Top 7 Premium Proxies of 2024: A Comprehensive Review

Premium proxies can significantly enhance the performance of your bot or web scraping applications. They present several benefits, particularly for businesses and individuals with specific usage requirements. When a proxy provider labels its services as premium, it’s important to understand whether they truly offer better security and higher speeds compared to standard and free proxies.

This article provides a comparison of leading premium proxy providers, detailing their main features and pricing structures.

Comparing the key features of leading premium proxies

Notes:

*Starting plan is for residential proxies and is determined by the smallest package available from the provider on a monthly basis.

1. Bright Data

Bright Data stands as a top-tier provider in the premium proxy industry. Bright Data’s proxy servers offers a wide variety of web scraping tools, including data scraping APIs and proxy servers equipped with advanced functionalities such as customizable IP rotation and targeting options based on zip code or ASN. The provider caters to users seeking an extensive range of features with their proxies, as well as a substantial proxy pool for conducting large-scale data gathering tasks.

Features:

• Various geo-targeting options: Aims at targeting any specific country, city, ZIP Code, carrier, and ASN level.
• Advanced rotating options: Each time a connection request is made by the user, the IP address alters, minimizing the chance of excessively using any one IP. You can customize the set intervals to rotate IP addresses using Bright Data’s proxy manager.
• Flexible pricing models: Provides four types of IP addresses with its proxy solutions: shared IPs with a pay-per-usage model, shared IPs with a pay-per-IP, dedicated IPs, and premium IPs.
• Static sessions: Maintain a consistent IP address for durations of up to 1 minute or up to 30 minutes.

Pricing:

• Free trial: 7-day free trial is provided exclusively for registered companies.
• Pay-as-you-go: Offers flexible pricing with pay-as-you-go and tailored plans available.

2. Oxylabs

Oxylabs is a premium proxy provider with a vast pool of over 102 million IP addresses, offering a variety of proxy server types. Oxylabs’ premium proxy servers target country, city, and coordinate-level targeting options. Oxylabs imposes restrictions on accessing certain websites through their proxies, including platforms like LinkedIn, Netflix, and various banking and streaming services.

Features:

• Automatic IP rotation: Residential and mobile proxies support self-rotating capabilities.
• City, state, and ASN level targeting: Residential, mobile Residential proxies only support ZIP code targeting for locations within the United States.
• Session control: The default session duration for proxies is set at 10 minutes, or it can end after 60 seconds of inactivity, if no requests are made. Oxylabs provides the flexibility for proxy users to modify the session time for their proxies, with the option to extend a session up to a maximum of 30 minutes.
• IP whitelist: Up to 10 residential IPs can be whitelisted for use.
• Shared and dedicated proxies: Oxylabs provides shared and dedicated datacenter proxies. The shared datacenter proxies are available across fifteen different countries. Their dedicated proxies includes a pool of 2 million datacenter proxies and an additional 100 thousand ISP proxies.
• Web Unblocker: AI-powered proxy solution is designed for proxy users to effectively access and gather data from websites that implement stringent anti-bot measures. Web Unblocker features automated proxy management, generation of browser fingerprints, automatic retries, and the capability to render JavaScript.
• Dedicated datacenter proxies: Dedicated datacenter proxies are divided into two categories: self-service and enterprise proxies. Self-service datacenter proxies are located in 8 countries and offer targeting at the country level. On the other hand, enterprise dedicated datacenter proxies are available in over 180 countries, providing more granular targeting options at the country, state, and city levels.

Pricing:

• Free trial: Registered companies are eligible for a 7-day free trial, while individuals can take advantage of a 3-day money-back guarantee for all proxy types.
• Pay-as-you-go: Available for residential and mobile proxies.

3. Smartproxy

Smartproxy is a premium proxy server provider, known for its extensive IP pool and a wide array of proxy types. It offers coverage in over 195 locations globally, including any city in the world and 50 US states.

Features:

• ZIP code targeting for residential proxies: Smartproxy enables users to use postal code targeting with its residential proxies.
• Rotating and sticky sessions: Users can rotate IPs with each request or maintain the same IP for up to 30 minutes.
• Dedicated IP addresses: Dedicated ISP Pay per IP, mobile, and residential proxies.
• OS filtering by iOS & Android: This feature allows users to filter and choose proxies based on the operating system of the mobile devices.
• Shared and dedicated datacenter proxies: Smartproxy offers 400,000 dedicated static and rotating datacenter IPs from the United States, along with 100,000 static shared datacenter IP addresses available globally.

Pricing:

• Free trial: Smartproxy offers 14-day money-back option for its proxy network.
• Refund: Smartproxy provides refunds to customers who have used less than 20% of their chosen proxy plan’s data traffic or 1 GB, whichever is lower.
• Pay-As-You-Go option: This payment model is available for residential and mobile proxies.

4. Nimble

Nimble provides specialized web scraping APIs for various purposes, including SERP API and eCommerce API. These APIs come equipped with integrated residential proxies and proxy unblocker technology. You have the flexibility to utilize Nimble’s residential proxies either with your in-house scraper or with another third-party scraper.

Features:

• Rotating IPs: The residential proxy pool automatically assigns rotating IP addresses.
• Dedicated pool: Offer private IP addresses that are not shared.
• City and state selection: Enable users to select IP addresses from specific cities and states.

Pricing:

• Free trial: Offer a 7 day free trial.
• Pay-As-You-Go option: They don’t provide a pay-as-you-go plan.

4. NetNut

NetNut is one of the main provider in the rotating proxy server market. While it may not be as widely known as Oxylabs, Smartproxy or Bright Data, NetNut is a common choice among proxy users for web scraping tasks. The pricing of NetNut’s entry-level proxy network might be might be expensive for businesses operate with limited budgets.

Features:

• Rotating and sticky IPs: Residential and datacenter proxy networks allocate both sticky and rotating IP addresses.
• Dedicated pool: ISP (static residential proxies), mobile, and residential proxy services offer private IP addresses that are not shared publicly or widely distributed.
• Shared pool: Datacenter proxy pool consists of shared IP addresses.
• City & state selection: ISP, rotating residential and mobile proxies allow users to select IP addresses from specific cities and states.
• Personalized IP rotation: Mobile and residential proxies offer users the flexibility of a custom rotation feature, allowing them to tailor the rotation of IP addresses according to their specific needs.

Pricing:

• Free trial: NetNut does offer a 7 day free trial for its proxy services.
• Pay-As-You-Go option: They don’t provide a pay-as-you-go plan.

5. IPRoyal

IPRoyal is primarily focused on individual customers, but the provider is enhancing its offerings to attract more corporate upscale customers. Although its proxy pool is smaller compared to premium providers like Oxylabs, Bright Data, and Smartproxy, this proxy provider offers advanced feature proxies from multiple countries. IPRoyal ranks as one of the more affordable choices for rotating residential IPs when compared to other providers.

Features:

• IP rotation: The frequency of proxy rotation varies based on the plan purchased. In the 1-day plan, manual rotation of IP addresses is possible every 6 minutes. For longer plans of 30, 60, and 90 days, IP addresses can be rotated either manually or automatically at the same interval.
• Auto-rotate toggle: Automatically changes mobile proxies at set intervals. The interval can be customized based on your needs.
• Region and city level targeting: This feature is exclusively available for rotating residential proxies.

Pricing:

• Free trial: 24-hour refund
• Pay-as-you-go option: Available

6. PrivateProxy.

PrivateProxy., a Hong Kong-based IT company, specializes in Cloud IT services. Their offerings include datacenter, ISP, and rotating residential proxies. The provider is dedicated to delivering premium private proxies.

Features:

• Static and rotating proxies: The vendor divides its proxy offerings into two primary categories based on the type of IP rotation: static and rotating. This classification is applied across both datacenter and residential proxies.
• Synchronous requests: Enables users to send multiple requests to the same website and receive several responses simultaneously when using rotating proxies.
• Locations: The provider offers proxies that are located in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Kazakhstan, Hong Kong, and South Africa.

Pricing:

• Free trial: They offer a free trial of 3 private proxies. Additionally, for a backconnect rotating proxy trial, you can choose the beginner package, which includes 200,000 requests for free over a 2-day period.
• Pay-as-you-go option: Unavailable

7. ProxyEmpire

ProxyEmpire offers rotating proxy servers for data extraction and automation activities, including mobile, residential and datacenter IPs with VIP integration support.

Features:

• Rotating IPs: ProxyEmpire offers ISP proxies in 21 countries supporting both HTTP and SOCKS5 protocols. They have 110K rotating datacenter proxies across 13 countries. Additionally, there are 4 million 4G mobile proxies, both rotating and static, and 9 million residential proxies equipped with advanced filtering options such as region, city, and ASN/ISP targeting.
• IP rotation: IP rotation settings can be configured to switch the IP address at intervals ranging from 90 seconds to one hour.
• VIP: Every residential proxy plan offered by the provider includes support for VIP integration.

Pricing:

Free trial: ProxyEmpire does not have a trial period. Instead, they offer a trial package for $1.97, which consists of 100 MB of residential proxy data and 50 MB of mobile proxy data.

• Pay-as-you-go: Available for rotating residential and rotating mobile proxies.

What is a premium proxy server?

A premium proxy server provides more advanced capabilities than standard proxy services. This includes dedicated IP addresses, advanced unblocking methods such as IP rotation, control over sessions, and CAPTCHA solving.

Transparency statement

AIMultiple serves numerous emerging tech companies, including Bright Data, Smartproxy and Oxylabs.

More on proxy server

• Top 10 Proxy Service Providers of 2023 for Web Scraping
• Top 10 Residential Proxy Service Providers of 2023
• The Best SOCKS5 Proxy Providers of 2023

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