Proxies for Crawling and Scraping: How Do They Work?
The terms ‘web crawling’ and ‘web scraping’ are often used interchangeably to describe the process of mass searching for data. But is it the correct approach? Not really. So let’s clarify what the difference lies between the two processes.
Web scraping means searching the web to find the necessary information on some sites. Simply put, it always tries to collect as much information as possible.
But what is web crawling, then? It is a more specific process used when you want to find the data and extract it or, in other words, download it. Web crawling and web scraping are not isolated and, as a rule, are parts of the same process.
A proxy for web scraping or crawling is an intermediary that routes your traffic through itself and replaces your IP address with its own. When you send a site request via an intermediary, the site does not see your IP. It only sees the proxy server’s IP address, allowing you to browse (or parse) web pages anonymously. These proxies are used to:
Bypass blocking. If your IP has been blocked due to suspicious activity like spamming, the web scraping proxy will give you access to blocked content.
Access localized data. The majority of websites put limits on locations allowed to visit the website.
Avoid excessive requests. Each website can limit the maximum number of requests issued by a particular IP address. So, if you exceed the website’s rate, your IP will be blocked. Hence, you must frequently change your IP – scraping proxies provide this opportunity.
How to Choose Proxies for Crawling and Scraping
A great variety of server providers offer proxies for web scraping or crawling. Anyway, it’s still quite complicated to choose the most reliable platform with the most effective services. How to get proxies for parsing that will please with stable performance and lack of malfunctions?
First, study the range of companies that provide proxies for scraping purposes. Identify the top 15 variants for your needs and explore their features. Pay much attention to pricing options as well as the proxy pool available.
If you find these platforms appropriate, read expert reviews. They will help you to study the service in more detail, saving time and money on your investigation.
Finally, look through user reviews on TrustPilot, SiteJabber, and Reddit. They will reflect how things really are. Here you will get a detailed response on all platform failures if they have a place to be.
Before you search for top web proxies, get acquainted with our overview of the best 15 proxy services that suit parsing.
Strengths and Weaknesses of Crawling and Scraping Proxies
Strengths
Weaknesses
✅ Hide your IP, current location, and data ✅ Increase your security online ✅ Give access to localized content ✅ Help to avoid excessive requests
⛔ Do not encrypt data ⛔ Advanced detection methods can still identify your location ⛔Your traffic passes through a proxy server
Top Crawling and Scraping Proxies in 2024
These are the best proxies for parsing that have earned universal acceptance. Each can boast a large pool of IPs, stable performance, and a good reputation. Let’s focus on each platform in detail.
1. Asocks — Best Price-Quality Ratio
Asocks has a massive pool of over 9 million residential and mobile proxy IP addresses. With more than 190 GEOs on hand, users can enjoy a stable connection that allows them to perform any kind of crawling, scraping, and parsing tasks.
The service supports integrations with anti-detect browsers and other tools for seamless web scraping and allows targeting by ASN numbers.
Asocks can boast one of the lowest prices for residential proxies on the market: $3 per 1 GB. In fact, this is a universal price for all the proxy provider’s solutions including static and rotating residential IPs as well as mobile proxies. And you can enjoy a free trial of 3GB before you start paying.
2. MobileProxy— Best Private Proxies for Multiple Accounts
Anyone with at least some experience in web scraping and crawling knows that it is super important that the proxies you use for it are clean and whitelisted. And this is precisely what MobileProxy offers. Their IPs are sourced from real mobile operators in 30 countries worldwide. The chances of a ban for such proxies are close to zero.
Another significant plus is that the user has complete control over their proxies for web scraping. For example, they can independently change…
IP by API
IP by timer
GEO
Mobile operator.
Needless to say, this autonomy is beneficial for both scraping and crawling. Plus, MobileProxy provides various free tools to enhance the proxies’ performance even further. Those include a free proxy checker, an Internet speed test, an anti-hacking interface, and more.
Every tariff at MobileProxy includes unlimited traffic, a private channel, multithreading, and HTTP and SOCKS5 support. You can use a two-hour free trial to see how it all works. All they need for that is to complete a super fast registration, and they are good to go.
Key Features:
A large pool of almost 2 million IPs from real mobile operators
Change IPs by link or timer
Independently change GEO or mobile operator
Lots of discounts to new users plus promos from partner services
3. MangoProxy – Best for an Extensive Range of Locations
If you need unrestricted access to web resources worldwide, you should give MangoProxies a try. From what I’ve seen, this provider is probably the leader by the IP pool provided – 90M addresses across the globe! All sourced from reliable sources, these proxies for web scraping guarantee anonymity and mirror genuine user behavior. Thus, the risk of getting blocked is eliminated.
Unlike some other services I tried, MangoProxy won’t charge you extra for concurrent sessions. So, you can connect as many accounts as you want simultaneously. Perfect for web scraping projects at scale!
As for geo-targeting, the precision is top-notch. I liked that I could target by city, state, country, or ASN. The number of countries covered exceeds 220 so far.
Web scraping and crawling proxies from MangoProxy support connection via HTTP, HTTPS, and SOCKS. The uptime? A whopping 99.99%! The speed of connection never disappointed me. The stated response time is 0.7 seconds – from my experience, that seems to be true.
The cost of MangoProxy’s services will depend on the traffic used, starting from $8 per GB. The more traffic in the plan, the cheaper the solution will ultimately be. Unfortunately, there’s no free trial as such. However, new customers can order the first 1 GB of data to test scraping and crawling proxies for just $1.7.
4. SOAX — Best for Gathering Highly-Localized Data
When you need a proxy for scraping, and the very precise GEO-location matters, SOAX proxies come to the scene. It offers a huge proxy pool: over 191 million IPs, and also suggests tools that minimize the risks of bans. By buying SOAX residential or mobile proxies for scraping, or their US ISP IPs, you can target particular cities or ISP. This way, you can easily conduct local market analysis, monitor competitors, do local SEO optimization, track local events — and many more.
Besides, SOAX has additional scraping solutions. I’m talking access to a big ethically sourced scraping proxy pool – you can purchase AI, SERP, eCommerce, and social media APIs.
Pricing plans are the same for US ISP, residential, and mobile proxies (while datacenter ones will cost you $0,50/GB):
Prices for SOAX scraping proxies start from $4/GB.
Key features:
Special tools for customizing proxies
Ready scrapers
A pool of 191 mln IPs
Dedicated account managers
A success rate of 99,55%
Best suited for marketers and large-scale businesses.
Affiliate marketers — people who run traffic to various offers and get a commission — constantly require anonymous browsing. Proxy solutions can solve many traffic arbitrage tasks: from crawling competitors’ ad campaigns to scraping social network subscribers.
Sometimes, it’s enough to use a simple IPv4 or IPv6 proxy. It saves money yet allows you to reach high speeds with no limits. It is precisely what Proxy-IPv4.com offers to customers requiring proxies for crawling and scraping: cheap private IPs in 20 countries with minimum ping and unlimited traffic.
To purchase a proxy, select an IP address country and choose the number of packages. If you opt for a mobile proxy, you will have automated IP rotation and won’t need to buy several addresses to rotate them manually.
Prices may vary depending on the GEO and proxy type. Here are some pricing examples:
AnyIP.io stands out as a user-friendly proxy provider for scraping and crawling, granting access to a vast array of mobile and residential IPs worldwide. The range of products and services available varies from sneaker bots and SEO scrapers to Instagram automation tools, some of which cost as low as $2/GB. AnyIP proxy service proves invaluable for SEO scraping, data monitoring, sneakers, Instagram, Amazon, Twitter, Reddit automation/scraping, and general security purposes.
If you’re on the lookout for the best proxies for scraping in 2024, AnyIP is a top-tier choice for several compelling reasons:
It maintains affordability while boasting a global network with over 30 million IPs;
Supports both HTTP and SOCKS5 protocols;
Ensures compatibility with all software;
Achieves an impressive 98.6% request success rate.
And as a cherry on top, it even adheres to a robust “Satisfied or refunded” policy. However, I highly recommend checking out my comprehensive review of all the opportunities AnyIP.io can deliver!
This proxy service for crawling exhibits remarkable service diversity, providing proxies for Telegram, Instagram, Amazon, mobile solutions, and sneaker bots (potentially the best in the industry). These offerings enhance and secure users’ browsing experiences. The proxy service excels in delivering fast speeds, with an average response time of 0.6 seconds, as well as permits unlimited concurrent requests and automatic IP rotation without constraints.
A notable feature is the continuous growth of its IP pool. In the competitive landscape of AnyIP.io vs. its counterparts, it distinguishes itself as more than a reseller by maintaining a unique network of IP addresses.
I once tried NodeMaven’s web scraping proxy servers, and I did so for two main reasons. First, my previous IP addresses had shown poor quality when checked by third-party tools. And secondly, even with my past proxies perfectly configured, I still had unexplained problems.
Well, NodeMaven has solved them all. For one thing, they seem to be the first in the crawling proxy market to put the quality of IPs far above their quantity. That, in particular, resulted in over 95% of their IP addresses having a clean reputation.
Also, in terms of proxy servers for scraping, NodeMaven differs significantly due to the following unique features you’d hardly find anywhere else:
First-class IP filtering, for which they use an advanced algorithm that checks IP addresses in real time before assigning them.
Sticky sessions here are powered by NodeMaven’s special hybrid proxy technology, which provides IP sessions lasting up to 24 hours, and that, my friend, is well above the market average.
Expert-level customer support is indispensable for those of you who probably haven’t yet hit a snag with scraping proxies. NodeMaven can indeed offer detailed problem analysis and expert assistance in optimizing your performance.
Key Features:
Unlimited concurrent sessions
More than 5 million premium residential IP addresses for web scraping and crawling
Precise geographical targeting across over 1400 cities in 150 countries
Trial check – for only €3.99 – which includes 500 MB of traffic to test all features
When you connect to NodeMaven’s scraping proxy server, you are only allocated an IP address after it has gone through an advanced quality control algorithm.
Best suited for SEO, multi-accounting, and online shopping.
ProxyEmpire has become one of the most eminent representatives among scraping proxies. You can find all major proxy types here — residential, datacenter, and mobile servers. Depending on your use case, you can also select the static mode or rotation.
With an extensive pool of 25+ million IPs worldwide, ProxyEmpire becomes a perfect fit for professional scraping and crawling. The service stands out for advanced session control, high connection rate, and excellent uptime of 99,95%.
You can target the majority of proxies presented here by city, state, country, and even ISP, which is rather convenient for crawling purposes. These intermediaries have unlimited bandwidth and concurrent sessions, so your activity won’t be interrupted with undesired blocks.
ProxyEmpire plans to introduce several scraping APIs integrated into the pricing plan you purchase to provide convenient data extraction. Among the tools are:
SERP Scraping API: This tool facilitates access to search engine data. It enables high-quality market analysis with precise geo-targeting. It allows users to extract data from major search engines like Google, Bing, Baidu, and Yandex. If you need live and reliable data, this tool will help boost localized search.
eCommerce Scraping API: If you strive to excel your business in the digital marketplace, an eCommerce scraping tool is what you need. It allows crawling data from 60+ famous marketplaces to develop new business strategies with real-time insights and updates.
Social Media Scraping API: It gives access to data from top social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. This scraper can easily extract data from profiles, posts, photos, reels, sounds, and videos. It will allow you to make informed decisions and build a working strategy for account promotion.
Key Features:
Pool of 25+ million IP addresses
170 locations worldwide
Residential, datacenter, and mobile servers
Qualitative scraping tools integrated into pricing plans
9. Proxy-Seller — Best for Web Scraping Limitless Potential
Proxy-Seller offers some outstanding features, making it a top pick for starters seeking to uncover everything scraping proxies are capable of. Its main benefit is nearly limitless web scraping capabilities. This functionality is achieved due to the lack of ISP proxies restrictions. Besides, Proxy-Seller is notable for a mind-blowing speed of 1GB/s which would make data collection as swift and convenient as ever before.
In addition, the proxy provides the opportunity to connect to IPs in 50 countries. It may not be the highest number you encountered, but when combined with immense speed is quite enough for seamless web scraping. To ensure the best user experience, Proxy-Seller also offers several helpful tools:
Proxy Checker. The option allows checking the performance of a proxy server and evaluating the server type and anonymity level.
Port Scanner. It scans any open ports for security and determines malware, if any. It will secure your PC and protect you against data leakages.
Ping-IP. This tool will allow you to define the exact time needed to transfer data from one device to another.
IP-Trace. With this tool, you will discover data on all the halfway routers placed on the way to the end node.
All the tools described are free and available for testing on the Proxy-Seller site.
Key Features:
Convenient choice of 800 subnets and 300 networks
High-quality protection and anonymity ensured by dedicated Socks5 & HTTPS proxies
24/7/365 technical support
24-hour trial period and a full refund or package substitution if needed
Smartproxy is the top-ranked proxy provider that has already asserted itself as one of the best solutions to scale business with a fine set of proxy scrapers. Here you can use residential, datacenter, and dedicated DC proxies that count over 50 million addresses with worldwide coverage in over 195 locations.
Although the choice of server types is not so rich, the service compensates for this lack with its outstanding quality and speed. To amend the user experience amid the lack of server types, Smartproxy offers several tools:
X Browser. This tool juggles multiple accounts while guaranteeing no risk of getting blocked.
Chrome Extension. It will allow you to bring all essential features of proxies for web scraping into your browser.
Firefox Add-on. It moves proxies to your favorite browser with a few clicks.
Address generator. With it, you can generate proxy lists in bulk effortlessly.
Note that all these free tools make Smartproxy stand out among other providers.
What about proxy scrapers offered by this service? It boasts its ready-made solutions to fit any scraping needs:
SERP Scraping API. This proxy scraper can boast a success rate of about 100%. It is a stack solution for Google and other search engines. SERP Scraping API combines a proxy network, web scraper, and data parser, making it a universal product for business scaling.
E-Commerce Scraping API. This tool lets you get neatly structured e-commerce data in JSON or HTML. As well as SERP scraper, it combines a proxy network, web scraper, and data parser.
Web-Scraping API. Parse at scale with this web scraper. All you need is to send a single request and get data in raw HTML from any website you like. It can help you research data from sites of any complexity, including those programmed with JavaScript.
Social Media Scraping API. This solution allows scraping data from any social media platform, including Twitter, TikTok, or Instagram. It will enable getting well-structured data on images, profiles, soundtracks, etc., while avoiding IP bans or blockages.
No-Code Scraper. It allows one to schedule tasks and store scraped data without writing codes. Thus, you can parse visually, choose scraping templates, and forget about coding skills.
Oxylabs continues the list of the best proxies for data extraction. This platform has an extensive pool of over 100 million high-quality residential proxies with unblemished performance. As for the server types presented here, there are various residential (Mobile, Rotating ISP) and datacenter (Shared, Dedicated, SOCKS5, Static) proxies. Oxylabs can be proud of its high speed and absence of failures and interruptions.
Among the special features implemented in Oxylabs is an integrated proxy rotator. What does it mean? It means that the servers you use will rotate automatically or, in other words, change each other without your intervention. Thus, you can achieve a 100% success rate staying anonymous online.
JavaScript rendering is another feature that makes parsing with Oxylabs uncomplicated. It allows extracting data from even the most advanced and complex targets, like JavaScript-heavy targets.
Finally, Oxylabs offers convenient data delivery. It is an enterprise-grade solution that is ready to use straight away. Thus, you can start crawling in minutes and get parsed data delivered to your preferred storage solution.
Oxylabs offers a set of proxy scrapers to ease scraping management:
SERP Scraper API. It performs a localized search from major search engines, delivers live and reliable data, and is resilient to SERP layout changes. This tool is used mainly for parsing, brand monitoring, and ad tracking.
E-Commerce Scraper API. With this tool, you can access and crawl the e-commerce product page. It allows one to scrape thousands of e-commerce websites, provides adaptive parsing, and delivers structured data in JSON. As for its specialization, it suits best for pricing intelligence, product catalog mapping, and competitor analysis.
Real Estate Scraper API. It is an advanced solution for scraping real estate platforms and avoiding blockages. It allows collecting property type, location, pricing, and amenities from all the major sites and extracting it in HTML form.
Web Scraper API. Here you can receive scalable real-time data from a majority of websites. This tool covers customizable request parameters and JavaScript rending and performs convenient delivery. Users exploit it primarily for website change monitoring, fraud protection, and travel fare monitoring.
Each tool is a paid one. However, pricing options are adequate, with a minimum package starting from $49 monthly. Still, you can request a free trial for these services.
Ranking ninth in our list, Bright Data is still one of the best proxies for data gathering. It is the category leader #1 in web data gathering, but we can’t say it is the best service in this niche. Anyhow, we should pay tribute to Bright Data here because it prioritizes data collection and provides one of the richest proxy pools of over 72 million addresses. These are stable proxies for web scraping that operate without interruptions. We can’t say Bright Data words flawlessly, but it excels in data gathering. What about tools provided for data extraction?
Among them are:
Datasets. These are units of information for every business need. You can search data in different categories: social media, e-commerce, business, and even directories.
Data Collector. It allows one to scrape data at scale with zero infrastructure. So, you do not need to write any codes to scrape data. Besides, it helps overcome obstacles to desired content and gain business partners.
SERP API. It is another proxy scraper allowing structured data in HTML or JSON from all major search engines.
Web scraper IDE. It is a unique solution designed for developers to reduce their development time and allow them to scale without limits.
Scraping browser. This new feature by Bright Data is touted as the world’s only automated browser with any web crawling and scraping tools in one place.
Web unlocker. This tool allows overcoming any website blocks with ease.
IPRoyal rates are tenth in the list of top web proxies for crawling. Its proxy pool is about to reach 8 million addresses of different server types: residential, datacenter, static, sneaker, private, and 4G mobile. Most often, IPRoyal comes in handy for social networking and covers five major social platforms where it can be applied. These are Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, and Discord.
This service allows you to manually switch from a sticky session to a rotating one. During rotation, the platform changes the IP address with every sent request. On the contrary, a sticky session allows maintaining the same IP address for up to 24 hours. Choosing a rotating session that will keep you safe from blocks and restrictions is better for scraping issues. Among the tools provided here are:
NetNut offers a pool of over 52 million residential IP addresses available worldwide. This scraping proxy does not rely on a P2P network – its IPs are always online and ready for further usage. One of the most significant advantages of NetNut is manual session control. It means you can use the same IP for up to 30 minutes and change it independently – the session control is entirely in your hands.
For ease of summarizing current statistics, the platform offers Traffic Data Analysis and Reporting. If you want to test this service, a 7-day free trial will help you independently estimate the quality of NetNut service.
The following four proxy services lack the features required for advanced web scraping and data crawling. That’s why we mention them as alternatives for the eleven mentioned above. These four are good choices if you are searching for a fallback platform.
1. ProxySale — Best for Speediest Scraping
ProxySale can offer access to the extensive proxy pool in almost any country. Enjoy dedicated proxies to help you increase speed, avoid captcha, multi-thread, and bypass blocking. Moreover, unlike other options, this one will not create problems while scraping with Google. Once you choose ProxySale for your needs, you can be sure that its team will help you to set it up and continue supporting you during the usage period.
Shifter offers over 50+ million proxies for scraping with worldwide coverage and ultra-low latencies. Concerning data extraction, you can use SERP API and Web Scraping API. Although Shifter has an extensive pool of proxy servers and is a good solution for parsing, it does not fit for working with Google and Amazon.
When scraping Google pages, you’ll have to get through an avalanche of captchas that hinder the workload. Anyway, there are a lot of ways to avoid them. As for Amazon, the company forbids using proxies unless you contact its support. Finally, the session control is limited here.
GeoSurf is another web scraping proxy that stands out for precise location targeting and the possibility to select the frequency and timeline of parsing. It helps greatly when you need to extract a particular amount of money for a specific time. Besides, these proxies are stable and have a sticky session of up to 10 minutes.
Rayobyte (formerly Blazing SEO) is the last proxy crawler in our rating. It focuses mainly on residential proxies, but you can still get practically all types of intermediaries here. Rotating, static, residential, datacenter, mobile, and ISP proxies – everything is at your service.
Rayobyte suits well for all SEO purposes – from SEO monitoring to collecting SERP data on localized sources. Unfortunately, Rayobyte has the same problems with Amazon and Google as Shifter. Besides, the IP distribution is quite unpredictable, limiting your data-gathering opportunities.
Sure, you will find some providers offering their services for free, but they lack quality. These are unreliable services with plenty of malfunctions. Besides, your data will no longer be secure once you entrust your device to free services. Such a proxy for scraping might do more harm than good.
How many proxies for web scraping do I need for parsing?
Websites have different limits set on the number of allowed requests. The average is 600 requests per hour and ten requests per minute. Say, you need to scrape 600,000 pages per hour. Hence, you need 1000 proxies for scraping. Nevertheless, it is essential to pay attention to scraping circumstances.
Why use a proxy pool?
Let’s assume you need 1000 proxies to scrape 600,000 pages per hour. To avoid undesired blocking, you need to use them most efficiently. The proxy pool allows you to manage these 1000 proxies and is regulated by the proxy network.
Using this pool, you shift all the problems of choosing IPs and their rotation on the shoulders of the proxy network. Providers will give you a single entry point to all or only part of the proxies of the pool. As for pricing, it depends on bandwidth and ports.
Which proxies suit best for scraping?
We can’t say for sure which proxy scraper will be the best for parsing because the success rate of each service depends on website parameters. Nevertheless, choosing services that guarantee your privacy and are challenging to detect or block is better.
Don’t forget about the speed rate and level of security because they also play an essential role in choosing the best proxy scraper. We can confidently say that each platform we have reviewed is reliable and fit for parsing.
How to set up a proxy for crawling?
These proxies operate on the same principle as ordinary ones. It is a simple guide on how to set up a proxy scraper:
1. Find Wi-Fi parameters in the network settings. 2. Click on the Change Network button. 3. Enter Advanced Settings and select Proxy Server. 4. In the Proxy Server section, change configurations manually. 5. Save settings.
Final Words
Proxies for web scraping and crawling are used universally since they are the best tool for data gathering. A great variety of platforms specialize in proxy scrapers, but it is difficult to pick out the best one. These 15 reliable platforms have established themselves as high-quality services for advanced web scraping and crawling.
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