Top 6 Mobile Proxy Services of 2024
Mobile proxies empower individuals and companies to extract valuable data, improve mobile app user experience, and conduct app quality assurance. However, obstacles such as being blacklisted and geographically restricted contents necessitate the use of a trustworthy proxy service.
This article reviews top 5 mobile proxy services highlighting their unique features and pricing plans to help you navigate the complex landscape of mobile proxy services with ease. We will also discuss how mobile proxies work and benefits companies.
The leading mobile proxy providers of 2024
There are many mobile proxy services, which slows down the decision-making process. In this section, we will examine the top five mobile proxy solutions in terms of their features (e.g., pool size, geo-targeting, IP type), as well as their prices.
We selected the vendors based on their market presence and customer satisfaction. While filtering mobile proxy providers, we followed these verifiable criteria:
- 40+ employees on LinkedIn
- 5+ reviews on review sites such as G2, Trustradius, and Capterra.
Proxy providers | # of employees | # of reviews | Average score |
---|---|---|---|
Bright Data | 878 | 179 | 4.7 |
Smartproxy | 103 | 38 | 4.4 |
Oxylabs | 314 | 33 | 4.7 |
NetNut | 51 | 6 | 4.7 |
IPRoyal | 47 | 10 | 4.6 |
SOAX | 61 | 42 | 4.9 |
What is a mobile proxy?
A mobile proxy is a gateway that uses the IP addresses of a mobile network. Mobile proxies provide a layer of privacy between a mobile device and the target web server to hide users’ real mobile IP addresses.
1. Bright Data
Bright Data is a web data platform that provides proxies, no-code tools, and ready-to-use datasets for data collection purposes. The proxy provider offers mobile residential IPs, including 3G/4G/5G mobile proxy network. The mobile IPs are provided by ISPs, allowing you to view websites as a real mobile user.
Features:
- Proxy pool: 7 million 3G/4G mobile proxy network
- Geolocation targeting: Supports country, city, zip code, carrier & ASN targeting
- Proxy control panel or API: Allows users to manage and track their mobile IPs
- Rotating IPs from mobile devices: You can change mobile IPs at regular intervals or for each request.
- Shared and dedicated IP types: You can use shared or dedicated mobile IPs based on your specific need and application.
Pricing:
- Starting price: $14.4/GB/monthly
- Free trial: 7-day trial
2. Smartproxy
Smartproxy is a data collection platform that allows individuals and businesses to efficiently gather data from web sources. They offer rotating 3G/4G/5G mobile proxies for various use cases, such as verifying cellular ads and app quality assurance.
Features:
- Proxy pool: 10+ million 3G/4G/5G mobile IPs
- Geolocation targeting: Supports ASN, OS & country-level targeting
- Rotating and sticky IPs: Allows users to change mobile IPs periodically or maintain the same IP for the duration of a session.
- Shared and dedicated IP types: You can use dedicated or shared mobile IPs based on your specific need and application.
- Dedicated account manager for enterprise plans: Offers personalized assistance tailored to your specific requirements. You can get direct support with technical issues.
Pricing:
- Starting price: $15/GB/monthly
- Free trial: Get 35% on your first purchase with Smartproxy
3. Oxylabs
Oxylabs offers 3G, 4G, and 5G mobile proxies with ASN and country-level targeting. You can use mobile IPs to check the context, location, and other display parameters to ensure the ad is displayed correctly and effectively on websites.
Features:
- Proxy pool: 20+ million mobile IPs
- Geolocation targeting: Allows users to target by country or ASN, enabling access to the required geo-restricted content.
- HTTP/HTTPS/SOCKS5 protocol support: You can use mobile proxies to redirect your internet traffic through the service provider’s supported protocols.
- Automatic IP rotation: Allows users to rotate their mobile IP addresses at predefined intervals or for each request.
Pricing:
- Starting price: $25/GB
- Free trial: 7-day trial
4. NetNut
NetNut offers 1 million mobile proxies with automatic mobile IP rotation. Rotating mobile proxies enable users to avoid detection and blocking by the target website.
Features:
- Personalized IP rotation: Changes mobile IPs after each connection request or after a certain period.
- IP whitelist: Allows only a certain set of IP addresses to connect and interact with the proxy pool.
- City-level targeting: Enables users to select proxies associated with a particular city.
- API for stats: Provides information and data regarding performance metrics and proxy usage.
Pricing:
- Starting price: $19/GB/monthly
- Free trial: 7-day trial
5. IPRoyal
IPRoyal provides mobile IPs from a 5G/4G/3G residential cellular network pool, which can be used for various purposes, including social media automation and app testing.
Features:
- Proxy pool: 1M+ residential mobile IPs
- Geolocation targeting: Supports country, city, zip code, carrier & ASN targeting
- API access: Offers API to interact with mobile proxy service. You can rotate IPs, manage sticky sessions, or check usage stats via API.
- Automatic IP rotation: Allow users to rotate mobile IPs at the set intervals, starting from 6 minutes for per request.
- Dedicated IPs: Also known as static IP addresses, are used only by the assigned user.
Pricing:
- Starting price: $90 per month
- Free trial: They don’t offer free trial
6. SOAX
SOAX offers real 3G / 4G / 5G / LTE mobile IPs for businesses for data collection, market research and SEO monitoring.
Features:
- Proxy pool: 8.5M+ proxy IP pool
- Geolocation targeting: Allows users to select proxies based on mobile carrier and city associated with a specific city and carrier.
- Customer success manager: Provides personalized services and technical support to its customers, and onboard new customers.
- Automatic mobile proxy rotation
Pricing:
- Starting price: $33.00/GB
- Free trial: 3-day Trial for $1.99
How do mobile proxies work?
Mobile proxies work much like regular proxies such as residential and datacenter proxies. Mobile proxies assign mobile IPs to mobile devices (e.g. tablets, smartphones) to conceal the real IP addresses of users. Here is a simplified steps involved in how mobile proxies work:
- Making request: When a user access to a website on their mobile device, their connection request first goes to the mobile proxy server.
- Forwarding user request: The mobile proxy receives the request and forwards it to the target website by assigning you a new IP address.
- Response: The target website takes the request provide the required information back to the mobile proxy server. The website sees the IP of the mobile proxy as the source of your request.
- Data delivery: The mobile proxy server forwards the response to the user device.
Comparing residential, datacenter, and mobile proxies
- Datacenter proxies are IP addresses that belong to datacenters. It is one of the cheapest ways to mask users’ real IP addresses. However, since they come from cloud server providers, they can be identified and blacklisted more easily compared to mobile and private proxies.
- Residential proxies are IP addresses provided by an ISP (Internet Service Providers). Unlike other proxy services, residential proxies are more difficult to blacklist because they provide real IP addresses.
- Mobile proxies are 3G/4G connections assigned to users by mobile operators. Mobile proxies also work very similarly to residential proxies. Detecting mobile proxies is difficult because they provide dynamic IPs.
We listed Top 10 Residential Proxy Providers of 2023 and outlined their key features to help you understand which residential service is best for your business needs.
3 Ways to Leverage Mobile Proxies for Your Business
1. Scraping data from social media accounts
While scraping web data, organizations can use mobile IPs to bypass IP bans and CAPTCHAs. CAPTCHA is one of the most common types of website security techniques. It identifies scraping bots and denies them access to websites to minimize web scraping practices. Mobile proxies are used to tackle this problem and allow web scraping bot access. They use dynamic IPs instead of static IP addresses.
The difference between a dynamic and a static IP address is that static IP addresses do not change over time while dynamic IP addresses are updated regularly and change over time. This increases privacy and anonymity.
Mobile proxies are also the best option for managing multiple social media accounts. They give social media managers different IP addresses so that they can easily access multiple accounts without IP bans.
If you log out of one of your social media accounts and then log in to another account, your IP address remains the same since you use the wireless or mobile network. Most of the time, social media platforms deny access to users who create multiple accounts with the same IP address. Mobile proxies prevent such scenarios by assigning different IPs.
See our in-depth guide on social media scraping to learn more about its legality, benefits, and use cases.
2. Ad verification
Ad verification helps businesses understand that their digital ads are being displayed in the desired location and reaching the desired audience. Here are the main benefits of ad verification for businesses:
- It helps businesses and advertisers parse the traffic not delivered to their target audience and calculate a more realistic reach for their online campaign.
- With ad verification, businesses can keep track of their brand’s reputation. They can make sure that their ads are displayed on credible sources.
Monitoring every single ad is not feasible, especially for large companies, as they often run multiple campaigns simultaneously. Companies can integrate mobile proxies into their web scrapers. This allows them to crawl websites at different times without being blacklisted.
3. Enabling access to region-specific content
Geoblocking is one of the most common barriers to tracking competitive data. Companies can use mobile proxies to gather geo-specific data without IP bans in order to obtain regional data in real-time. With a mobile proxy, your IP address is changed every time you make a request. Mobile proxies gain access to all content available in their region and can easily scroll mobile-first websites.
Further Readings:
- Using Proxies for Web Scraping: How-to, Types, Best Practices
- The Ultimate Guide to Datacenter Proxies: Why do you need them?
- 4 Ways to Gain Competitive Edge With Residential Proxies
If you still have any questions about how to choose a mobile proxy service that is suitable for your specific application, feel free to read our data-driven whitepaper on the topic:
If you believe that your business may benefit from a web scraping solution, check out data-driven list of web scrapers, and reach out to us:
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