10 Best Rotating Proxy Services of 2023 – Blackdown

Using a proxy service to mask your IP is a great idea when you want to scrap data, verify ads, or simply hide your online identity while browsing the internet. While dedicated proxies tend to be better in terms of performance, rotating proxies are a much better choice if you want to prevent others from tracking your real location, or your data. That’s because rotating proxy services can assign you a new IP every few minutes, which makes it very difficult for third-party entities to discover your real identity.

Rotating proxies tend to be available in two variants – mobile and residential. Both types work in a similar way and use IPs that come from real users, however, the source of these addresses differs. We won’t go into the technical details right now but suffice it to say that either of them can be used to fulfill the same purpose. Provided, of course, the IP addresses come from a reliable provider of rotating proxies, which are sometimes also referred to as backconnect proxies.

Top Rotating Proxies Providers

A quick Google search for rotating proxies will reveal dozens upon dozens of results, so finding a good provider can be a bit of a hassle if you’re not already familiar with these types of companies. But don’t worry because we already took it upon ourselves to test the most popular rotating proxy services on the market so you won’t have to. In order to make things even easier for you, we put together a comprehensive list based on our findings. Here’s a quick summary of our picks:

• Smartproxy – Perfect for newcomers thanks to its low prices and many ease-of-use features.
• Bright Data – The absolute best provider of rotating proxies on the market right now. Tons of great features, easy to use, and has the largest network.
• Shifter – Large network and plenty of packages to choose from, some of which are surprisingly cheap.
• Oxylabs – A pretty good alternative to Bright Data with a smaller network but some interesting optional tools and services.
• Rayobyte – Very fast and cheap proxies but the network is extremely limited.
• Geonode – Much smaller network compared to the other premium providers but its prices are a bit more accessible.
• Storm Proxies – Limited network but very fast, cheap, and offers three methods of rotating IPs.
• NetNut – Relies on DiviNetworks instead of a regular P2P network and offers a 7-day free trial.
• Proxyrack – A cheaper alternative to Smartproxy that comes with a few drawbacks but can still get the job done.
• RotatingProxies – A decent option if you’re looking primarily for US-based proxies.

Remember – You may notice that there is a significant price difference between some of the companies featured on our list. Although it may seem tempting, we don’t recommend jumping straight to the cheapest options because the most expensive ones tend to offer a lot more features and resources.

Smartproxy is a great option for beginners thanks to its relatively low prices and ease-of-use features. While its network isn’t quite as big as some of the other entries on this list, the company maintains a very respectable pool of over 10 million rotating proxies. Smartproxy is one of the only major players on the market that offers backconnect proxies specifically designed for coping sneakers. Naturally, the proxies have many other uses like affiliate testing, travel fare aggregation, data extraction, and more.

Smartproxy guarantees an uptime of 99.99% and average response times of around 3.1 seconds for its rotating proxies. The company stresses the fact that its proxies don’t share a subnetwork, which makes them immune to blanket bans. Similar to the companies we’ve covered previously, Smartproxy uses a pricing model based on bandwidth usage so there are no limits to how many sessions you can run at the same time or how many countries you can target.

Plans for All Budgets

If you’re looking for a provider with a relatively cheap entry point, Smartproxy might be right up your alley. The company charges $75 per month for its basic package, which comes with 5 GB of traffic included. There are three other plans to choose from with prices ranging between $200 and $600 per month. While not the cheapest option on our list, it’s clear that Smartproxy is trying to cater to a larger audience instead of focusing primarily on big businesses like some of its competitors.

However, if $75/mo is a bit outside your price range, we recommend using our coupon code to get 15% off your first package of residential proxies. The coupon can also be used to get a discount on datacenter proxies but keep in mind that you can only take advantage of the offer once per account, so you’ll need to choose between one or the other. Regardless of which type of plan you choose, signing up with Smartproxy is virtually risk-free for a limited time because the company offers a 3-day money-back guarantee.

Bright Data is by far the largest and most popular provider of rotating proxies right. The company has well over 40 million backconnect proxies at its disposal, split between its residential (35 million) and mobile (7 million) networks. In addition, it also offers a steadily growing network of datacenter proxies to boot. In other words, you can find every type of proxy here and the service is extremely easy to use thanks to the intuitive Proxy Manager and Chrome browser extension.

Bright Data is considered a premium proxy provider so expect the prices to be fairly high, though not unreasonable considering what you get in return. If you’re looking for residential rotating proxies, you can get a basic package for $500 a month, which includes 40 GB of traffic usage. Other providers force you to pay per IP but paying for traffic is a much better option in this case because it gives you access to Bright Data’s entire network that spans close to 200 countries. If you feel like the entry price is outside your budget, don’t hesitate to use our coupon code to get 50% off your first month. Simply deposit $250 for a package of rotating residential proxies and you’ll receive the remaining $250 for free.

If you’re looking for mobile rotating proxies, on the other hand, the price is identical but expect to get less traffic in return. That’s likely because mobile proxies are harder to come by, though that may change in the near future as their popularity increases. The mobile proxies Starter plan also comes with a minimum monthly commitment of $500 and includes 17 GB of traffic usage. If you decide to purchase the Starter package make sure to use our coupon code to get a $100 bonus for your first month. In addition, registered companies can also take advantage of a free 7-day trial on both mobile and residential rotating proxies.

The Most Ethical Proxy Provider

Bright Data has a reputation for having some of the best ethical business practices in the industry. The company goes as far as to assign compliance offices to individually vet every new user. This process is meant to prevent users from abusing the network while also giving Bright Data representatives a chance to familiarize themselves with new clients. The process itself isn’t complicated as it only involves having a brief conversation with a representative via Skype or another communication channel and sending in a valid form of identification. Pretty standard stuff.

If you plan on using the coupon codes mentioned earlier, make sure to get in touch with a representative and tell them we sent you. Speaking of coupon codes, we also have one for the static residential network that will grant you 50% off during your first month. Meanwhile, you can use one of our other coupon codes to get a $5 bonus when you first purchase a package of datacenter proxies.

Shifter is a company that strikes a good balance between price and performance. The provider has a very impressive network composed of over 26 million residential backconnect proxies. You can also find other services here like cheap dedicated and shared HTTP proxies, however, these services only include IPs based in the US. If you want access to a worldwide network with proxies in every country, you’ll definitely want to check out the residential network.

Shifter proxies are compatible with any type of software that supports the HTTP/s or Socks 4/5 protocols. That means you can use them for everything ranging from search engines and social media to ticketing and sneaker sites. The proxies are even compatible with certain games, such as Pokemon Go for example. Backconnect proxies are easy to manage thanks to the advanced control panel and the IPs come from various sources, including DSL, digital cable, broadband, and more.

Over a Dozen Packages to Choose From

You’ll need to pay $125 per month for a starter package of rotating proxies or choose from among more than a dozen other plans. Shifter doesn’t charge per bandwidth so the difference between all these plans is the number of proxy ports you get in return. With the starter package, you only get access to 10 but you can get as many as 10,000 if you can afford it so there’s clearly a plan for everyone here.

If you want to use your proxies for very specific purposes like sneaker coping, you may want to look into the special backconnect proxies packages. These plans are more expensive (starting at $250/mo) but the proxies can literally be used for anything. Regardless of which type you choose, the proxies are highly anonymous, rotate every 5 minutes, and allow you to geo-target cities as well as countries.

Oxylabs is another well-known provider that boasts an impressive worldwide network of rotating residential proxies. The network includes well over 30 million IP addresses and although a large portion of them are located in the US and Europe, you can easily find proxies for pretty much every country in the world. Oxylabs also has a fairly large network of datacenter proxies and offers a handful of other services, including static residential proxies, premium Socks5 proxies, and more.

Oxylabs promises that its backconnect proxies can achieve a success rate of up to 90% and that IP bans are nearly inexistent here. Additionally, the company guarantees that customers won’t have to deal with captchas and that you will be able to benefit from unlimited concurrent sessions regardless of which package you pick. All plans also come with session control, city-level targeting, and access to an intuitive all-in-one residential proxy dashboard that allows clients to create sub-users, see detailed proxy usage statistics, whitelist IPs, and more.

A basic package of rotating residential proxies comes with a minimum monthly commitment of $600 and includes 50 GB of traffic. Similar to Bright Data, Oxylabs gives you access to its entire network of proxies. The company’s prices are fairly high, however, the advantage of using Oxylabs is that its network includes both residential and mobile rotating IPs. If you’re part of a big company that’s looking to purchase IPs in bulk, you’ll be happy to know that Oxylabs offers special prices on corporate packages.

Web Scraper and Scraper API

Although Oxylabs can be used for a variety of purposes, the service truly shines when it comes to web scraping. Most people who engage in data extraction tend to use their own tools, which can sometimes be difficult to set up and configure. With that in mind, Oxylabs has developed its own web scraper that can be purchased separately. The company’s data extraction solution doesn’t require you to know how to code or manage proxies. All you need to do is enter the URL of the site you want to scrape and the tool will take care of everything for you.

Another useful tool offered by Oxylabs is the scraper API. The crawler can be used to capture data from any search engine and is just as easy to use as the web scraper. Furthermore, the tool is highly customizable and Oxylabs claims that it has a 100% success rate. Using this tool will only cost you $0.30 for every 1.000 pages crawled, however, the product comes with a $150 per month commitment so it’s not really suitable for small projects.

Rayobyte is a service offered by Rayobyte, a company that started as a one-man project but gradually expanded into a popular and reliable proxy provider. Rayobyte has one of the smallest networks on this list but what the company lacks in size, it more than makes up for in speed. Just as its name indicates, you can expect to find blazing fast-rotating proxies here and, as an added bonus, the prices are extremely low.

Rayobyte offers instant delivery and works with multiple subnets to prevent blanket bans. You can expect support for all three protocols – HTTP, HTTPS, and Socks – and the proxies are guaranteed to work for sensitive tasks, such as sneaker coping. IP whitelisting and username/password authentication are both available and the bandwidth speeds go up to 1 GB/s. Most of the backconnect proxies come from the US but you can also find IP addresses from a few other countries like Germany, Japan, India, Canada, and the UK.

Unlimited Everything

As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, most proxy providers impose limits on either the bandwidth or the number of threads you can use. That’s not really the case here as Rayobyte offers unlimited access to everything. The downside is that the network only includes around 8,000 proxies, which is a much smaller pool compared to other companies on this list. That’s why I wouldn’t recommend Rayobyte for large projects that require a lot of IPs.

However, if you’re a developer looking to do some fast data scraping the service might be worth your time. The cheapest package of rotating proxies will only set you back $11 per month and you can get discounts of up to 20% off by subscribing for several months in advance. The starter plan only includes 5 proxies but you can add more at a rate of a little over $2 per proxy. The company also offers a 2-day trial so you can test the service risk-free before you need to invest anything.

Geonode is a premium provider of rotating residential proxies that offers a pool of over 2 million IPs spread across 130 countries. While the network may be a bit smaller compared to other companies on this list, it is just as reliable and its proxies can be used for everything from ad verification and sales intelligence to Instagram and sneaker sites. The company also has a good amount of proxies in countries that other services struggle with, such as China and Iran.

Geonode has a user-friendly dashboard that displays detailed statistics about your account and an API that’s easy to use even by those who are not particularly tech-savvy. On the other hand, if you are a developer you’ll certainly enjoy the advanced features, speed, and security offered by the API. The service supports both IP whitelisting and username/password authentication along with unrestricted access to its entire pool of IPs. Similarly, you will also be able to use an unlimited number of connections and threads.

Geonode’s entry point sits at $47 per month, which is a bit cheaper than some of its competitors but still fairly pricey all things considered. In return, you get 10 threads and the ability to add more traffic to your plan for a fixed fee. Alternatively, you could go for the $377/mo or even $2,470/mo packages to get more traffic right off the bat or you can contact Geonode to get an estimate for the special enterprise-grade plan.

Additional Products

In addition to backconnect proxies, the company also offers a couple of other products and a few applications. Geonode has both mobile and desktop VPNs along with Firefox and Chrome browser extensions that you can use to become part of the P2P network. The company even has its own proxy toolbar that comes with some pretty interesting features. Among other things, it allows you to set the IP rotation time, emulate various mobile devices, clear cookies, and cache from your browser with one click, and quickly switch between residential and static IPs.

Storm Proxies is one of the smallest companies on our list and also one of the cheapest. The company’s low prices can likely be attributed to the fact that its network consists of only around 70.000 rotating IPs. However, you can expect very good performance from this company, two types of rotating proxies to choose from, and a number of interesting features you can rarely find somewhere else. On the other hand, all the proxies are located in Europe and the US so this isn’t the best option if you’re looking for a provider with an extensive worldwide network.

One of the most unique things you may notice about Storm Proxies is that the company offers both residential and dedicated rotating IPs. Generally speaking, data center IPs are static and aren’t really a good fit for activities that require rotating proxies. However, that’s not the case here as these reverse backconnect rotating proxies work just like the regular ones and have been optimized for all the common use cases you might expect, including data extraction, brand protection, web crawling, and more.

At Storm Proxies, you can also find traditional rotating residential proxies, though the IP pool is somewhat smaller and only includes around 40.000 addresses. Still, these proxies are highly anonymous and you get unlimited bandwidth because, unlike some of the other providers on this list, Storm Proxies charges per IP and connections. One drawback worth noting that you only get 1 access IP with these proxies so you won’t be able to use the service from multiple devices. In the case of data center rotating proxies, you get between 1 and 3 access IPs depending on which plan you choose.

Nearly Unbeatable Prices

The cheapest package of reverse backconnect (data center) proxies will only set you back $39 per month. You are limited to a maximum of 40 threads with the starter plan but you can unlock more by upgrading to one of the higher tiers. These proxies come with three types of rotating IPs – fresh IP with every new HTTP request, 3-minute proxies, and 15-minute proxies. Although data center proxies are limited in certain ways, the fact that you can choose the frequency of the rotations makes them very flexible.

As far as the residential rotating proxies are concerned, these will set you back $50 per month for the basic package. A bit more expensive but still a lot cheaper compared to other providers. You don’t have to worry about the threads here because they are not limited, however, you’ll only have a certain amount of ports at your disposal. Namely, you get 5 ports with the entry plan, 10 with the next tier, and so on. The proxy rotation time here is 5 minutes and can’t be changed.

NetNut is a reputable provider that puts a lot of emphasis on performance and ease of use. The company hasn’t been around for as long as many of its competitors but don’t let its age fool you because the people behind NetNut definitely know what they’re doing. Instead of trying their hand at various types of services like other companies, NetNut specializes exclusively in residential proxies and has a fairly unique network backing up the whole operation.

Instead of using P2P (peer-to-peer) networks like so many other proxy providers, NetNut relies on DiviNetworks, a company that works closely with hundreds of internet service provers around the world. This puts NetNut in the rather unique position of being able to use proxies that come directly from ISPs. In addition to making the proxies more reliable, they also seem to perform better at certain tasks. According to the company, you can achieve a failure rate of less than 1% with its proxies, provided you also have the right architecture on your side.

NetNut’s prices are more or less standard, with a starter package of rotating IPs coming in at $300 per month. The entry plan comes with 20 GB of bandwidth so the price per GB is higher compared to companies like Smartproxy even though the entry point is lower. That said, you can get much lower prices per GB by going with one of the other packages, particularly the last one. If you need more than 1 TB of bandwidth per month, you’ll need to get in touch with the company and ask for an estimate.

Static and Rotating IPs in the Same Package

One of the most interesting features offered by NetNut is the ability to switch between static and rotating IPs almost on the fly. Static IPs are much more likely to get blocked than rotating ones so keep that in mind if you plan to use this feature. Another thing that makes NetNut special is the fact that the company offers a free trial, which is not very common among proxy providers these days. The trial allows you to check out the service for free for up to 7 days so don’t hesitate to check it out.

If you’re looking for a company that does many things similar to Shifter but charges less for its services you may want to give Proxyrack a shot. The provider’s network isn’t nearly as large, however, you do get access to around 2 million IP addresses in 140 geo-locations, which is pretty good. Proxyrack primarily targets businesses and has strict compliance rules in place to prevent users from abusing its IPs.

Proxyrack supports HTTP, HTTPS, and Socks protocols as well as the username/password and IP whitelisting methods of authentication. The company doesn’t include any public proxies with its packages so you can expect all the IPs to be private. Proxyrack is powered by a P2P network that requires residential peers to opt-in and allows their IP address to be used as a proxy. In other words, all the IP addresses come from actual users. However, that only applies if you pick a residential plan because the company also offers datacenter proxies.

Rotating IPs and Sticky Sessions

When you access the Proxyrack dashboard one of the first things you’ll likely notice is that there are two types of proxy ports available. The first type will allow you to get a random new IP every time you initiate a new connection and is a great option for users who want their IPs to rotate constantly. In addition, you can also go with a sticky IP, which lets you hang onto the same address for long periods of time. You can set the interval yourself but keep in mind that it should fall somewhere between 3 and 30 minutes.

As far as the pricing is concerned, Proxyrack offers some very appealing plans. You can get a package of residential rotating proxies for only $80 per month or go for the $120/mo plan if you need high-performance USA-only proxies. The company doesn’t charge per bandwidth, so you can use as much of it as you want, however, you will only have a limited amount of threads at your disposal. Alternatively, if you subscribe to the premium service you can choose to pay per GB of usage instead.

Yes, there is a company out there with a name as obvious as RotatingProxies. Despite the name, however, RotatingProxies also offers dedicated proxies, ticketing proxies, and a few other products and services. The company primarily targets American users so you can expect the vast majority of the proxies to be located in the US. However, you can also get backconnect proxies from other Tier 1 countries like Germany, France, Canada or the UK upon request.

Although RotatingProxies is a fairly small company, it does offer a good amount of useful features. For example, you get unmetered bandwidth with all plans and you can expect the pool of IPs to be refreshed at least once per day in order to weed out the bad proxies and maintain the quality of the network. The IPs are set to rotate every 5 minutes at scheduled times and can be used for web scraping, social media research, ad verification, ticketing, sneaker sites, and more. One drawback is that RotatingProxies doesn’t support Socks protocols so you’ll have to work exclusively with HTTP and HTTPS.

Reasonable Prices

While RotatingProxies allows you to use as much bandwidth as you want, you will only get a limited amount of proxies with each package. The starter plan comes with 10 proxies and will cost you $39 per month, or $3.9/mo per proxy. Not a bad price but you can get that ratio to as low as $1.93 per proxy if you’re willing to spend big and get the $969/mo package, which comes with 500 rotating proxies. In addition to the standard prices, the company also sells bulk proxies in packages that include anywhere from 1,000 to a whopping 10,000 proxies.

How Do Rotating Proxies Work?

Whenever you connect to the internet without a proxy or any other specialized service (like a VPN for example), there’s nothing stopping the website you’re accessing from collecting your personal data. Of course, not all websites are interested in your data but there’s a growing number of companies and entities that most certainly do want to collect it and use it for their own purposes. This personal data can be anything from your real name and credit card details to your geo location and IP address.

A proxy service simply reroutes your connection through an external server and assigns you a new IP in the process. Unless the website you’re targeting uses very specialized tools, it won’t be able to see your real IP or track your location as long as you are using a proxy. That said, using a single proxy doesn’t guarantee that you will remain anonymous for long, particularly when trying to access websites that have good security measures in place. That’s where rotating proxies come in.

Just as their name indicates, these types of proxies rotate between all available IPs found throughout the network and assign you a new one at regular intervals. Depending on the service, you can get a new IP every few minutes or every time you initiate a new session. Generally speaking, the IPs you get with every rotation are completely random, however, certain services can be configured to only assign IP addresses from specific countries, or even cities in some cases.

The best services offer a combination of both methods or allow you to configure how often you want your IP to rotate. It also helps to have a very large pool of IPs in order to make sure that you’ll never get the same address twice even if you rotate constantly. Among other things, we decided to put Bright Data and some of the other big companies at the top of our list because their extensive networks provide users with a huge advantage.

Residential Rotating Proxies vs Datacenter Rotating Proxies

For the most part, rotating proxies tend to come from residential sources but that’s not always the case. In fact, we mentioned a few companies that offer datacenter rotating proxies earlier in our list. So what’s the difference? Well, the name actually says it all. Residential proxies are IP addresses used by real users, which are assigned to them by internet service providers or mobile carriers. Meanwhile, datacenter proxies come from data centers, which are usually owned by big companies.

Datacenter rotating proxies are considered less secure because they generally share the same subnetwork. That makes them very susceptive to blanket bans, much more so than residential proxies. The advantage is that datacenters use hardware that’s a lot more advanced than what you would find on your regular consumer-grade computer, so you can expect excellent performance from these proxies. And because there’s a higher risk associated with them, they also tend to be cheaper.

Residential rotating proxies, on the other hand, are pretty much the opposite. Thanks to the fact that you’ve got a large pool of IPs from all over the world at your disposal, the chance of them being blacklisted en masse by websites is significantly lower. Even if one of your proxies does get banned, the rotation system ensures that you get a fresh new one in no time. Depending on which service you’re working with, the residential proxies you get can be a lot slower when compared to datacenter proxies and they will almost always be a bit more expensive.

F.A.Q.

What is Proxy Scraping?

Web scraping is a technique used to extract large amounts of data from websites. This sort of data is highly sought-after by big companies that want to improve their products or get an advantage over the competition. Proxy scraping is pretty much the same thing only instead of using your own computer when extracting the data, you use proxy servers. As you might imagine, a lot of companies aren’t happy with people extracting important data from their websites, so using proxies to do it is always a good idea.

What is a Proxy Pool?

A proxy pool represents the total amount of proxies found in a particular network. For example, Bright Data is known to have a total proxy pool of over 40 million IP addresses. Meanwhile, its residential proxy pool consists of about 35 million IPs.

What Are Backconnect Proxies?

Backconnect proxies fulfill the same purpose as regular proxies but work in a slightly different way. With a regular proxy, your connection gets rerouted through a very limited amount of servers (often just one) before reaching the target website. If the proxy you’re using happens to get banned, you’ll need to start over and establish a new connection using a different proxy. Backconnect proxies, on the other hand, reroute your connection through a series of IPs, which are part of a much larger network. In this case, if your proxy gets banned or blacklisted, the backconnect proxy service will automatically assign you a new one. Backconnect proxy services also rotate IPs on a regular basis to lower the chances of them getting banned, which is why they’re also often referred to as rotating proxies.

What is a Residential Proxy?

A residential proxy is a proxy server that uses IPs assigned by internet service providers or mobile carriers. In other words, it’s the same type of IP address used by regular consumers like you and me. As opposed to dedicated proxies, which are usually found in datacenters owned by big companies.

Final Thoughts

Rotating proxies constitute a very effective method of protecting your real identity while browsing the internet. But while many people use them simply for the sake of anonymity, rotating proxies have a wide variety of other use cases. Some of the most common ones include web scraping, travel fare aggregation, ad verification, SEO and social media research, price comparison, and many more. These proxies can also be used on ticketing and sneaker sites in some situations, however, you may want to go with a more specialized service that offers dedicated proxies if those are your preferred use cases.

As far as choosing the best proxy provider is concerned, there are certainly plenty of good options at your disposal, as we hopefully demonstrated in this article. Our number 1 choice at the moment is Smartproxy because this is one of the few companies that offers a truly all-in-one package that can not only get the job done but is also very easy to use. However, if you prefer enterprise services and bigger networks, then you should consider Bright Data or Shifter.