Smartproxy proxy service review

It may not have quite the profile of the big-name proxy service competition, as Smartproxy is a relative newcomer starting in 2018. It still is an excellent platform which delivers a pile of proxy features and functionality for a very fair price for its over 50,000 users.

The company's 50+ million rotating residential IPs across over 195 worldwide locations in every country you can think of should cover you for most applications, for instance, and there are also 40K regular US Datacenter proxies (with dedicated proxies if you need them.) There are also city specific proxies for all major cities, everywhere from Berlin, Houston, Moscow to London.

Also, don’t think that you’re restricted by concurrency limits or per-proxy pricing, either. You're able to use the entire pool with unlimited connections, and the Smartproxy website claims 'your social media bot can juggle thousands of accounts per minute.'

Unlimited connection requests don't help you much if they're blocked, but Smartproxy offers various ways to avoid that trouble. Its '100% successful' Search Engine Proxies enable hassle-free Google scraping, while its X Browser generates unique user profiles to reduce the chance of IP bans or captchas. There’s also over 10 million mobile proxies on 3G, 4G, and even 5G networks.

If you've already got your own preferred scrapers, SEO or proxy managers, no problem, Smart Proxy works with just about anything. Its integration page points users to setup guides for ScrapeBox, Octoparse, Apify, Jarvee, Follow Like, NikeSlayer and a whole lot more.

Plans and pricing

Smartproxy prices start at just $7.50+VAT billing monthly for its Teeny Dedicated Datacenter plan. While the price is low, that gets you only 3 IPs, but there's no traffic limit and you're allowed unlimited targets. All plans work on HTTP(s) and SOCKS5 protocols.

Smartproxy's other plans have higher monthly prices for more proxies.  The Mini Datacenter plan gives you 50 IPs to spread around its 40,000 rotating US datacenter proxies, for instance, with one proxy user at a cost of $95 +VAT monthly. 

Need more? The Main plan delivers 200 IPs for $320+VAT per month. There are also Enterprise plans available that start with 500 IPs monthly for $750, and can scale to even higher levels if needed. 

Residential proxies start at $12.50/month, giving you 15GB of traffic (that's $12.50 per GB.) As with the datacenter plans, opting for a higher subscription can save you money. The Regular plan offers 50GB of traffic for $400 (that's $8 per GB), and if you ask Smartproxy for a quote, the company says it can offer 1TB or more traffic at 'industry leading prices.' 

A limitation is that there's no free plan and no trial, but you are protected by a 3-day money-back guarantee. Hand over your cash, and if the service doesn't live up to its promises, ask within 3 days and you'll get a refund. Also, there are only monthly prices, and we did not find discounts for committing to the annual plan. 

There's support for paying via credit cards, PayPal, Google Pay and also Apple Pay.

These are fair prices, generally less than you'll pay with Bright Data and some other top names. Although if your needs are simple, you can get started more cheaply elsewhere. Squid Proxies, for instance, gives you 10 dedicated data center proxies for $24 a month, with no bandwidth limits.

Getting started

Signing up with Smartproxy gets you access to its web-based 'smartdashboard', where you can view and manage your products.

We started in the Authentication section, which allowed us to define how we could access our proxies. Smartproxy defaults to username:password authentication by default, but it also supports allow-listed IPs (potentially more convenient as there's no need to set up login details, Smartproxy knows your requests are legitimate simply because they come from your IP address.) 

It’s certainly an advantage to have both (for example, competitor Squidproxiyes only has IP-based authentication), however, Smartproxy only allows very short lists on the lesser plans. Its Micro option on the Residential Plans only allows a single allow-listed IP address, for instance, and even the next tier up, Starter, limits the account to just three. 

Smartproxy's Endpoint Generator uses your authentication and other preferred options (location, rotating or 'sticky' session type, endpoint:port or HTTP output format). It can also generate a proxy list. It’s as easy as copying and pasting this into your preferred software (or savinge and importing it as a CSV or TXT file) and you're good to go.

Smartproxy Apps

Smartproxy also supplies some custom apps of its own to help you get more from your proxies.

X Browser is a multi-session browser for Windows and Mac which enables creating multiple Chrome profiles, each with a different fingerprint. Profiles can be customized, via options for a timezone, OS type, webRTC, proxy location and more. Once it's set up, you're able to open new Chrome windows for those profiles, each assigned a different IP, with a click.

Smart Scraper also has a Chrome extension  which, in theory, allows you to select and extract elements from a web page, then save them in JSON and CSV, no coding required. It is easy enough to add to the Chrome browser, with a link provided directly from the SmartProxy page. From there, you can specify a location, and a choice of proxy rotation. A subscription plan is required for use.  

Proxy Generator is a Windows and Mac desktop app for generating proxy lists of up to 49,999 lines.

There's also a simple Chrome and Firefox extension which enables testing the proxies direct from your browser. In a click or two you can set up your authentication, choose a location, a session type (rotating proxies or 'sticky') and get connected.

We weren't impressed by the non-functional Smart Scraper, and you may not need all (or maybe any) of these apps. X Browser and the browser extensions worked well for us, though, and it's good to see a service which gives its users these extra options.

Support

Smartproxy's support starts on its website, where there's a simple FAQ, some more in-depth tutorials, and a scattering of code examples (C#, Golang, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby). We also found a blog which gets multiple new articles a month, and also case studies.

Although the individual articles are generally short, there's more content than you might expect. The Setup Guide section alone has eight areas (Browser, Operating System, Smartphone, Proxy Managers, Sneaker Bots, Social Media Tools, Scrapers and SEO Tools.) Choosing a Browser took us to more tutorials for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Internet Explorer, Ghost Browser, Smartproxy's own browser extensions, and others including FoxyProxy and SwitchyOmega. Overall, there is plenty to take in.

If you can't find what you need on the support site, you could turn to live chat on the website. That didn't help us very much: we posted a chat message, waited for a few minutes, the site said it would reply via email, instead, and we still hadn't received anything twelve hours later.

You could just send an email, instead, though, and when Smartproxy's Support did reply, its answers were helpful and told us precisely what we needed to know. A final option is that there is a Discord community option to solve your issue with some fellow user input.

Final verdict

Smartproxy isn't the most powerful proxy service, or the cheapest, and also lacks a free trial. However, its vast proxy network including mobile proxies, and handy library of management apps along with 24/7 help available via chat should deliver everything you need for most applications. 

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