The Ultimate Comparison of Top Rotating Proxy Services in 2024

Web data holds immense value, yet many websites implement measures to prevent their data from being scraped, aiming to prevent unauthorized data scraping. When requests originate from a single IP address, it becomes straightforward for websites to block them. What strategies can companies employ to bypass these restrictions and efficiently gather web data on a large scale?

Rotating proxies are a common method to circumvent these anti-scraping measures. This article delves into the top providers of rotating proxy services, exploring their main features and pricing models.

Top 7 rotating proxy providers of 2024: features, prices & performance analysis

This article focuses solely on evaluating proxies that provide auto-rotating capabilities.

Notes:

Flexible rotating options*: Timed rotation (every 5/10/15…/60 minutes), rotation with each request, or sticky.

Starts from**: As every proxy provider listed in the table offers rotating residential proxies, we assess and compare their pricing specifically for residential proxies. The initial cost for residential proxies is determined from the smallest package available.

1. Smartproxy

Smartproxy’s rotating proxy pool consists of residential, mobile and shared datacenter IP addresses.

Features:

• Residential proxies enable targeting at the city and ZIP code level, while datacenter proxies allow for targeting at the country level, and mobile proxies provide targeting based on ASN and country level.
• Residential proxies enable users to rotate IP addresses with each request or maintain the same one for up to 30 minutes.
• Mobile proxies can be configured to work with tools that support HTTP(S) proxies.

Pricing:

• Pay-as-you-go: Only residential and mobile proxies provide the option to pay based on usage.
• Free trial: Get 100MB free trial credits to explore Smartproxy’s residential proxies. Smartproxy provides a free trial for proxies upon submission of information about your company.

2. Bright Data

Bright Data is a proxy service provider that features four types of rotating proxies: residential, datacenter, ISP, and mobile. Bright Data provides an open-source Proxy Manager, allowing clients to set the number of requests allowed before changing the IP, determine the time interval between IP changes, and specify the number of IPs in their rotation pool.

Features:

• For residential, datacenter, ISP, and mobile proxies, both shared and dedicated proxy pools are offered.
• You can target specific locations using criteria such as City, State, Zip code, or ASN with residential and mobile proxies.

Pricing:

• Pay-as-you-go: Available for all proxy types.
• Free trial: 7-day trial for registered companies.

3. Oxylabs

Oxylabs offers rotating ISP (static residential proxies), residential, and mobile proxies. The primary distinction between Oxylabs’ Rotating ISP Proxies and Residential Proxies lies in the session duration. With Rotating ISP Proxies, you have the option to retain the same IP address for as long as 5 hours.

Oxylabs’ dedicated datacenter proxies themselves do not come with a rotation feature. However, they provide a tool called Proxy Rotator, which automatically rotates proxies each time you send a request to the target site.

Features:

• Mobile Proxies rotate their IP address with each request by default. However, the proxy provider offers users the option to maintain the same IP address for a period of up to 30 minutes.
• For rotating ISP proxies, the default session duration is 10 minutes. After this period, a new IP address is automatically assigned. If requests are paused for 60 seconds or if the IP address goes offline, the system will automatically allocate a new proxy IP.
• The Rotating ISP proxy network covers 20 locations and provides targeting options at the country level, coordinate level, and ASN level.

Pricing:

• Free trial: They provide two types of trials for customers: a 7-day trial for those signing up on behalf of a company, and a 3-day money-back guarantee for individuals signing up in their personal capacity. The pay-as-you-go option is non-refundable.
• Pay-as-you-go: For residential and mobile proxies.

4. Nimble

Nimble provides rotating residential proxies, featuring a pool of dedicated IP addresses. These residential proxies are integrated with Nimble’s web scraping APIs, which covers various domains like SERP, eCommerce, web, and maps, along with unlocker proxy technology. Users have the flexibility to employ these residential proxies either with their own in-house scraper or with third-party scraping APIs.

Features:

• Includes coverage for 195 locations, enabling targeting at the country, city, and state levels.
• Provides private residential proxies for exclusive use.
• Features residential proxies with automatic IP address rotation as a standard option, and includes sticky sessions which rotate after a 10-minute period of inactivity.
• Supports both HTTP and SOCKS5 protocols for network communication.

Pricing:

• Free trial: 7-day free trial

5. IPRoyal

IPRoyal offers rotating residential proxies with the flexibility to set any rotation interval up to 24 hours directly in the widget. The option for auto-rotating proxies is exclusively available for Royal residential proxies. The proxy provider allows users to manually rotate mobile IPs by clicking the ‘rotate IP’ button, which is available every 3:40 minutes for Lithuanian proxies and every 6 minutes for UK and US proxies. Additionally, there’s an auto-rotate feature that, when enabled, automatically changes your IP address every 3 minutes. However, this auto-rotate option is not included in the 1-day plan.

They allow you to purchase the exact amount of traffic you require, without providing monthly proxy plans. However, a notable limitation is that IPRoyal’s proxy pool size is relatively smaller when compared to premium providers like Bright Data, Smartproxy, and Oxylabs.

Features:

• Allow you to select IP addresses based on specific cities or states.
• Automatically replace your residential IP proxy at predetermined intervals. You can choose preferred frequency for auto-rotation such as every 1, 10, or 30 minutes.
• You have the option to utilize the same residential proxy for as long as required, with a maximum duration of up to 24 hours.

Pricing:

• Free trial: If you’re registering an account on behalf of a company, you might qualify for a free trial period.
• Pay-as-you-go: Does not provide a pay-as-you-go option.

5. NetNut

NetNut offers rotating residential, shared datacenter and mobile proxy pools for data extraction activities. The proxy service provider changes proxies for each individual session by default.

Features:

• Their datacenter proxy pool is comprised of shared IP addresses.
• Residential, datacenter, and mobile proxies offer city-level targeting capabilities.
• Provide a custom rotation feature for both Residential and Mobile proxies.

Pricing:

• Free trial: 7-day
• Pay-as-you-go: Unavailable

6. SOAX

SOAX’s rotating proxy pool consist of residential and ISP IP addresses. The provider US-based rotating ISP proxies and allow sessions to last up to 24 hours, except in the state of Texas, USA.

Features:

• You have the option to receive a new IP with each request or configure it to change starting from a minimum of 1 minute.
• The rotating ISP IP address will automatically switch after 15 minutes of no activity.
• SOAX also offers its clients the option to manually change a proxy without having to wait for the automatic IP rotation.

Pricing:

• Free trial: Provides a trial for $1.99 with a duration of three days and includes 100 MB of data usage.
• Pay-as-you-go: Unavailable

7. Infatica

Infatica offers rotating residential and datacenter proxies with city and ASN targeting.

Features:

• Various proxy rotation settings are available, including timed rotation (every 5 and up to 60 minutes), rotation upon each request, or a sticky option.

Pricing:

• Free trial: 3-day Trial for only $1.99 with 100 MB of traffic.
• Pay-as-you-go: Unavailable

What is a rotating proxy?

A rotating proxy is a type of proxy server that assigns a different IP address from its pool of IPs to each of your internet connection.

Why should you use rotating proxies?

1. Automatic IP rotation: Automatically assigning IP addresses without any manual input from the user. Rotation can happen based on various triggers like the number of connection requests, for each new sessions, time intervals.
2. Manual IP rotation: Users decides when to change the IP addresses by manually selecting a new IP from a pool provided by the proxy service provider.
3. Time-based IP rotation: Automatically rotate IP addresses based on predetermined time intervals. The cycle of rotating IP addresses continues as long as the user is connected to the proxy pool.
4. Session-based IP rotation: IP addresses change with each session. When a new session begins, the proxy server assigns a different IP address.
5. Random IP rotation: Time-based and session-based rotations follow a predictable pattern. Random IP rotation changes IPs in unpredictable and non-sequential manner.
6. Rotation through proxy server: The proxy server automatically manages and rotates IP addresses based on specific rules.

What type of proxies can be rotated?

The two main types of proxies used for rotation are datacenter proxy and residential proxy.

1. Residential Proxy

• Residential proxies have the benefit of assigning residential IPs for each connection request.
• Residential IPs are owned by internet service providers and are registered to a particular home address.
• Since residential IPs are verified and associated with a real person, they are less likely to get blocked out from target websites as compared to datacenter IPs.
• Ensures better access than data centre proxy for web scraping and similar activities.

Check out Top 10 Residential Proxy Providers of 2023 to understand residential proxy vendor landscape.

2. Mobile Proxy

• IP addresses are sources from mobile IPs.
• Provides a high degree of anonymity and privacy.
• Rotating mobile proxies change users’ IP addresses periodically.

3. Datacenter Proxy

• Uses a different datacenter proxy server for each connection request.
• Assigns an IP address from the data centre in the proxy pool. These are not tied to any specific internet service provider but to the organization which owns the data centre.
• Keeps its users anonymous by changing their IP addresses, however all the IP addresses it assigns can be traced back to the organization owning the data centre.
• Carries a risk of the target website banning all IPs originating from the concerned data centre.

Is it legal?

Rotating proxies are legal in most of the countries. 2 things are important determining legality of your proxy usage:

• How are proxies acquired? Malware infected residential computers can be provided as proxies by malicious actors. Provision or use of such proxies would be illegal, therefore we recommend working with legitimate proxy providers. We have a regularly updated list of proxy providers
• How are proxies used? For example, using them to launch denial of service attacks or to collect personal information would be illegal.

Please note that this is not legal advice. We recommend users to get legal advice beforehand on the intended use to ensure no legal laws are being broken. 

Further reading

• Top 7 Proxy Providers of 2023: Pricing & Features Compared
• Top 10 Residential Proxy Service Providers of 2023
• Proxy Pricing Benchmark: Lowest Price Proxy Services in 2023

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