Bright Data review

Bright Data was founded in 2014 as a division of Hola, a popular VPN service. It was initially named Luminati Networks and, in 2017, was sold separately from Hola. It rebranded as Bright Data in 2021 to reflect its focus on helping users scrape data with its proxy services.

This platform offers a broad network of proxy IPs. Over 20,000 enterprises use Bright Data’s residential, datacenter, and mobile proxies to bypass geo-restrictions and scrape crucial data. We’re reviewing Bright Data to help you decide whether to join these customers. Our review will cover its features, pricing, support, ease of use, and other crucial characteristics.

• Want to try Bright Data? Check out the website here

Plans and Pricing

Bright Data has complex pricing plans, which is expected because it offers different types of proxies. Let’s break down its pricing below.

Users pay for residential proxies according to the bandwidth they consume. Bright Data offers three standard plans: $499 monthly for 69 GB, $999 monthly for 158 GB, and $1999 monthly for 339 GB. Alternatively, you can choose the pay-as-you-go option for $8.4 per GB. The drawback is that the pay-as-you-go plan is more expensive in the long run ($8.4 per GB compared to $7.14 per GB on the standard 69 GB plan).

Users pay for datacenter proxies also according to bandwidth. The standard plans are $499 monthly for 1 TB, $999 monthly for 2 TB, and $1999 monthly for 5 TB. The pay-as-you-go option with no monthly commitment costs $0.6 per GB.

Bright Data offers three standard plans for ISP proxies: $499 monthly for 31 GB, $99 monthly for 71 GB, or $1999 monthly for 152 GB. The pay-as-you-go plan with no monthly commitment costs $18.75 per GB.

Mobile proxies cost the same as residential proxies: $499 monthly for 69 GB, $999 monthly for 158 GB, and $1999 monthly for 339 GB. The pay-as-you-go option also costs the same $8.4 per GB.

Bright Data offers a sophisticated Web Scraper API with three standard plans: Growth for $499 monthly, Business for $999 monthly, and Premium for $1999 monthly. The higher your plan, the greater the scraping requests available each month. If you don’t want a monthly commitment, you can choose the $1 per 1,000 requests pay-as-you-go plan.

Bright Data offers pre-built datasets, a unique feature many proxy platforms don’t offer. Starting from $500 per month, these datasets allow businesses to access ready-made data instead of scraping them from scratch at higher costs. Available datasets include Yahoo Finance stock market data, Zillow real estate listings, and LinkedIn profiles.

This platform doesn’t offer any free proxy plan. However, it offers a 7-day free trial for registered companies. This trial period is short, but it helps users test the features before committing to a monthly or pay-as-you-go plan.

Features

Accessing Bright Data’s features starts with registration. To sign up as a new user, you need a work email address (generic email addresses like Gmail.com and Yahoo.com won’t work). You'll receive a verification email after signing up and creating a password. Click on the link in this email to immediately access your dashboard.

Let’s dive deeper into Bright Data’s features:

Residential Proxies

Bright Data offers proxy IP addresses sourced from physical devices worldwide. People agree to add their devices to the network for a benefit, such as a VPN subscription. Bright Data’s users can then choose one of the IPs to bypass geo-restrictions and scrape data.

This platform offers over 72 million residential proxies, with the most popular locations being the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Italy, and Australia. Residential proxies rotate IP addresses, i.e., change with each browsing session.

During our test, the residential proxies had excellent speed and reliability. Both static and rotating proxies allowed us to surf the web seamlessly and bypass strict website geo-restrictions. You can manage all proxies from your user dashboard, deploying new ones or removing existing ones at will.

Bright Data gives you significant control over your proxies. You can choose proxies from specific cities, states, and countries. The robust IP network, especially in Europe and North America, makes it easier to bypass geo-restrictions. If an IP address can’t successfully bypass the restriction, Bright Data rotates different IP addresses until it succeeds.

ISP Proxies

ISP proxies are static residential proxies sourced directly from Internet Service Providers (ISP). Unlike residential IPs that rotate with each browsing session, a static ISP proxy is assigned only to you. You can keep this static IP for as long as your subscription lasts.

Bright Data offers a network of 700,000+ static IPs, with the most popular locations being the U.S., U.K., Germany, Italy, and France. The U.S. has the highest number of static IPs – 144,000 – while all other countries have less than 10,000 each. This smaller number is expected because of the higher costs and difficulty of obtaining IP addresses directly from ISPs.

The static ISP proxies offered excellent speed and reliability during our test. Bright Data lets users manage static IPs directly from their Control Panel or an external API. The user-friendly Control Panel makes it easy to deploy and organize a large number of proxies.

ISP proxies are more reliable than typical residential proxies because they don’t change frequently. Using one IP address for a long period makes it easier to browse anonymously and break through geographical and IP website restrictions. Once you bypass a site’s restriction with a static IP, you can continue accessing the site with that IP. In contrast, rotating proxies mean you can bypass a site’s restriction today and struggle to bypass it tomorrow with a new IP address. Expectedly, Bright Data’s static IPs cost more than rotating IPs.

Datacenter Proxies

Datacenter proxies are sourced from secondary corporations rather than ISPs. A server (in a datacenter) with a unique IP acts as the intermediary between your device and a website you want to access. You can request a shared or dedicated datacenter IP: a dedicated IP is more reliable in circumventing site blockades.

Bright Data offers datacenter proxies in 98 countries, unlike residential proxies available in 195 countries. You can select your datacenter proxy by specific city or country. These proxies are fast because your browser request is sent directly from the proxy server to the target website, unlike residential proxies that can bounce through several devices before reaching the target site.

The drawback is that datacenter proxies are more vulnerable to detection because of their less diverse IP range. They are cost-effective but less efficient at bypassing geo-restrictions than residential and ISP proxies.

Mobile proxies

Bright Data’s pool includes over 7 million mobile proxy IPs. These residential IPs are sourced from mobile devices across the globe, with the U.S., India, Japan, and Italy having the largest share in Bright Data’s pool. You can use these IPs to surf the web from the eyes of real mobile users. You can choose IPs from 3G, 4G, or 5G networks.

During our test, Bright Data’s mobile proxies provided top-notch browsing speed. We tested IPs from different countries, and they worked reliably. Usually, mobile IPs are more expensive than residential IPs from PCs, but Bright Data charges the same amount for both.

Web Scraper API

Web scraping is one of the most common use cases for proxy servers. Some businesses need to scrape massive amounts of data from a website, e.g., pricing data from retail sites. However, many websites discourage scraping by implementing geographical and IP restrictions. Proxy IPs let businesses bypass these restrictions and scrape their desired data.

As a first-rate platform, Bright Data doesn’t stop at providing proxy IP addresses for web scraping. It also provides APIs that let businesses automate data scraping. It has ready-made scraping APIs for websites like Facebook, Amazon, LinkedIn, Zillow, and TikTok. Several websites, such as Facebook, have filed lawsuits to block these scraping APIs, but Bright Data has countersued and prevailed.

Suppose you run a price comparison site that helps people find the best e-commerce deals. You can use Bright Data’s APIs to automate data scraping from Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and other popular e-commerce sites. You’ll then clean the scraped data and display it on your price comparison website.

Bright Data's APIs can handle bulk scraping requests, convert raw HTML into structured data, and validate data automatically. Pricing depends on the number of API requests you make.

Dataset Marketplace

You must not always scrape data from scratch. Bright Data offers an alternative: ready-made datasets sourced from different websites. It provides pre-built datasets from many websites like LinkedIn, Pinterest, Crunchbase, Amazon, and Redfin. You can also get categorical datasets, such as car prices, housing prices, crime rates, NBA players' stats, etc.

Pre-built datasets reduce headaches for businesses. Instead of scraping data from scratch and waiting a while to access it, you can access datasets already scraped by others. Pricing starts from $500 monthly for 200,000 records.

Ease of Use

Bright Data has an intuitive interface you’ll likely enjoy using. The left menu has all the features you need to access, and the right side is the main dashboard. Many features are neatly arranged across the dashboard to make them easy to find. With a white background and a few contrasting colors, Bright Data’s interface looks visually pleasing.

You can access this proxy software primarily from the desktop interface. There’s also a Google Chrome extension that lets you seamlessly change proxy locations. Bright Data's user-friendliness is unmatched by most rivals. 

Customer Support

One of Bright Data’s strengths is its top-notch support. You can contact its support team 24/7 and receive a response in less than 30 minutes. It offers support via live chat and email, but there’s no telephone support.

Bright Data also provides extensive documentation and user manuals to help users figure out solutions to their problems. The website’s Docs section contains detailed guides for all features and an API reference that helps users write effective data scraping commands.

We found Bright Data’s documentation easy to follow and helpful for our test. For instance, we followed the web scraping tutorial to harvest data from an external website.

The Competition

The proxy software market is very competitive. There’s no shortage of rivals to Bright Data, and the ones we’d like to highlight are Smartproxy, Oxylabs, and Webshare.

Smartproxy is an excellent proxy provider offering residential, ISP, and datacenter proxies. It's a cost-effective alternative with a large pool of 55 million+ IPs across 195 countries. However, Bright Data has a larger IP pool and offers more features and customizability.

Oxylabs offers a larger IP pool, with 100 million+ addresses compared to Bright Data’s 72 million. Both platforms have similar offerings, but Bright Data provides some features not available in the other, such as a dataset marketplace and a web IDE. Bright Data also has a more responsive support team than Oxylabs, according to our experience when testing both.

Webshare is one of the best alternatives that go head-to-head with Bright Data. It’s a more affordable tool, which is crucial for small businesses. It offers effective APIs to scrape data en masse just like Bright Data. However, Webshare has a much smaller pool of IP addresses: roughly 30 million across 50 countries, compared to Bright Data’s 72 million across 195 countries.

Final Verdict

Bright Data is a one-stop proxy provider you can rely on. It offers a broad range of IP addresses and additional features like web scraping APIs and pre-built datasets. This platform provides all you need to bypass website restrictions and scrape needed data. However, it has some drawbacks, mainly its high cost compared to other proxy providers.

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