Rotating proxies are essential for any web scraper or automated tool that needs to access the web without getting blocked. By automatically rotating IP addresses with each request, they allow you to scrape at scale while avoiding bans.
But with so many proxy providers out there, how do you know which ones are the best for your needs?
In this comprehensive guide, we‘ve tested and reviewed the top 9 rotating proxy services of 2024 based on performance, features, and pricing.
Whether you need blazing fast residential IPs or budget-friendly datacenter proxies, this list has an option for every use case and budget.
Contents
- How We Evaluated the Best Rotating Proxy Providers
- The 9 Best Rotating Proxy Services of 2024
- 1. Smartproxy – Best Overall
- 2. Oxylabs – Best Premium Residential Proxies
- 3. Bright Data (Luminati) – Most Diverse Proxy Types
- 4. GeoSurf – Best Unlimited Bandwidth
- 5. Storm Proxies – Largest IP Pool
- 6. Microleaves – Best Customer Support
- 7. Proxyrack – Best Residential Proxy API
- 8. PacketStream – Cheapest Proxies
- 9. StormProxies – Pay-Per-Use Proxies
- Key Benefits of Using Rotating Proxies
- Questions When Choosing Your Rotating Proxy Provider
- Wrapping Up
How We Evaluated the Best Rotating Proxy Providers
We used several criteria to evaluate the best rotating proxy providers:
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Proxy types: The variety of proxy types offered – residential, datacenter, mobile, etc. Residential rotating proxies tend to be the most reliable for scraping.
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Location targeting: The ability to target proxies by country, state, city, ASN, carrier, etc. Precise location targeting helps avoid blocks.
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IP pools: The number of unique IPs available. Larger pools mean more IP rotation options.
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Rotation settings: The ability to customize how often IPs rotate – per request, every 5 mins, etc. More flexibility is better.
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Performance: Latency, success rates, and stability during comprehensive testing. Fast, reliable proxies are a must.
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Pricing: The costs for proxy plans based on bandwidth usage or number of threads. Value for money is important.
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Features: Additional tools, integrations, APIs, etc that enhance the proxy service.
Based on these criteria, we selected the top contenders that offer the best overall value. Now let‘s dive into the details!
The 9 Best Rotating Proxy Services of 2024
1. Smartproxy – Best Overall
Smartproxy tops our list as the best overall rotating proxy provider thanks to its combination of affordability, large IP pools, and reliable performance.
Some key features:
- Proxy types: Residential, datacenter, mobile
- Locations: 195+ countries
- IP addresses: 40+ million residential IPs
- Rotation: Every request, sticky sessions up to 30 mins
- Performance: 99.4% success rate, 574ms latency
- Pricing: From $8.5/GB
We found Smartproxy‘s residential proxies to be blazing fast and highly anonymous, making them ideal for large-scale web scraping and ad verification. The service also provides unlimited bandwidth and threads, along with convenient targeting options.
The pricing is very reasonable too, starting at just $8.5 per GB. Smartproxy is our #1 recommendation for an all-around rotating proxy service.
2. Oxylabs – Best Premium Residential Proxies
Oxylabs is the leading premium provider when you need highly reliable residential rotating proxies. The price is higher, but you get enterprise-grade performance and features.
Some key features:
- Proxy types: Residential, datacenter, mobile
- Locations: Any city worldwide
- IP addresses: 100+ million residential IPs
- Rotation: Every request, custom sticky sessions
- Performance: 99.6% success rate, 572ms latency
- Pricing: From $10/GB
This robust residential IP network delivers lightning-fast speeds with minimal blocking. We recorded stellar success rates during testing. You can target locations extremely precisely as well.
Oxylabs also provides expert customer support and easy API integration. It‘s an excellent choice for large businesses and mission-critical scraping projects.
3. Bright Data (Luminati) – Most Diverse Proxy Types
Bright Data (formerly Luminati) stands out for offering rotating proxies of every type – residential, mobile, datacenter, and ISP. The sheer variety gives you flexibility.
Some key features:
- Proxy types: Residential, mobile, datacenter, ISP
- Locations: Any city worldwide
- IP addresses: 72+ million residential IPs
- Rotation: Customizable
- Performance: Above average
- Pricing: From $10.50/GB
Despite the slower speeds, Bright Data earns its place as one of the top providers thanks to its unmatched selection of proxy options. Features like precise location targeting, unlimited bandwidth, and concurrent threads make it suitable for advanced scraping jobs.
The network firewall does create some usage restrictions, so Bright Data works best for commercial use cases. But the proxy diversity can‘t be beaten.
4. GeoSurf – Best Unlimited Bandwidth
GeoSurf stands out as one of the only major providers to offer true unlimited bandwidth with its rotating proxy plans. There are no hard usage limits.
Some key features:
- Proxy types: Residential
- Locations: 130+ countries
- IP addresses: 20+ million residential IPs
- Rotation: Customizable
- Performance: Very fast
- Pricing: From $24/month
The proxies provide excellent speeds and anonymity across a large IP pool. While the pricing is based on your number of threads rather than bandwidth, you get unlimited scraping capacity which helps avoid overages.
GeoSurf also offers a 7-day free trial to test the residential proxies before committing. If you want unmetered bandwidth, this is a great choice.
5. Storm Proxies – Largest IP Pool
Storm Proxies boasts the largest pool of residential IPs out of any rotating proxy provider we tested – a massive 72 million and growing.
Some key features:
- Proxy types: Residential
- Locations: 130+ countries
- IP addresses: 72+ million residential IPs
- Rotation: Every request or sticky sessions
- Performance: Very fast
- Pricing: From $9/GB
If your top priority is having an endless supply of fresh IPs to rotate through, Storm Proxies is tough to beat. Despite the huge pool, speeds remain lightning-fast and latency low across our tests.
With unlimited threads, Storm Proxies works great for massively parallel scraping. The pool size makes it one of the most resilient services against IP blocks.
6. Microleaves – Best Customer Support
Microleaves stands out from most proxy providers for its stellar customer support and ease of use. The residential proxy service itself is also solid.
Some key features:
- Proxy types: Residential
- Locations: Any country
- IP addresses: 20+ million residential IPs
- Rotation: Customizable
- Performance: Very good
- Pricing: From $8/GB
Rather than just emails and docs, Microleaves assigns personal account managers to assist customers with any issues that come up. It also offers extensive tutorials and guides for using the rotating proxies.
The proxies themselves show low latency and reliable uptime. Helpful features like whitelisted IPs, drop URLs, and API access provide plenty of flexibility.
7. Proxyrack – Best Residential Proxy API
Proxyrack focuses specifically on providing an API for easily integrating residential rotating proxies into your scripts and tools.
Some key features:
- Proxy types: Residential
- Locations: 130+ countries
- IP addresses: 5 million+ residential IPs
- Rotation: Customizable
- Performance: Above average
- Pricing: Usage-based
While Proxyrack has fewer overall features compared to bigger providers, the easy-to-use API makes setting up and managing proxies simple from any programming language.
There are also some handy options like carrier-specific targeting to further avoid blocks when scraping heavily protected sites. Reliable speeds and anonymity comes standard.
8. PacketStream – Cheapest Proxies
If your top concern is price, PacketStream has some of the most affordable rotating proxy plans starting at just $1 per GB.
Some key features:
- Proxy types: Residential
- Locations: 150+ countries
- IP addresses: 7 million residential IPs
- Rotation: Every request or sticky sessions
- Performance: Average
- Pricing: From $1/GB
Keep in mind these budget proxies prioritize cost over performance. But PacketStream still delivers decent speeds and reliability for basic scraping of public sites and Google searches.
The lack of targeting options beyond countries and limited customization also reflects the lower price point. Still, this is one of the most cost-effective services.
9. StormProxies – Pay-Per-Use Proxies
StormProxies (not to be confused with Storm Proxies) takes an unusual approach of charging per API request rather than for bandwidth. This pay-per-use model works well for low-volume use cases.
Some key features:
- Proxy types: Residential
- Locations: Any country
- IP addresses: Unclear
- Rotation: Every request
- Performance: Good
- Pricing: $0.002 per request
You only pay for the number of requests you make rather than pre-purchasing resources you may not use. After the first 1,000 free requests, each additional call costs $0.002.
StormProxies provides over 100 residential IP locations to target. Performance-wise, speeds are relatively quick and success rates reliable.
If your scraping needs are infrequent, the pay-per-use model helps avoid wasted spend. But costs add up quickly at high volumes.
Key Benefits of Using Rotating Proxies
Before picking the best provider for your needs, let‘s recap the unique advantages of rotating vs. static proxies:
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Avoid IP blocks – By rotating IP addresses, you avoid reusing the same IPs which often triggers blocks.
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Hide scraping activity – Rotating IPs make your traffic appear more human and less suspicious to target sites.
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Scale requests – You can make near-limitless parallel requests across a large pool of proxies.
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Simpler proxy management – No need to juggle multiple static IPs. Just plug into rotating proxies.
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Multiple locations – Rotate through different geographic locations to access localized data.
Rotating proxies effectively mask scraping bots and automate proxy handling. With the right provider, you can scrape massive sites at scale without worrying about CAPTCHAs, blocks, or rate limits.
Questions When Choosing Your Rotating Proxy Provider
Here are some key questions to help you choose the right rotating proxy provider:
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What types of sites will you be scraping? Consider residential vs. datacenter proxies. Residential is better for highly protected sites like Google and Facebook.
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What scale of scraping do you need? The size of the IP pools determines how many requests you can make in parallel.
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Do you need to target specific locations? Not all providers allow city-level targeting.
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What is your budget? Prices range from $1 – $10+ per GB depending on the provider. Factor in your monthly usage.
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Are APIs and customization important? Proxies with more configurability tend to cost more.
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How tech-savvy are you? Some providers offer more hand-holding than others.
The best rotating proxy provider ultimately depends on your specific use case, browsing patterns, and technical requirements. Evaluating proxies against the criteria above will help you choose the right fit.
Wrapping Up
Rotating proxies is no longer an optional luxury – they‘re a must for scraping in 2024. Thankfully many high-quality providers have entered the market with a range of proxy types, features, locations, and prices.
We recommend starting with Smartproxy if you want a reliable provider that balances performance and affordability. Oxylabs is worth the premium price for enterprise-level residential proxies. And if unlimited bandwidth is essential, check out GeoSurf.
Take some time to evaluate the pros and cons of each provider against your specific needs. With the right rotating proxy service, you can access even the most challenging sites and scale to thousands of concurrent requests without worrying about ever getting blocked.
Let us know if you have any other questions! We‘re always happy to help choose the best rotating proxies for your scraping and automation projects.