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Established by a group of digital marketing experts, Storm Proxies has existed since 2016 and has grown to become a leading proxy service provider catering to individuals and small businesses. It currently runs a modest network of only 700,000+ IPs compared to some competitors that surpass 100 million. Those IPs are mainly concentrated in the United States and Europe, as opposed to the competitors that cover virtually every country in the world.

That said, where it lacks in the IP spread, it certainly makes up for it with the affordability of its proxies for basic activities. Unlike major competitors, Storm Proxies isn’t there to cover your every proxy requirement, marketing itself as a simple proxy provider and meeting expectations in this matter.

Plans and pricing

Storm Proxies provides access to three IP categories: residential rotating proxies, private dedicated addresses, and backconnect rotating proxies, each with its own distinct pricing options.

The company charges a monthly fee for private dedicated datacenter IPs according to the number of proxies. For $10/month, you can get 5 private IPs with unlimited bandwidth at 1 Gbps speed. At $20/month, you can get 10 IPs; $40/month gets you 20 IPs, $60/month provides access to 30 IPs, $90/month is guaranteed 50 IPs, $160/month means 100 IPs, $320/month is 200 IPs, and for $640/month, you can get 400 data center proxies. In other words, the higher the number of IPs, the lower the cost per IP.

Where residential rotating proxies are concerned, you pay according to the number of ports, or ‘proxy gateway’ IPs, that change every 5 minutes. Hence, access to one residential IP port costs $19/month, 5 ports are charged $50/month, 10 ports are $90/month, 20 ports are $160/month, 50 ports are $300/month, 100 ports are $550/month, 200 ports cost $900/month, and 500 ports can be yours for $1,600/month.

For reverse rotating backconnect proxies, you pay according to the number of ‘threads’ or simultaneous connections from one device. The pricing starts at $39/month and includes unlimited bandwidth for up to 40 simultaneous connections. To get 80 connections, you’ll pay $59/month, and $97/month will get you 150 connections.

There’s no free trial, but the 24-hour money-back guarantee is supposed to give you a taste of what Storm Proxies has to offer.

Features

Storm Proxies focuses on proxy IPs and lacks complementary features you’ll find on other proxy providers, such as web scraping APIs. However, it performs its core function well. Let’s explore the features users can access on this platform.

Residential rotating proxies

Residential proxies are real IP addresses sourced from physical devices. The device owners agree to add their IP address to Storm Proxies’ network in exchange for a benefit, e.g., VPN usage. Storm Proxies pools these IPs and offers them to its users.

Storm Proxies offers a roughly 700,000-strong pool of rotating residential proxies. Rotating means your IP address changes frequently, switching to a new one randomly selected from the pool. Constant rotation makes it harder for websites to detect the proxies, providing better anonymity and security.

What are residential proxies used for? Web scraping is a good use case. Suppose you run a website showing users the best sports and concert ticket deals. This website requires frequent data scraping from ticket sites like StubHub and Ticketmaster. However, these sites dislike data scraping and institute geographical and IP restrictions to block it. Storm Proxies’ residential proxies help counter these blocks.

When you use a residential proxy to visit a website, the website thinks the traffic comes from a typical device. With IP rotation, the website thinks the traffic comes from different devices visiting the site as usual. Some ticket websites block traffic from entire countries, usually those they aren’t serving. But you can simply bypass this geo-restriction by choosing a US or EU proxy.

Storm Proxies' residential proxies have unlimited bandwidth, so you don't need to worry about the volume of data being scraped. It uses encryption to hide your actual IP address from websites. During our test, Storm Proxies’ IPs offered fast speeds and performance, with little slowdown compared to accessing sites normally. The drawback is this platform’s limited proxy pool, with servers concentrated in the US and EU and negligible in other regions.

Datacenter IPs

Datacenter IPs are IP addresses tied to physical servers. These servers are sourced from secondary corporations, and Storm Proxies gives users easy access. Unlike residential proxies, which rotate every 3 to 5 minutes, datacenter IPs are static. You'll get one IP for a long time, but you can request up to two replacements monthly.

(Datacenter IPs are IP addresses tied to physical servers. These servers are sourced from secondary corporations, and Storm Proxies gives users easy access. Datacenter IPs offer rapid speed and performance. In this case, a physical server with a stable connection sits as an intermediary between you and the Internet. This is much better than relying on an end user’s PC or mobile phone (residential IP), which might have an unstable connection.

If you’re scraping massive data volumes, datacenter IPs are the best choice because of their better reliability and speed. The drawback is their limited reach, with Storm Proxies offering datacenter IPs only in the US (Cheyenne, Los Angeles, and New York City). If you need a datacenter IP in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and other continents, Storm Proxies can’t fulfill this need.

Backconnect rotating proxies

Backconnect proxies are a type of proxy server that dynamically routes traffic through a pool of rotating IPs. Storm Proxies lets you choose proxies that change every 3 minutes or 15 minutes. A 3-minute proxy is suitable for regular browsing or account creation, while 15-minute proxies are suitable for longer browsing sessions. You can also get a fresh IP address with every new HTTP request, enhancing your anonymity.

Storm Proxies gives you one or several "proxy gateway" IPs that you'll enter inside your proxy management software. With this connection set up, you'll receive a new proxy IP on every HTTP request, every 3 minutes or every 15 minutes (depending on what you choose). You don't need to manually change IPs in your proxy management software: everything works automatically on Storm Proxies' side.

The maximum number of backconnect proxy connections you can open depends on your proxy plan. Storm Proxies offers different plans ranging from 40 to 150 simultaneous connections. The lowest plan provides one IP address, and the highest includes 3 IP addresses for different computers. Users get unlimited bandwidth, so there’s no need to worry about your data scraping volumes.

Storm Proxies’ backconnect proxies were reliable during our test. We liked that the pools rotated automatically while we surfed the web seamlessly. We chose the option for a new IP address with every request, enabling us to bypass geo-restrictions more effectively, although we encountered a few request failures. The main drawback remains Storm Proxies’ limited 700,000-IP pool, unlike many competitors that give access to tens of millions of global IPs.

It’s worth noting some features that Storm Proxies lack. The first is a web scraping API, which many competitors provide. Web scraping is the most common use case for proxy servers, so many proxy providers offer APIs to assist users. This feature lets people kill two birds with one stone: getting reliable proxies and the APIs to leverage those proxies for data scraping.

Web scraping APIs let you automate massive data scraping tasks. You’ll choose the website you want to scrape from and select your data type, and the API fetches the data. The timing depends on the volume of data being scraped. APIs let you automate scraping tasks ahead of time. Unfortunately, Storm Proxies doesn’t provide this feature.

We don’t like that Storm Proxies doesn’t offer bandwidth-based pricing plans, which can be more economical for small users. If you need just a few GB of proxy bandwidth, it’ll be more cost-effective to pay for precisely that rather than subscribe to a monthly plan you won’t fully utilize. We also don’t like this platform’s limited geographical reach, with servers primarily in the US and EU. But if you’re looking for reliable proxies in these regions, Storm Proxies is an excellent choice.

Ease of use

Storm Proxies offers a simple dashboard that we found easy to use. Setting up your proxies is as simple as it gets, helped by its limited features (there's not much to navigate). Creating an account requires your full name and email address. Then, you'll be asked to select a plan, although you can register without paying initially. After registration, you’ll be taken to the dashboard to access the proxies you paid for.

(Image credit: Storm Proxies)

The user interface is simple, with all options at the top and the main dashboard below. From this menu, you can renew your plan, deploy new proxies, change credentials, and whitelist IPs. However, we noticed a user interface-related drawback: the lack of usage reports.

(Image credit: Storm Proxies)

Most proxies we've tested provide extensive usage reports, letting users know how much bandwidth they've consumed over time. But Storm Proxies doesn’t have this feature, which we consider a disadvantage. On the bright side, Storm Proxies offer unlimited bandwidth, so you don’t need to monitor your usage rigorously.

Customer support

Customer support is an area where Storm Proxies needs considerable improvement. It claims to offer "24/7 Premium Support, but this support is only available via email. There's no live chat or telephone option to communicate with support staff in real-time. You can wait up to 24 hours to get a response to a support email. Storm Proxies’ support system isn’t the best when you need solutions to urgent issues.

There's an official Knowledge Base with solutions to common user challenges, e.g., “How do I start using proxies?” You can consult this Knowledge Base after encountering any issue, then seek direct support if you don’t find a solution to it.

(Image credit: Storm Proxies)The competition

The proxy server industry is very competitive, meaning we can give Storm Proxies an endless list of formidable competitors. We’d like to highlight Bright Data and Oxylabs as the main rivals.

Bright Data is a stellar proxy provider that offers residential, datacenter, ISP, and mobile proxies from its gargantuan network of 72 million+ IPs. It also offers sophisticated web scraping APIs, letting users kill two birds with one stone. Overall, we consider Bright Data a better proxy service than Storm Proxies, albeit a more expensive one.

Oxylabs has a massive pool of 175 million+ proxies, compared to Storm Proxies’ minuscule 700,000+. It provides residential, datacenter, ISP, and mobile proxies, plus web scraping APIs and pre-built datasets. Oxylabs is a more sophisticated proxy provider than Storm Proxies. However, unlike Storm Proxies, which offers unlimited bandwidth, its residential IPs are bandwidth-limited.

Final verdict

Offering only residential and dedicated datacenter proxies, limited customer support, and a tiny number of accessible IPs compared to many competitors, Storm Proxies is far from being a very sophisticated proxy provider. Still, it’s one of the best budget proxy platforms in the industry. If you need a bit of data scraping from US and EU websites, then Storm Proxies is the way to go. This means it’s best suited for individual and small business users and not enterprises seeking a solution for massive data scraping tasks.

We've also highlighted the best proxy and best VPN

Originally named Luminati Networks, Bright Data traces its beginnings back to 2014, when it was established as a division of a renowned VPN service called Hola. In 2017, it was sold separately from Hola and rebranded under its current name in 2021 to highlight its goal of helping users scrape data with its proxy services.

Today, Bright Data provides access to its 150 million-strong collection of proxy IPs, including to more than 20,000 enterprises. Alongside individual users, they rely on its residential, datacenter, and mobile proxies to circumvent geographical restrictions and scrape important information.

• Want to try Bright Data? Check out the website here

Plans and Pricing

Due to offering different types of proxies and related services, Bright Data has several pricing options.

Users pay for residential proxies according to the bandwidth they consume. Bright Data offers three standard plans, currently at a 50% discount for the first three months: $499 monthly for 141 GB, $999 monthly for 332 GB, and $1,999 monthly for 798 GB. Alternatively, you can choose the pay-as-you-go option starting at $4 per GB. The drawback is that the pay-as-you-go plan is slightly more expensive in the long run ($4 per GB compared to $3.5 per GB on the standard 141 GB plan). If you need more than 1 TB, you can reach out to the company for customized pricing.

For datacenter proxies, users can pay according to the number of IP addresses they require. The standard plans are 10 IPS at $14 per month ($1.4 per IP), 100 IPs at $100 per month ($1 per IP), 500 IPs for $475 per month ($0.95 per IP), and 1,000 IPs at $900 per month ($0.9 per IP). As with residential proxies, if these plans don’t meet your needs, you can contact the company for tailored pricing above 1,000 IPs. Users can also pay for datacenter proxies according to bandwidth. The standard plans are $499 monthly for 1 TB, $999 monthly for 2 TB, and $1,999 monthly for 5 TB. The pay-as-you-go option with no monthly commitment costs $0.6 per GB.

Dedicated datacenter proxies are pricier.

If you need ISP proxies, Bright Data has four standard plans to offer you: $18/month for 10 IPs ($1.8 per IP), $145/month for 100 IPs ($1.45 per IP), $700/month for 500 IPs ($1.4 per IP), and $1,300/month for 1,000 IPs ($1.3 per IP). You can also pay for ISP proxies according to bandwidth. The standard plans are $499 monthly for 39 GB, $999 monthly for 88 GB, and $1,999 monthly for 190 GB. The pay-as-you-go option with no monthly commitment costs $15 per GB.

Dedicated ISP IPs are a bit more expensive but follow the same structure. Similarly to residential and datacenter plans, should you require over 1,000 IPs or 1 TB, you’ll need to check in with the Bright Data team directly.

Mobile proxies are priced similarly to residential proxies, $499/month for 71 GB, $999/month for 166 GB, and $1,999/month for 399 GB, with the possibility to get the pay-as-you-go, no commitment option at $8 per GB.

Bright Data offers sophisticated web access APIs with its Web Unlocker API pricing coming in three standard versions: Growth for $499 monthly ($1.3 per 1,000 results), Business for $999 monthly ($1.1 per 1,000 results), and Premium for $1,999 monthly ($1 per 1,000 results). The higher your plan, the greater the scraping requests available each month. If you don’t want a monthly commitment, you can choose the $1.5 per 1,000 results pay-as-you-go plan.

It also has a similarly priced Web Scraper API, at $499/month for 1K records under the Growth subscription, $999/month for 1K records included in the Business plan, and $1,999/month for 1K records as offered by the Premium pricing tier. These are currently available at a 25% discount. As expected, there’s a pay-as-you-go option at $1.5 per 1K records.

SERP API has the same pricing structure as the Web Scraper API, except that it’s currently available at a 50% discount for the first six months of use. The Browser API pricing follows much the same sentiment, costing $499/month for 71 GB, $999/month for 166 GB, and $1,999/month for 399 GB. The no-commitment option is charged $8 per GB.

Alternatively, you can run your scrapers as serverless functions at $500/month + compute time of $0.095/hr under the Growth plan, $1,000/month + $0.09/hr compute time as part of the Business option, and $2,000 + $0.085/hr compute time included in the Enterprise subscription.

Finally, Bright Data offers pre-built datasets, a unique feature that many proxy platforms don’t have. Starting at $250 per month for 100,000 records, these datasets allow businesses to access ready-made data instead of scraping it from scratch at higher costs. Available datasets include Amazon products, Yahoo Finance stock market data, Zillow real estate listings, LinkedIn profiles, and much, much more.

There’s no free trial available per se, but you do get $2 in credits when first signing up. Bright Data also offers a 7-day free trial for registered companies. This trial period is short, but it helps users test the features before committing to a monthly or pay-as-you-go plan.

Features

Accessing Bright Data’s features starts with registration. To sign up as a new user, you’ll need a work email address, but the platform also supports logging in with Google and GitHub accounts. You'll receive a verification email after signing up and creating a password.

Residential Proxies

Bright Data offers proxy IP addresses sourced from physical devices worldwide. People agree to add their devices to the network for a benefit, such as a VPN subscription. Bright Data’s users can then choose one of the IPs to bypass geo-restrictions and scrape data.

This platform offers over 150 million ethically sourced residential proxies from 195 countries, with the most popular locations being Brazil, India, the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Russia, and China. Residential proxies rotate IP addresses, i.e., change with each browsing session.

(Image credit: Bright Data )

During our test, the residential proxies had excellent speed and reliability. Both static and rotating proxies allowed us to surf the web seamlessly and bypass strict website geo-restrictions. You can manage all proxies from your user dashboard, deploying new ones or removing existing ones at will.

Bright Data gives you significant control over your proxies. You can choose proxies from specific cities, states, and countries. The robust IP network, especially in Europe and North America, makes it easier to bypass geo-restrictions. If an IP address can’t successfully bypass the restriction, Bright Data rotates different IP addresses until it succeeds.

ISP Proxies

ISP proxies are static residential proxies sourced directly from Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Unlike residential IPs that rotate with each browsing session, a static ISP proxy is assigned only to you. You can keep this static IP for as long as your subscription lasts.

Bright Data offers a network of 1,300,000+ fully compliant static IPs, with the most popular locations being the U.S., U.K., Germany, Italy, and France. The U.S. has the highest number of static IPs - 1,173,705 - while all other countries have fewer than 15,000 each. This smaller number is expected because of the higher costs and difficulty of obtaining IP addresses directly from ISPs.

The static ISP proxies offered excellent speed and reliability during our test. Bright Data lets users manage static IPs directly from their Control Panel or an external API. The user-friendly Control Panel makes it easy to deploy and organize a large number of proxies.

ISP proxies are more reliable than typical residential proxies because they don’t change frequently. Using one IP address for a long period makes it easier to browse anonymously and break through geographical and IP website restrictions. Once you bypass a site’s restriction with a static IP, you can continue accessing the site with that IP. In contrast, rotating proxies mean you can bypass a site’s restriction today and struggle to bypass it tomorrow with a new IP address. Expectedly, Bright Data’s static IPs cost more than rotating IPs.

Datacenter Proxies

Datacenter proxies are sourced from secondary corporations rather than ISPs. A server (in a datacenter) with a unique IP acts as the intermediary between your device and a website you want to access. You can request a shared or dedicated datacenter IP: a dedicated IP is more reliable in circumventing site blockades.

(Image credit: Bright Data)

Bright Data offers 770,000+ datacenter proxies in 98 countries, unlike residential proxies available in 195 countries. You can select your datacenter proxy by specific city or country. These proxies are fast because your browser request is sent directly from the proxy server to the target website, unlike residential proxies that can bounce through several devices before reaching the target site.

The drawback is that datacenter proxies are more vulnerable to detection because of their less diverse IP range. They are cost-effective but less efficient at bypassing geo-restrictions than residential and ISP proxies.

Mobile proxies

Bright Data’s pool includes over 7 million mobile proxy IPs from 195 countries. These residential IPs are sourced from mobile devices across the globe, with India, the U.S., and Brazil having the largest share in Bright Data’s pool. You can use these IPs to surf the web from the eyes of real mobile users. You can choose IPs from 3G, 4G, or 5G networks.

During our test, Bright Data’s mobile proxies provided top-notch browsing speed. We tested IPs from different countries, and they worked reliably. Usually, mobile IPs are more expensive than residential IPs from PCs, but Bright Data charges the same amount for both.

Web Scraper API

Web scraping is one of the most common use cases for proxy servers. Some businesses need to scrape massive amounts of data from a website, e.g., pricing data from retail sites. However, many websites discourage scraping by implementing geographical and IP restrictions. Proxy IPs let businesses bypass these restrictions and scrape their desired data.

(Image credit: Bright Data)

As a first-rate platform, Bright Data doesn’t stop at providing proxy IP addresses for web scraping. It also provides APIs that let businesses automate data scraping. It has ready-made scraping APIs for websites like Facebook, Amazon, LinkedIn, Zillow, X, ChatGPT, and TikTok. Several websites, such as Facebook, have filed lawsuits to block these scraping APIs, but Bright Data has countersued and prevailed.

Suppose you run a price comparison site that helps people find the best e-commerce deals. You can use Bright Data’s APIs to automate data scraping from Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and other popular e-commerce sites. You’ll then clean the scraped data and display it on your price comparison website.

Bright Data's APIs can handle bulk scraping requests, convert raw HTML into structured data, and validate data automatically. Pricing depends on the number of API requests you make.

Dataset Marketplace

You don’t always have to scrape data from scratch. Bright Data offers an alternative: ready-made datasets sourced from different websites. It provides pre-built datasets from many websites, like LinkedIn, Pinterest, Crunchbase, Amazon, and Redfin. You can also get categorical datasets, such as car prices, housing prices, crime rates, NBA players' stats, etc.

(Image credit: Bright Data)

Pre-built datasets reduce headaches for businesses. Instead of scraping data from scratch and waiting a while to access it, you can access datasets already scraped by others. Pricing starts from $250 monthly for 100,000 records.

Ease of Use

Bright Data has an intuitive interface you’ll likely enjoy using. The left menu has all the features you need to access, and the right side is the main dashboard. Many features are neatly arranged across the dashboard to make them easy to find. With a white background and a few contrasting colors, Bright Data’s interface looks visually pleasing.

(Image credit: Bright Data)

You can access this proxy software primarily from the desktop interface. There’s also a Google Chrome extension that lets you seamlessly change proxy locations. Bright Data's user-friendliness is unmatched by most rivals.

Customer Support

One of Bright Data’s strengths is its top-notch support. You can contact its support team 24/7 and receive a response in less than 30 minutes. It offers support via live chat and email, but there’s no telephone support.

Bright Data also provides extensive documentation and user manuals to help users figure out solutions to their problems. The website’s Docs section contains detailed guides for all features and an API reference that helps users write effective data scraping commands.

We found Bright Data’s documentation easy to follow and helpful for our test. For instance, we followed the web scraping tutorial to harvest data from an external website.

The Competition

The proxy software market is very competitive. There’s no shortage of rivals to Bright Data, and the ones we’d like to highlight are Decodo (formerly Smartproxy), Oxylabs, and Webshare.

Decodo is an excellent proxy provider offering residential, ISP, and datacenter proxies. It's a cost-effective alternative with a large pool of 125 million+ IPs across 195 countries. However, Bright Data has a larger IP pool across the same number of countries and offers more features and customizability.

Oxylabs offers a slightly larger IP pool, with 175 million+ addresses compared to Bright Data’s 150 million+. Both platforms have similar offerings, but Bright Data provides some features not available in the other, such as a dataset marketplace and a web IDE. Bright Data also has a more responsive support team than Oxylabs, according to our experience when testing both.

Webshare is one of the best alternatives that go head-to-head with Bright Data. It’s a more affordable tool, which is crucial for small businesses. It offers effective APIs to scrape data en masse, just like Bright Data. However, Webshare has a much smaller pool of IP addresses: roughly 80 million compared to Bright Data’s 150 million.

Final Verdict

Bright Data is a comprehensive provider of proxy and proxy-related services. It offers not just tons of IP addresses covering the entire world, but also throws in quite a few extras for good measure. These include different kinds of web scraping APIs and even pre-built datasets. Thanks to these features, it’s well equipped to provide you with anything you need to bypass website restrictions and scrape any required data. There are a few drawbacks here and there, primarily its higher cost compared to the competition, but it might well be worth it, especially for high-volume needs.

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