Best Proxy Servers in 2022

Formed in 2018, Smartproxy is a relatively young proxy service. However, the quality of the service helped it grow massively in that short time.

Let’s see if the services are as good as users say.

Smartproxy Features

Smartproxy adds a lot of nuance to its services, but its main focus is rotating residential and data center proxies.

The residential proxy plans use the same IP addresses regular internet users would get. In other words, the proxies mimic the activity of real devices, which means it won't be apparent that you're actually using a proxy server.

If you want a fast proxy server, data center IP addresses are an option, but they don’t make your activity online completely anonymous. Sites might catch on and block your proxy IP.

That said, the “rotating” part means that IP addresses get switched out automatically without you needing to reset the server. You can choose how often to switch out addresses (the default is on every connection).

Smartproxy has a massive network of 40 million IP addresses based in 195 locations worldwide, so you can avoid getting flagged easily enough.

You can use Smartproxy in any way you like, but its main application is automated activity like bots, web scraping, or ad testing. That can be anything from using the privacy to run many social media accounts, over-collecting data from Google, to purchasing rare items like limited-edition sneakers.

In fact, Smartproxy has special features for search engine scraping. It’s designed to get around annoying CAPTCHA and guarantees 100% success.

If you want a powerful, reliable proxy server for automated tasks, Smartproxy is one of the most powerful solutions.

Ease of Use

Smartproxy has an intuitive interface. It’s fairly easy to get around the options and use them. You can buy and use its plans from the same place for added convenience.

That said, setting up user permissions can take some time. It’s easy enough if you’re the only user. For numerous accounts, though, it’s kind of tedious to set up all logins and whitelist IP addresses.

Other than that, the provider uses its XBrowser tool, which acts as a dashboard for configuring your proxy service and scraping activity. The interface is rather clean despite the multitude of features. You can also connect through a browser extension to obfuscate your own browsing sessions in just two clicks.

Smartproxy is a straightforward tool, all in all.

Pricing

Smartproxy has two tiers of pricing—Residential and Data Center plans.

The Data Center plans start at $50/month for 100GB traffic and one user up to $500/month for 1TB traffic and ten users. Residential plans are a tad more expensive, starting at $75/month for 5GB traffic and one user and rising to $4,000/month for 1TB and 4 users.

The prices are in line with the best internet proxies, though they are a bit much for a user that just wants to access some video content.

In order to get a good Smartproxy deal, make sure the HOSTING10 code upon purchase and lower the price by $10.

We Recommend Smartproxy For…

Smartproxy is a premium service awesomely equipped for web scraping and other automated tasks. It’s a solid choice for any business that wants to get around nasty blocks on major websites.

Whoer is one of the more significant providers of VPN services. That said, it also offers proxy solutions for personal use.

Let’s see what it can do.

Whoer Features

Whoer sells your standard personal use proxies. Users can connect from any browser to a Whoer server and browse the internet anonymously. The provider states the proxy helps you get around geo-blocking and keeps no logs of the activity.

The proxy also hides your IP address so you can sidestep online trackers.

All in all, it’s a pretty standard offer for users who want to stream or torrent quickly and privately.

The service has one free proxy server you can use to try it out, though the connection speed is very limited. Once you pay, you can access 17 full-speed servers. The proxies use the same machines that support its VPN services, so you can expect decent performance.

The proxy works on Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Yandex browsers. Although it won’t work for everyone, it covers most users.

Ease of Use

The web-based proxy server is as straightforward as they come.

All you have to do is download a browser extension, and you’ll be ready to connect to the trial server. Once you purchase a plan, you’ll be able to switch to one of the regular servers and experience full speeds.

That’s it—you’re now ready to browse the internet anonymously.

Pricing

You can get access to the Whoer paid proxy service as part of Whoer’s VPN package. It comes in a single-plan variant, with discounts if you prepay for a longer period.

• One month—$9.90/month
• Six months—$6.50/month
• One year—$3.90/month

Overall, the pricing is fair, plus you get a full VPN service if you want more anonymity.

We Recommend Whoer For…

Whoer is a solid personal web surfer proxy and VPN. If you want something straightforward to get around blocks on various websites, it’s a great choice.

HideMyAss (HMA) is one of the leading VPN providers in the world. Like many other VPNs, it offers proxy services based on the same underlying technologies.

Let’s see how good the solution is.

HMA Features

HMA is a bit more than your typical web surfing proxies.

It has no browser plugin, but it has an interesting free version.

Instead, you input your settings into HMA's website, and it will open a connection for you through its website. If you'd like to use it as a traditional proxy, you would have to pay for HMA's VPN plan.

There are a few benefits, however. HMA lets you route traffic through six different locations—quite a bit more than your average free proxy. It can also encrypt the URL, block cookies, and disable script loading, which gives you some measure of online privacy.

The best proxy also has no caps on bandwidth, unlike most other free options.

Overall, it’s a solid option if you want to do a few quick sessions through a proxy but aren’t sure you need one long-term.

Ease of Use

HMA is fairly easy to set up and get used to. There are some basic settings to get through, but the interface is mostly intuitive.

One annoying aspect is that the free version of what is essentially the best proxy browser limits you to a single browser tab. Although you can do practically anything with it, managing proxy use can be a bit of  hassle.

Overall, there are more straightforward free services. Still, you can always upgrade to paid VPN if you want to make the experience smoother.

Pricing

HMA is a free online proxy. There are no downloads required—you can access it directly on the provider’s website.

If you'd like more flexibility and don't want to bother with visiting HMA's website every time you want to use the proxy, you can upgrade to an entire VPN plan. The VPN starts as low as €2.99/month, so it’s fairly affordable.

We Recommend HMA For…

HMA is the best proxy browser for one-off sessions. If you want to use it regularly, a full HMA VPN plan is more suitable.

Hide.me is one of the world’s top VPN players. It offers proxy services as a way to introduce users to its packages.

Let’s see if it can be the best proxy server choice too.

Hide.me Features

Hide.me is mostly meant to be a personal proxy. You can connect to one of three locations—France, Canada, or Germany—which is enough to unlock most web content.

It works with Firefox and Chrome and supports the SOCKS protocol, making it a very fast and reliable proxy. Hide.me even suggests using it for torrenting, which most free choices prohibit.

The proxy also hides your IP address, making it more anonymous than your typical solution. Hide.me also includes IP leak protection into its proxies, which is usually reserved only for VPNs. 

Overall, you get solid privacy features.

Ease of Use

Hide.me is fairly straightforward to set up. All you need to do is download a browser extension, and you’ll be connected to a free proxy server. If you do decide to upgrade to a full VPN, you’ll have a few more options to deal with, but the setup is still very simple.

Pricing

Possibly the best part about Hide.me is the price—there is none, making it the best free proxy in the market. The upgrade of the proxy server is Hide.me’s virtual private network, which is paid.

If you purchase the VPN, you will get access to more servers, more protocols, traffic encryption, and similar advantages that are included with your typical VPN.

The VPN starts as low as $4.99/month, which is fair though not the lowest price out there.

We Recommend Hide.me For…

Hide.me is great for users not looking to break the bank. It’s the best free choice out there and, if you want more, you can always upgrade to a quite decent VPN.

You might not have heard of Brightdata, but you may know of its former name. The company used to be called  Luminati, one of the best-known proxy providers. It changed names to avoid unfortunate associations with its name.

It’s as if they knew that something’s up.

Be that as it may. Let’s see if it remains the brightest proxy server host in 2022.

Brightdata Features

Birghtdata is a business proxy provider.

It offers both data center and residential proxies. The business solution provides nearly 800,000 IP addresses, guarantees 100% uptime, and is available in 10 data centers around the globe. 

The personal proxies are available with 110,000+ static and 72 million dynamic residential IP addresses. These are sourced from a multitude of devices, including 7 million mobile phones.

Brightdata guarantees an impressive 99.99% uptime here as well.

The configurations get pretty granular, so the services are superb for geo-targeting.

Brightdata charges for traffic spent, which is fairly standard for paid proxy services.

If you’d like to do some web scraping from search engines or other websites, you might prefer Brightdata services geared accordingly. They can collect data once or in real-time, imitate real browser activity, and support unlimited connections.

Brightdata’s crawlers can also solve captchas and parse JavaScript files, making them great for SPAs that use JS to generate HTML markup.

Overall, Brightdaata is one of the best proxy services for data collection.

Ease of Use

Brightdata takes some configuration to get started. You’ll first have to set up zones, which are sort of batch configurations for proxies. The interface for setting everything up is fairly straightforward, though.

More advanced users, however, will want to use the Luminati Proxy Manager. This is a downloadable, open-source tool for Windows and macOS. You can also use npm or curl to set it up on a Linux machine.

It offers more advanced controls for tinkering with your proxies, rerouting some requests, cycling out bad IP addresses, and more. However, the sheer amount of options also makes it more challenging to use.

Overall, Brightdata’s top proxy servers cater to both beginners and experienced users alike. 

Pricing

Brightdata’s pricing is flexible. There are pay-as-you-go plans, monthly and annual traffic-based ones, and per-request offers.

The prices are reasonable. For instance, starter data center plans charge $0.60 per IP address and $0.095 per GB of traffic.

Search engine scraping starts at $2.50 per thousand requests.

That said, the paid proxy plans have a mandatory minimum on how much resources you must purchase. The plans typically start at $500/month ($450/month with the annual discount). 

Brightdata is so confident in its proxy server service that it only charges you for successful connections. This can dramatically drive down the cost of your plans.

And if you’d like something even more affordable, you might be able to purchase previously collected data sets from Brightdata. You just have to contact its team to see if there’s anything from your desired websites.

We Recommend Brightdata For…

Brightdata is a solid option for everything from simple geo-targeting to complex real-time data collection projects. It’s fantastic for big data companies and online businesses.

LibertyShield is a large provider of various solutions that bundles VPN and a proxy service into a single package. Let’s see how it works.

LibertyShield Features

LibertyShield offers a fairly standard browsing proxy. You can set it up on a browser and route all traffic through LibertyShield’s servers. The same eight global locations are used for both proxy and VPN services.

• USA
• Canada
• UK
• Ireland
• Germany
• Spain
• France
• Switzerland

Once you get a plan, there are no limitations. You can connect any number of browsers and pull as much bandwidth as you need.

The proxy is also anonymous, meaning it scrubs your IP address from requests and attaches its own. That turns it into a more safe proxy server that helps avoid ad tracking. Naturally, there are also the benefits of getting around geo-blocks and censorship.

If you want full traffic encryption, just install the VPN app included with your plan. Once you’re connected to a server, all the traffic going out of your computer will be fully encrypted.

In case you’re interested in something more robust, LibertyShield even sells VPN routers that can encrypt absolutely all traffic from all connected devices.

Overall, LibertyShield is great if you want a solid web surfing proxy as well as the option to go online with full anonymity.

Ease of Use

Setting up the LibertyShield proxy takes some effort.

Once you install the required browser extension, you’ll need to go into the configuration files and input the info provided when you created your account. It’s not terribly complicated, but there are even simpler solutions among the top proxy software.

Fortunately, the VPN client is significantly easier to deal with and has a sleeker interface. The fact that you don’t control both solutions from the same dashboard might seem silly to some, but it actually increases flexibility and granular control.

Pricing

LibertyShield pricing is very straightforward. There is one plan, and the price goes down if you pay for more than a month at a time.

• One month—£6.99/month
• Three months—£6.66/month
• Six months—£6/month
• One year—£5.83/month

Overall, the prices are in line with the top proxy services, though they might be a bit too high if you just want proxy access.

We Recommend LibertyShield For…

LibertyShield is a solid provider if you want to use a proxy for browsing and encrypt other activity over a VPN. It’s the top bundle deal for both services.

Blazing Proxies is a website proxy service by Blazing SEO. It likes to boast about being the most reliable proxy solution around.

Let’s see if it can back up its claims.

Blazing Proxies Features

Blazing Proxies mostly focuses on data center proxies. These are very fast and reliable. Plus, Blazing Proxies owns all of the underlying infrastructure, so it has full control over the servers.

Instead of charging you for the traffic, Blazing Proxies charges per IP address. This makes it great for heavy usage and large amounts of scraped data. And there are 300,000+ data center IP addresses over 20,000 subnets, meaning there’s great diversity.

Overall, the top proxies are great for enterprises that need to do big data market analysis, automate many social media tasks, monitor ads, and similar activities.

If you want something more under the radar, Blazing Proxies also has residential proxies.

All the IP addresses here are ethically sourced, mainly from users that are paid for their device resources or clients using Blazing Proxies’ free apps. The service supports both static and rotating IP addresses. It’s still a new option, however, so there aren’t as many available addresses.

There is a proxy API that you can use to run the services. However, it's quite basic compared to the robust APIs of services like Smartproxy.

Ease of Use

Blazing Proxies is fairly easy to set up. All the controls are available in its browser-based client or through most proxy software. The dashboard looks a bit plain, but it’s straightforward to find all the controls.

Blazing Proxies also has a tool that's still in beta that can make your life a bit easier.

Proxy Pilot is a smart tool that can help you manage cooldowns between requests, rotate IPs, detect bans, do complex geo-targeting, and collect advanced statistics. It has the potential to be a massive boost in proxy server software management, though the solution is still a bit rough around the edges.

Pricing

Blazing Proxies charges users by the IP address they need. Data center proxies start at $2/month per address for a standard server or $3/month for rotating ones for 5 to 99 IP addresses. This goes down to $1.50/month or $2.25/month per address for 1,000-4,999 addresses.

Residential proxies are more expensive, ranging from $4.60–$5 per month based on the same numbers. It’s still worth it if you want the best online proxies.

If you need even more, you can contact Blazing Proxies about getting a custom plan.

There are also discounts based on how long you prepay for. You can go for up to a year, which would get you 15% off your subscription fee.

The prices might be a bit much for individual users. Still, they are great for organizations that need many proxies.

We Recommend Blazing Proxies For…

Blazing Proxies is among the best proxies in 2022 for companies and organizations with considerable automation needs. Affordable prices, unlimited traffic, and great features all make it a fantastic choice.