We feature the best proxy service providers currently available, covering free, paid-for, and business proxy servers, to help protect your privacy online.
The best proxy service providers make it simple and easy to help protect your privacy online. Effectively, a proxy serves as a gateway between you and the internet, so when using a proxy server the details of the websites you visit and other online history is saved to that server, rather than to your computer. This allows for a degree of anonymous surfing, with the caveat that proxy servers will often save at least some details. This means a full investigation of the server records may make it possible to personally identify you. However, this is unlikely to be a problem for most people, and proxy servers otherwise provide a useful if basic way to avoid the extensive advertiser tracking and routine privacy intrusions that are now commonplace online. Do note that a lot of proxy server providers also provide paid-for VPN services, because VPN (Virtual Private Network) can offer better security and privacy than a proxy service alone. In which case, it may be worth considering getting a free VPN or pay for one of the best premium services instead. If you’re not sure whether a proxy server will be better, check out our guide Proxy servers vs VPN: Why VPNs are better. In the meantime, here we’ll feature the best proxy services, free and paid-for, which will overlap with some VPN services. You can get both residential and data center proxies from Smartproxy. Its pool of over 40 million rotating residential IPs comes from desktop and mobile devices and is shared between all the users. While this can be disadvantageous as you can get flagged IPs, the provider ensures its quick rotation policy ensures its proxies don’t get banned. Smartproxy limits plans by bandwidth but allows you to run an unlimited number of concurrent threads. You can select the proxy you want to use from a list of backconnect gateway servers in your dashboard. By default, Smartproxy displays all the different gateways for the countries and cities that it supports. You can however filter down the proxies based on a couple of useful parameters such as the location, and the type of session (rotating or sticky). Depending on these, the dashboard will show the appropriate proxy gateway that you can then use in your apps and tools. If you plan to use the proxy to browse the web, Smartproxy also has extensions for both Chrome and Firefox. You can use the extension to again narrow down the location and type of proxy you want and even choose the authentication mechanism. The first that strikes you about Luminati is its huge proxy pool of over 72 millions IPs. The service offers all kinds of proxies. In addition to rotating residential IPs, the service also offers static ones, which are a group of 6 to 100 residential addresses for your exclusive use that haven’t been previously used with your target domain. Luminati also sells mobile IPs that cost more than the usual residential IPs but are more resilient and will work on particularly difficult to please targets. If you have very specific targeting requirements, you’ll appreciate Luminati’s support for ASN (Autonomous System Number) in addition to the usual targeting options such as country, state, and city. To use its proxies, you can use the Luminati Proxy Manager (LPM), which is an open source tool that can be installed on top of Windows, macOS and Linux for free. LPM can help you define rules for IP rotation, blacklist IPs that give bad results, optimise bandwidth usage by routing some requests through your regular non-proxied connection, and more. Luminati’s residential proxies support all the main protocols including HTTP, HTTPS and even SOCKS5. The service also has a comprehensive support infrastructure with multiple avenues of help including video tutorials and webinars. However, all the features and dexterity comes at a price. While the service advertises a base rate for all types of proxies, specifying additional parameters such as the targeting levels has an effect on the final cost of the proxy. The service also has multiple payment plans to accommodate different users. In addition to the standard monthly subscriptions, Luminati also offers a pay-as-you-go plan. The plans are on average more expensive than many of its peers, but will seem reasonable particularly to large scale proxy users and those with very specific requirements. RSocks offers residential, data center and even mobile IPs. You can either share its list of over 3 million proxies with other users or get some for your exclusive use. One of the best features of the service is that it doesn’t restrict the amount of bandwidth on any of its plans. As long as the plan is valid, you can continue to use the proxies. RSocks also allows users to run upto 500 concurrent threads on many of the plans. To top it all, the proxy provider supports all the popular protocols including HTTP, HTTPS, and SOCKS5.
