10 Residential & Rotating Proxies – Which One Is Best?

Web scraping without residential, backconnect or rotating proxies can be difficult, particularly when most popular sites put heavy restrictions on access from certain IP addresses.

In order to properly scrape most popular sites, developers need to use residential proxies, backconnect proxies, rotating proxies, or other IP rotation methods in order to avoid having their web scrapers blocked or shut down. This is particularly true when running scrapers in data centers, where IP addresses are often blacklisted from visiting popular sites on the consumer internet.

It’s difficult to pick the best rotating proxies, as choosing the correct proxy service for scraping is a balancing act between speed, price, and reliability. It can be hard to tell which proxy service providers provide a quality service, so we’ve collected the 10 best rotating residential proxies and backconnect proxy services for web scraping developers into a single list!

1. ScraperAPI

Website: https://www.scraperapi.com/

ScraperAPI is a tool for developers building web scrapers. It handles proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs so developers can get the raw HTML from any website with a simple API call.

ScraperAPI doesn’t burden you with managing your own proxies. It automatically manages rotating IP addresses using its pool of hundreds of thousands of datacenter proxies, residential proxies, and mobile proxies from over a dozen of the best proxy providers with proxy servers in over 50 countries.

ScraperAPI has smart routing logic that routes requests through different subnets, automatically throttling some requests in order to avoid IP bans and CAPTCHAs. As one of the only services that offer free rotating proxies, it’s an excellent Crawlera alternative or Luminati alternative. ScraperAPI has special rotating residential proxy IP pools, eCommerce proxies, search engine proxies, social media proxies, sneaker proxies, ticket proxies, and more! If you need to scrape millions of pages a month, you can click “Contact Sales” on our homepage.

2. Bright Data (formerly Luminati)

Website: Bright Data

Bright Data has over 70 million rotating residential IPs in every country and city in the world. Whether you need their Datacenter, Residential, ISP, or Mobile Proxies, Bright Data offers some of the best proxy servers around, and you can connect to them using their Chrome Extension, Proxy Manager or API.

With features such as preset configurations for proxy manipulations, random header generator, and built-in captcha solving, they are a one-stop shop for all your proxy needs.

As one of the earliest and best paid proxy server providers, they offer maybe the largest variety of products and payment methods, with bandwidth-based pricing starting at $0.40 per Datacenter Proxy or $3.00/GB for Residential Proxies. At this price point their offerings primarily target enterprise-level customers.

3. Smartproxy

Website: Smartproxy

Smartproxy has over 40 million rotating residential proxies with location targeting and flexible pricing. In addition to some of the best proxies, they also offer all sorts of niceties like rotating sessions, random residential IP proxy pools, geo-targeting, sticky sessions, an automatic proxy rotator, and more. They allow for unlimited connections and threads, charging monthly by traffic (rotating residential proxies range from $75 for 5GB to $400 for 50GB of traffic).

They also offer a 99% SLA with low failure rates and 24/7 technical support with a 5 minute response time. As a raw proxy solution, you will need to do a lot of the heavy lifting yourself on the developer side with logic to retry failed requests, crawling logic, etc. One of the nice things about this service is that they are pretty good about overage pricing, once you exceed the limits of your plan, you can use them on a pay-as-you-go basis for every GB that you go over, instead of having to upgrade to the next plan.

4. Shifter (Formerly Microleaves)

Website: https://shifter.io/

Shifter, formerly known as Microleaves, boasts the world’s largest pool of fairly cheap residential proxies, with over 26 million in its pool at any given time. Better yet, they have no limits on bandwidth like many residential proxy providers.

They allow rotating proxies every 5 minutes, which is faster than many other backconnect proxy providers. For the specific use case where you are looking for rotating or dedicated residential proxies, but don’t want to get charged for bandwidth, these might be the best paid proxy servers around.

However, this service comes with quite a hefty price tag at $2499.99 for 10 special backconnect proxies or $124.99 for 10 basic backconnect proxies. The biggest draw for Shifter is the lack of bandwidth charge which is pretty rare for residential proxy providers.

If you’re looking to buy backconnect proxies and you have a pretty steady stream of requests that you can spread over a number of unmetered ports, this may be a residential proxy service that’s worth looking at.

5. Geosurf

Website: https://www.geosurf.com/

Geosurf offers premium residential proxies at premium prices. With plans starting at $450/month for 38GB of traffic and $12 per additional GB, Geosurf truly is a premium service.

Not all IPs associated with residential proxies are the same, and this may be the best proxy service for finding US residential IPs that are not available through other services (unfortunately they don’t currently offer mobile proxy sites). Geosurf also offers residential IP’s in over 130 countries, so if you’re looking for international residential proxies they are a good bet.

While this may not be the best residential proxy provider for those on a tight budget, this is one of the instances where you get what you pay for, these are some of the best residential proxies around. They offer special pools of proxies for certain use cases, such as Craigslist proxies, ad verification proxies and more.

Another cool thing about their service is that they offer IP addresses in a few countries that many other services don’t like China and Iran, so if you need residential proxies from those countries you may want to check them out.

6. Oxylabs

Website: https://oxylabs.io/

Oxylabs provides datacenter proxies and US residential proxies for large-scale data extraction. They offer a wide variety of proxies, with a proxy IP pool of over 100 million IPs from dozens of countries.

While they are a bit on the expensive side, they are a top-notch private proxy service, with some of the best dedicated private residential proxies for scraping tough sites. They are willing to work with you to find clean proxies for the particular site you are trying to scrape, and their support is always quite responsive.

They also have a few additional services like a random IP address proxy, a rotating proxy API, and a real-time proxy crawl service. Their UI is fast and user-friendly, but one potentially annoying part of this service is that they require you to fill out a form before trying out their proxies instead of letting you go through a self-service portal.

For customers with very specialized needs, this may not be a bad thing as they are able to give you residential proxy pools that are best suited for certain use cases (for example you can tell them what site you want to scrape and they will give you a set of proxies that are guaranteed to work on that site).

7. NetNut

Website: https://netnut.io/

NetNut boasts an impressive pool of residential proxies, allowing for country-level geotargeting and sticky sessions.

They offer US residential proxies, UK proxies, Canada proxies, France proxies, Germany proxies, India proxies, Brazil proxies, and more. They also offer complementary proxy rotation and load balancing, as well as a 7-day free trial. They charge between $300/month for 20GB and $4,000/month for 1TB of traffic, and with their excellent variety, they are a great Oxylabs alternative.

One of the nice things about NetNut is that all of your usage stats are available via API as well, meaning you can easily track usage in real-time without having to log in to the dashboard. You can also automatically throttle usage or send alerts when you get near your limits.

NetNut is run directly through DiViNetwork which runs hundreds of ISPs around the world, which makes it a bit different and more reliable than many other residential proxy provider services, who rely on P2P solutions or VPN users to get their IP addresses.

8. Intoli

Website: https://intoli.com/

Intoli is a smart proxy service boasting a large pool of residential proxies. It automatically rotates proxies on each HTTP request, but also allows you to reuse the same proxy if you desire, and can also use a headless browser to render dynamic javascript pages for you.

Pricing starts at $200 per GB with a minimum of 5GB/month, with additional data available for $200 per GB. Failed requests are automatically retried, and they use intelligent routing algorithms to avoid detection. While this is by far the most expensive solution on the list, this service is almost like having web scraping freelancers on your team, as they fix any issues you may have with scrapers being blocked.

The service is run by two friends, one with a PhD in Math and one with a PhD in high energy physics, who are also willing to provide you with a free consultation for any web scraping needs you might have.

9. Zyte (Formerly Crawlera)

Website: https://www.zyte.com/

Zyte, formerly known as Crawlera, uses their network proxy servers to route requests through IPs in a way to avoid IP bans. It’s one of the oldest web scraping IP rotation services, and also one of the few that offers a rotating proxies free trial.

Their smart proxy manager automatically routes proxy scraping requests through a different IP with every request, and they also offer additional services such as custom-built scrapers and JavaScript rendering. Starting at $29/month for 50,000 requests per month, and going all the way to an Enterprise Plan that starts at $999/month and includes dedicated account management, Zyte can fit almost any need.

Zyte was also formerly known as ScrapingHub, and they offer a full suite of solutions known under different names including Scrapy (an open-source web scraping framework) hosting, Splash (a scriptable web browser) hosting, and consulting services for people who want an IP proxy scraper built for them.

10. Blazing Proxies

Website: https://blazingseollc.com

Blazing Proxies lives up to its name with super fast US proxies including cheap rotating proxies at only $0.60 per proxy IP per month.

Blazing proxies allows for rotation once every 10 minutes, and provides unmetered bandwidth with speeds up to 1 Gb/s. Their proxy pool is a little smaller than other providers, but it includes over 300,000 IPs, and they are some of the top proxies in terms of speed and price!

This is a great choice for price sensitive developers who are scraping fairly easy to scrape sites. They offer a pretty smooth self service experience, and you can get all sorts of proxies from different countries, shared proxies, dedicated proxies, rotating proxies, etc.

For their rotating proxy service, they don’t offer username and password authentication, so you’ll need to have a static IP address for them to whitelist.

Honorable Mention: HomeIP

Website: https://homeip.io

Home IP is one of the newer residential proxy services for scraping, and they allow you to send unlimited parallel requests through their system. One of the nice things about them is that they integrate with many services like Multiloginapp, Jarvee, and BNB right out of the box so if you use one of those you may want to check them out. They also offer city-level targeting for over 2500 cities/states on their Pro Plan starting from $300/month, which is a pretty useful feature for those with extremely granular targeting needs.

Conclusion

These are the most popular residential and backconnect rotating proxy services out there for web scraping in 2021. While choosing a proxy for scraping is always a tradeoff between ease of use, reliability, speed, and price, you should be able to find one or two from this list that suits your needs.

Hopefully one of these top proxy providers is a fit for your web scraping needs, but if you still have questions and would like to discuss your particular use case with us, you can contact us here. Happy scraping!