Pia S5 Proxy Review 2024

Overview

I learned about the Pia S5 Proxy just a while ago, and because I had heard a lot of good things about it, I decided to test it myself. I bought the 620 IPs plan for $81 and used it for a month, mainly for market research and web scraping. All in all, I’m thrilled with what I got for my money.

Just to put it in context, the service specializes in residential proxies, including ISPs. They have a pretty good geo coverage (over 200 countries) and a huge pool (over 350M IPs). Their solutions fit any (or almost any) purpose you can think of. Ad verification, affiliate testing, and price monitoring — all possible. Plus, the aforementioned market research and web scraping, of course. But let’s get down to specifics.

Feature-Set and Guidance: Get More than Just Proxies

At first sight, the Piaproxy feature set looks standard. There’s nothing you don’t find in other services. But what crossed my mind as I tested them is that you often don’t find all these features in ONE place. So, if you give it a thought, it’s a rich feature set they have.

100% Compatibility

They say it’s compatible with Windows, MacOS, and Linux, and it really is. I used it both on Linux and Windows without any additional steps. I know how precious it is because, not long ago, I was testing a service that had special configuration tools that were only compatible with Windows. These would work on Linux, but there were special configuration instructions for that, too. And, of course, they didn’t say a word about it on the website. I’m not going to name the company as they’ve fixed it now, but the fact remains that compatibility matters.

State & City-level Targeting

What I want from a proxy service is accurate city-level targeting and good geo coverage (i.e., many locations are available). These are my minimum requirements, and PIA S5 Proxy meets them very well. With them, you can target by 

• City,
• ZIP,
• ISP.

All in all, they cover more than 200 countries and regions. What I especially like here is that they have millions of IPs in different parts of the world, not just in the USA. For example, my particular interest is Brazil (I even compiled a list of the best Brazil proxies a bit earlier), and they’ve got almost 3M IPs there. Bravo!

Free Android-based Proxy Manager App

Everything available in your web version is also available in the Android proxy manager app. You download one from the provider’s website, and all its functions are free. You can switch between IPs with a click, manage settings, automation, and whatever else.

Of course, it depends on why you need proxies, how you use them, and all that, but for me, it makes a huge difference when you can manage proxies when you are away from the PC. And then I also enjoyed the app’s interface. It’s super friendly. Even if you’ve never had anything to do with proxies before, you won’t have any difficulty.

Automation

Like I said, I used Pia for Linux and Microsoft to scrape sites and perform market research. They have bulk proxies and automation, so most of the job is performed without any intervention on your part. If you, too, need proxies for crawling and scraping, you can check my recent review, where I specifically focus on such providers. I’d certainly add PIA to it if I were writing it today.

Plus, another thing that I should probably mention here is that they allow you to create several sub-accounts. And each sub-account (there may be up to 20 of them) can have its own settings if necessary. That’s very convenient.

99.99% Network Online Time

Now, you might think, “OMG, they all say it, no?” At least, I feel exactly this when I see such claims. And let’s be honest, most users never actually check this. If the proxy works and I’m happy with it, I don’t care much if that’s 99.9% or 99.8%, or even 99.1%.

So why have I included this point in my review, then? Just to show you that it’s all very very smooth. That’s what my impression was. I only had about 4 minutes of downtime throughout the entire month. That’s a very decent performance, I believe.

Cryptocurrency Payments

I absolutely love crypto payments in proxy services because some (in fact, quite many) services deliver you proxies only when they get your money. And you very well know what Visa and Mastercard transactions are like. They can take 10 hours, or they can take 48 hours. Sometimes, you just can’t afford to wait for two days. So, my take is that it’s cool that PIA accepts crypto payments. I paid for my plan in Tether and received my proxies the same day.

But even if you aren’t interested in crypto payments, you’ll probably be happy with their choice of options here. Besides Visa and Mastercard, which I’ve mentioned already, they accept PayPal, WeChat Pay, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and the so-called local payment (e.g., PTX).

Convenient Dashboard

I doubted whether or not to include this in my review. A convenient dashboard doesn’t seem to be something unique these days. But then I thought this shouldn’t downplay the advantages of PIA’s dashboard. Yes, it’s common, but it’s still an advantage, right? And I really enjoyed working with it. You can

• see your pool there,
• configure targeting,
• track statistics.

Plus, it has in-built APIs and lets you set up sub-accounts. And a lot more. So it is good, indeed.

How to Use PiaProxy

The service has solutions tailored to 12 different use cases (perhaps more, but that’s what they mention on their website). Besides my use cases — market research and web scraping — these include

• Ad verification
• Brand protection
• Price monitoring
• Sneaker bots
• E-commerce, and others.

So when you know the use case, you can speak to a manager, and this—I believe—is a very good idea because they can select a plan that will fit you best. For example, I actually thought I needed a bigger plan, but when the manager found out about my project’s scope, she told me I would do well with 500-600 proxies. So, in the long run, this saved me almost $70.

Then, you complete the purchase and get your proxies. You’ll manage them through your dashboard. You can download PIA for PC, install the PIA Chrome extension (e.g., PIA Firefox), and download the Android app. All in all, it’s all pretty smooth.

Options and Additional Tools

I’ve noticed that proxy services now try to add as many free tools or cool features as possible. And not only proxy providers. ProxyBros, for instance, now has its own proxy checker (a fairly good one, by the way). As to PIA, I wouldn’t say it excels in this field. In effect, it has two tools: 

• IP Lookup
• ISO country code table.

I also heard they had (or were planning to have?) PIA VPN for Chrome, but since I’m not an active user of VPNs, I’ve never checked this.

Usability

I think it’s cool that the service has apps for all devices. You can download PIA proxy app for Windows. There’s a Piaproxy download for MAC. There’s the Linux Pia proxy download and a group control app. So you can really use it however you want.

Plus, they have a very helpful user guide (with screenshots) for how to configure different types of settings (e.g., how to configure the PIA Firefox extension). I think all proxy services should have such tutorials because you must be able to do anything you want to without contacting support.

Customer Service

I haven’t interacted much with their customer support because, like I said, you are pretty autonomous in managing your proxies. Everything you need is in your dashboard, and if something’s unclear, you will find those cool tutorials I wrote about. Still, from those few interactions I’ve had, I can say the guys are accommodating and open. And they are not pushy at all (which is rare, you know).

One aspect I didn’t like much is that their primary communication channel is email. I understand that this is perhaps the most convenient way for the team to manage requests. Yet, as a user, I’d prefer something more prompt. For example, if I can’t download PIA extension for Chrome, or have an issue with my Piaproxy login, or whatever else, I’m not very happy having to wait for up to 24 hours.

Performance Testing

I’ve already told you about the 99.99% network online time, with which I was super happy. Then, there’s also the speed factor. They say the speed is 20-50M/s — my tests showed 37-43M/s. Even if I hadn’t performed these tests, I’d say the speed is very good. Perhaps it’s slightly better than I have with proxies on average. Plus, you can have ISP sessions that last up to 24 hours.

PIA Proxy Pricing

The costs here are average. I know cheaper services, and I know more expensive ones. What caught my attention was that they had some fantastic special offers. For example, they have this plan where you buy 800 IPs for $144, and they give you 800 for free. The only reason why I didn’t buy it and went for a smaller one was that I only planned to test the service. Otherwise, I’d be happy with such a profit. My plan cost me $81 for 620 IPs (it’s $0.13 for 1 IP), and I think it was worth every single dollar.

They also have a pretty attractive enterprise plan. With my team, we are now considering their 30k IP plan for $1.2k because it’s just $0.04 for an IP — it’s really cheap. Since I now know that the quality is high, it sounds like a very cost-effective deal.

I haven’t needed a PIA refund, but they say they allow it, too.

Is PIA Safe?

Of course, you can never be sure when it comes to safety. What I personally liked is that the service has a comprehensive Vulnerability Disclosure Policy. You can find it at the bottom of their home page.

Plus, they have this Piracy Warning list with scam sites to protect you. And they use a proprietary algorithm to encrypt the communication protocol. Their proxies are anonymous (nothing new here, though), and you can also enhance this with fingerprint replacement when using a fingerprint browser. All in all, I felt completely safe with them and have seen nothing to believe otherwise.

My Verdict

PIA S5 Proxy is a good service. It’s completely transparent about what to expect and gives you a very good product. They are proud of their massive pool of clean residential IPs, and that’s not ungrounded. I haven’t had a single issue with these proxies. They completed pretty tough tasks for me, and they did it really well with minimum involvement on my part.

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