addresses.

Static residential proxies (ISP Proxies) 

• 77OK ISP proxies that combine the speed of datacenter proxies and the high anonymity of residential proxies.
• Offers both static and rotating (dynamic) IP addresses. You can maintain the same ISP IP address over long periods or change it either after a set period or after a certain number of requests.
• There are three types of ISP IP types: shared (Pay per usage), shared (Pay per IP), dedicated.

Key differentiators

• Vast proxy network: One of the largest proxy networks in the proxy landscape, offering millions of residential, datacenter, and mobile proxies.
• Geo-targeting: Allows users to target specific cities, select IPs specifically from a particular network or a particular ZIP code.
• Advanced rotating proxies: Automatically rotate IP addresses, which is especially useful for web scraping applications. Every time the user makes a connection request, the IP address is changed to reduce the likelihood of overusing any single IP.
• Diverse proxy types: Bright Data provides a variety of proxy server types, including Residential Proxies, Mobile Proxies, Datacenter Proxies, and ISP Proxies, making them suitable for different applications.
• Flexible pricing models: They offer multifaceted pricing strategies, making the proxy network accessible to a wide range of users, from individual users to large enterprises. You can choose a pay as you go plan without a monthly commitment or a commitments plan, coming at discount rates. Bright Data also offers custom plans based on your unique requirements, ensuring that you are not paying for unnecessary features.
• Tailored solutions: Having the largest number of employees among the leading proxy service providers on the market present several advantages. They can handle customer demands more successfully, ensuring that user queries and issues are addressed promptly.
• The diversification of scraping services: Offers a diverse set of web scraping tools and services like scrapers and ready-to-use datasets, making it a more compelling choice for a wide range of users.

Pricing details

Bright Data offers two main pricing plans for proxy network and scraping solutions: monthly and annual. Instead of adhering strictly to predefined packages, the proxy provider provides custom proxy plans to understand and cater to the specific needs of each client. They also offer a pay-as-you-go model, ensuring clients only pay for the duration and resources they use.

The proxy provider prices their proxy services based on bandwidth consumption. Bandwidth consumption is the amount of data transferred over a network, typically measured by gigabytes (GB), or terabytes (TB).

Where data scraping is the main goal, a bandwidth-based proxy pricing model can be more cost-effective than other pricing models, such as pricing per port.

The pricing information in the table below is derived from the vendor’s public claims. Please note that the information given for each package is on a monthly basis. Since pricing models can evolve, it’s advisable to check the proxy providers’ websites for the most up-to-date details.

Customer stories and case studies

This section provides some case studies to help you get an overview of the benefits that Bright Data has offered in the past.

Powerful omnichannel solutions driven by online data – Canopy, Advantage Solutions

• Industry: Retail and eCommerce
• Challenge: Canopy faced challenges in gathering public online data due to IP address restrictions and even exhausted the IP resources of a proxy company they collaborated with. ²
• Solution: Bright Data’s residential and datacenter proxies as well as the Bright Data Web Unlocker to access the needed data and extract it from the target websites.
• Results: Was able to access and scrape the target data without IP bans and restrictions.

Seamless Digital Automations

• Industry: Digital advertising
• Challenge: ThyssenKrupp, one of the customers of Seamless Digital Automations, wanted to automate the daily compilation of top industry news, commodity prices, and global currency exchange rates from multiple websites for distribution to its employees, a task that was previously done manually.³
• Solution: Bright Data’s Web Scraper IDE (Integrated Development Environment) to build a custom public web scraper to automatically manage the task.
• Results: Collected public web data, including daily exchange rates and commodities pricing, from various web sources.

Alternative travel solutions enabled by online data – Railofy

• Industry: Travel
• Challenge: Railofy encountered difficulties in obtaining sufficient public online data to nourish its pricing algorithm, and offer their waitlisted passengers the option to fly at a cost similar to their train ticket. ⁴
• Solution: Used Bright Data’s Datacenter IPs and Residential IPs as well as the Bright Data Proxy Manager to access the required data points such as flight options, number of seats and prices of flights.
• Results: Was able to collect the needed public online data and set its pricing effectively based on the collected data.

Transparency statement

AIMultiple serves numerous emerging tech companies, including Bright Data.

Further reading

• An In-Depth Look at Smartproxy’s Web Scraping Solutions
• Comparing the Best Enterprise Proxy Servers of 2023
• Top 7 Proxy Providers of 2023: Pricing & Features Compared

For guidance to choose the right residential proxy service, check out data-driven list of proxy providers, and reach out to us:

External Links

• 1. “Getting started with Residential Proxies“. Bright Data. Accessed 30 October, 2023
• 2. Bright Data Case Studies-Canopy, Advantage Solutions. Accessed 27 October, 2023
• 3. Bright Data Case Studies-Seamless Digital Automations. Accessed 27 October, 2023
• 4. Bright Data Case Studies-Railofy. Accessed 27 October, 2023