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Established in 2020 to meet the growing need for proxy servers and IP addresses, Live Proxies has been successful in its mission. This means that its servers have allowed individuals and businesses everywhere to bypass geo-restrictions and scrape data from websites for half a decade already.

In late 2022, it expanded its service to provide - among other things - Live Servers, meeting the market demand for secure and reliable virtual machines. In 2023, the platform added static residential and rotating mobile IPs to its existing offerings of rotating residential proxies.

Today, this proxy provider proudly offers access to a pool of more than 10 million IPs spanning 55 locations. Users can take their pick among rotating residential, static residential, and rotating mobile IP addresses to enjoy unrestricted access to the internet.

Live Proxies: Plans and Pricing

(Image credit: Live Proxies)

As mentioned above, there are three types of proxies you’ll get with Live Proxies - rotating residential, static residential, and rotating mobile. Each category has its custom pricing, and there’s also a separate B2B option for businesses.

Customers can choose plans based on location, bandwidth, and number of IPs included. For instance, for 200 rotating residential IPs with a 4 GB bandwidth allocation for the duration of 30 days, you’d have to set aside $70, regardless of the selected country. At the same time, selecting the US as the target location allows you to specify the particular state where you want your IPs to be located. Extending this plan to 60 days brings the price to $85, whereas doubling the bandwidth to 8 GB (during 30 days) costs $100.

With a similar pricing structure, static residential IPs are charged $65 for 50 IPs with a 4 GB allocation for 30 days. Upping this to 8 GB for 45 days costs $110. Rotating mobile proxies are also priced depending on bandwidth and subscription length. Long story short - the higher the bandwidth and subscription length, the more you pay in total (but less per IP).

That said, static residential proxy locations are only available in the US, rotating mobile IPs in the US, Canada, and the United Kingdom, whereas other locations support only rotating residential proxy plans.

Of course, unmetered options are pricier than the metered ones and don’t include rotating mobile IPs. So, the rotating residential plan of 25 IPs for 30 days is charged $130. The same option for static residential proxies costs $150.

As for the B2B plan, its pricing structure is simple - businesses pay a minimum $5,000 monthly to access the entire 10 million+ IP addresses. This is different from residential and mobile plans, which are limited to the specific proxy location.

This pricing plan organization is relatively easy to understand. All you need to know is where you want your IPs to be, how many proxy addresses you require, and how much traffic you need them for. However, the plans might be a tad costly compared to the competition.

Live Proxies: Features

(Image credit: Live Proxies)

Live Proxies not only offers a solid network of more than 10 million IP addresses and three main types of proxies - rotating residential, static residential, and rotating mobile - but also use cases across multiple categories, including web scraping, ad verification, unrestricted eCommerce, social media performance, gaming, brand protection, SEO, travel data aggregation, access to limited-edition sneakers, and much more.

Rotating residential IPs

In line with their name, rotating IPs “rotate” according to specific schedules. This means you’ll be switched to a proxy IP at a set time, like every hour or each time you start a new browsing session.

Live Proxies offers rotating residential IPs in multiple regions - US, Canada, UK, Mexico, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, France, Ireland, Israel, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, and Turkey.

Rotating proxies offer better anonymity, as the frequent change makes it difficult for websites to track your online behavior. Suppose you want to scrape data from a real estate listing site with anti-scraping features. Rotating proxies makes it challenging for the website’s admins to track your usage pattern and detect the proxy. They’ll likely assume the rotating proxies come from different individuals visiting their website.

Better off, Live Proxies offers residential IP addresses from legitimate sources. Device owners around the globe agree to add their IP addresses to Live Proxies’ pool in exchange for benefits. Then, you can use these IP addresses to bypass website restrictions and scrape data.

The drawback is that rotating proxies are slower than static proxies. Frequent rotation increases the likelihood of encountering slow connections, and rotating IPs are more expensive than static IPs.

(Image credit: Live Proxies)Static residential IPs

Static proxy IPs can be used for as long as your subscription lasts, and Live Proxies offers plans for durations of 30, 45, and 60 days. You can select a domestic static IP to bypass geo-restrictions or, say, scrape data from a US-centric real-estate listing website.

At the moment, Live Proxies’ static IPs are only available for the US. We tested these and noted excellent speed and performance.

Rotating mobile IPs

Mobile proxies are IPs sourced from mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, for various use cases. For example, you can use Live Proxies’ reliable rotating mobile IPs to juggle multiple social media accounts without risking restrictions or having to check whether ads are displayed correctly to mobile users.

B2B

Live Proxies offers a simplified proxy IP plan for businesses. Companies can access the entire pool of 10 million+ proxy IPs across 55 countries for a monthly fee. This plan best suits companies with large proxy needs, such as a price comparison website scraping data from numerous sources.

Live Proxies: Ease of Use

We didn’t observe any hiccups when testing Live Proxies. Its interface is easy to understand, with features neatly arranged on the left side and the main dashboard on the right. The dashboard sports a white background plus a few shades of blue to highlight features. Everything is set up in a way that a layperson can quickly grasp.

(Image credit: Live Proxies)Customer Support

Live Proxies has a decent help area on its website that includes a detailed knowledge base with answers to common issues. If you require further assistance, you can submit a ticket or reach out through the platform’s Discord channel. There’s no direct live chat on the site, nor is there any telephone support.

(Image credit: Live Proxies)Live Proxies: The Competition

Live Proxies performed on par with most rival proxy tools we’ve tested. Its proxy IPs provide excellent speed and performance. The drawback is its limited pool of 10 million IPs across 55 countries, compared to rivals like Oxylabs, which has 102 million IPs across 195 countries and Bright Data, which has 72 million IPs across 195 countries.

Live Proxies: Final Verdict

Live Proxies remains one of the best proxy providers in the industry, where speed and performance are concerned. For instance, thanks to these capabilities, it reliably supports large-scale data scraping, SEO boosting, and ad verification in which speed is of the essence, especially useful to businesses. At the same time, it works great for individual use cases dependent on performance, like downloading files, gaming, unrestricted shopping, and social media navigation.

• Take a look at our guide to the best proxy services

The Galaxy Z TriFold would be the world's second triple-screen phone, but there's no indication of when US shoppers will be able to buy it.

Formerly known as Smartproxy, Decodo is a proxy service scoring highly on our radar, thanks to its established reputation in the industry, where it has existed since 2018. It currently offers more than 125 million IPs across 195 locations with reliable uptime and speed.

With Decodo, users gain access to residential (dynamic and static), data center, and mobile proxies to level up their browsing security. There’s also a handy Site Unblocker feature that facilitates bypassing CAPTCHA and IP bans, and enables entry to restricted sites.

Aside from ethically-sourced proxy addresses, Decodo offers APIs for scraping, providing users with a wide array of options to automate the extraction of publicly available information from websites. These include several types of APIs for different levels of expertise and various objectives.

Plans and pricing

Decodo doesn’t have a subscription pricing model like many other proxy providers. Instead, its pricing is based on how many IPs you require, the type of IPs, and the volume of traffic you require. The pricing structure is complex, but let’s break it down below.

Decodo promotes its Residential IPs starting from $1.5 monthly per GB under enterprise pricing (excludes individuals and small businesses), but you need to take the 1000 GB plan, which means you’ll be charged $1,500 per month. Meanwhile, the pay-as-you-go option, available to regular users, starts at $3.5 per GB.

The more gigabytes you consume, the lower the unit price per GB. For instance, $245 per month would get you 50 GB ($4.90 per GB) of traffic for residential IPs, $450 monthly equals 100 GB ($4.50 per GB), while you’d need to set aside $3,000 each month if you want 1,000 GB ($3 per GB) of traffic through residential IPs.

Static residential proxies, priced by the number of IPs, monthly traffic, or the number of dedicated IPs required, start from $0.27 monthly per IP (that’s if you require 8,000 IPs and 50 GB of traffic). Furthermore, 500 IPs cost $165 monthly ($0.33 per IP), but 10 IPs cost $5.17 (that’s $0.47 monthly). In other words, the greater the number of IPs, the lower the unit cost of each IP.

The pricing for mobile proxies begins at $4.50 per IP with the 500 GB plan, and the price goes up per IP with the lower traffic requirement. Similar to static proxies, datacenter plans are also offered on the GB, IP, and dedicated IP basis. They start at $3,800 for the 10,000 GB plan, or $0.026 per IP if you go with the 4,000 IP and 300 GB option.

If you decide to go with the pay-as-you-go option for residential proxies, it’s priced by 1 GB, each costing $3.50. For mobile proxies, the price is $8 per 1 GB, while the static dedicated ISP and datacenter proxies don’t have the pay-as-you-go option available.

There’s a 14-day money-back guarantee if you’re not entirely satisfied with the service, although it’s not offered for every pricing plan. That said, you can first take it out for a spin during the rather short three-day free trial with 100MB of traffic before making a final decision.

All things considered, Decodo runs a pricing model that favors bulk users over individual and small business users. So, if you run a large organization that needs many IPs and gigabytes, you’ll find Decodo cost-effective due to the significant discounts. Still, Decodo might be expensive for small users.

Features

A Decodo user's journey begins with registration—you can sign up with an email address or link a Google account. Your account dashboard conveniently has all features located on the left, which you can easily sift through. Whether you need residential proxies, ISP proxies, or scraping, you can choose it on the left menu.

Smartproxy's dashboard (Image credit: Decodo )

After choosing and paying for a plan, you can conveniently add users via your dashboard. As the administrator, Decodo gives complete control over the IP resources you’ll allocate to each sub-user. For example, you can give a user 1 GB of data and another 10 GB. Each user from your organization has unique credentials to access Decodo.

You can create and customize proxy connections from your dashboard. First, you'll choose a sticky or rotating proxy. Sticky proxies change at set intervals (up to 24 hours) while rotating proxies change with every connection request. Then, you can choose an IP from a specific country/city or a random one as your proxy. With these options set, you can start utilizing Decodo’s online protection.

Let’s dive deeper into the features of this app:

Residential proxies

Residential proxies are real IPs from residential devices across the globe. Decodo promotes its service as “ethically sourced” proxies, which is crucial because some proxy services use IP addresses acquired without the owners' knowledge. Instead, Decodo gives access to residential IPs acquired with consent. You can choose from over 195 locations, with the United States, Germany, the UK, India, and Canada having the highest number of available proxies.

Residential proxies enable you to bypass geo-restrictions, e.g., changing your location to watch a sports match on a streaming site. During our test, we found Decodo's residential IPs to have excellent uptime and speed.

Static residential (ISP) proxies

Decodo now also offers static (fixed) residential proxies for as long as you need, which is great for long sessions, automation, and managing multiple accounts. Premium ASNs give you the best quality IPs from AT&T, Verizon, Orange, and others, to gain entry to the toughest of targets.

This option provides static IPs with ISP origin, combining datacenter speed and stability with residential legitimacy. It delivers 99.99% uptime and below 0.2-second response time, accompanied by HTTP(S) and SOCKS5 support, live usage statistics, and 100% dedicated IPs.

Mobile proxies

Decodo gives you access to mobile IP addresses around the globe. Its 10 million+ IP pool covers 160+ locations, and you can choose from 700+ mobile carriers. The largest pool of Smartpoxy's mobile IPs is available in the United States (3.9 million), Germany (1.2 million), the UK (940,000), and India (720,000).

Proxy mobile IPs help you bypass content geo-restrictions. They're also helpful for app testing, wherein developers test their apps across different devices, operating systems, and locations to ensure optimal user experience. Likewise, mobile IPs are useful for website scraping.

Datacenter proxies

You have access to residential and mobile IPs. But how about renting an entire proxy server for your online activities? Decodo offers this service, which helps bypass hard geo-restrictions and web scraping obstacles. You can choose a shared or dedicated proxy server; the latter costs more.

Decodo offers shared servers across many locations, but dedicated proxy servers are available only in the US. You can connect to the proxy servers via the HTTP(S) or SOCKS5 protocol.

Site Unblocker

Site Unblocker is a proxy-like solution that Decodo provides. It allows you to bypass IP and geographical restrictions and extract data from websites with robust CAPTCHAs and anti-bot measures.

Decodo's Site Unblocker differentiates itself from typical proxies with unique abilities like browser fingerprinting, which creates a different browser fingerprint for each proxy to bypass anti-bot measures; and JavaScript rendering, letting you execute website JavaScript codes without a headless browser. Of course, there’s automatic proxy rotation to prevent websites from identifying and blocking your IP address.

Scraping

Decodo goes beyond merely enabling you to scrape public websites. It actually provides APIs that let you automate website scraping instead of doing it manually by yourself for every single site. There are two primary approaches to this: Core and Advanced.

The former offers essential web scraping that handles proxies, browsers, and anti-bot measures. The latter is fully customizable, with premium proxies, advanced geo-targeting, target templates, JavaScript rendering, unlimited requests per second, and more.

With Decodo’s platform, you get APIs to scrape the web in general or specific templates, including search engine results pages (SERPs) like Google (with or without AI Overview, eCommerce websites, and social media. Now you can also scrape AI tools, as well as YouTube transcripts and metadata.

The web scraping API facilitates the retrieval of large amounts of data, presenting the results in an HTML or table format, and even including the option to schedule scrapes. Considering that many websites are strict about visiting IP addresses and use CAPTCHA to discourage scraping, Decodo’s full-stack solution helps bypass these obstacles.

Smartproxy's dashboard (Image credit: Decodo )

Those requiring social media scraping will benefit from structured data gathering at scale, with results presented in HTML or JSON format. For instance, you’ll be able to track the engagement rates of influencers working with your brand, monitor your competitors’ follower numbers, or discover trending content in real time or at a specific time. The recently introduced YouTube scraping lets you extract transcripts, metadata, and videos.

As for eCommerce scraping, you get structured marketing and pricing data from online stores, in HTML, JSON, or table format. This is helpful for businesses that run price comparison sites, enabling real-time pricing data scrapes to assist people in finding the best deals. Scraping tasks can be scheduled in advance, and you’ll receive an email notification once they’re done.

Smartproxy's dashboard (Image credit: Decodo )

Finally, Decodo’s SERP scraping API lets you access structured data from search engine pages and see the results in HTML, JSON, or table format. This way, you can research the competition’s search rankings, URLS, and meta descriptions directly from queries in Google or Bing.

Your scraping charges depend on the number of requests made, so you can expect to pay between $0.8 and $1.25 per 1,000 API requests.

X Browser

Decodo takes anti-detection one step further by offering an entire private browser. The X Browser focuses on privacy, allowing users to manage multiple browser profiles, each with a unique fingerprint. This means that websites can’t link these profiles to others on your device and discover your identity.

In other words, the X Browser lets you juggle multiple accounts on a single website and gather location-specific insights anonymously without facing cross-contamination risks, bans, and geographical or other kinds of restrictions.

Smartproxy's dashboard (Image credit: Decodo )Ease of Use

Decodo’s user interface is easy to navigate. On the desktop, all features are arranged on the left side, and you can easily access your desired feature with a single click. With a white background, black text, and colorful buttons, the whole setup is pleasing to the eye.

Along with the website interface, Decodo offers a Proxy Checker that lets you test up to 10,000 proxies after uploading them with one click.

There are also browser extensions for Google Chrome and Firefox, which give you access to features like one-click IP rotation, customizable session length, and seamless switching between proxies. Additionally, they include WebRTC Leak Prevent to stop WebRTC from bypassing your proxy, masking both your real IP address and location.

Like the main Decodo interface, the extensions are easy to navigate.

Smartproxy's dashboard (Image credit: Decodo )

Decodo makes it easy to integrate its proxies with various third-party tools, such as eCommerce purchase bots, scraping software, SEO tools, and external proxy managers like MuLogin and AdsPower. The backend is all covered, so you just need to carry out a few steps to kickstart the integration from the intuitive dashboard.

Customer Support

Excellent customer support is one of Decodo’s strengths. This support begins with extensive technical documentation for its features. You can find tutorials and user guides concerning all features, with detailed screenshots illustrating the instructions. You can learn everything about the app in the Help Center, from a basic introduction until you reach more complex aspects.

Decodo has a YouTube channel with video tutorials about its features. This channel allows users to learn about the platform more interactively and has dozens of illustrative and engaging videos.

Smartproxy's dashboard (Image credit: Decodo )

Of course, customer support can’t be left to the customer alone. If you need help, Smarproxy's support team is available via live chat. You can contact the support team 24/7 and get speedy answers, although the response time varies depending on your time zone. You can also reach Decodo’s support team via email (for non-urgent inquiries) and expect a response within 24 to 48 hours.

Other complementary support resources include Decodo’s GitHub repository with code samples and a Discord channel where you can connect with other users and share solutions to common issues. Decodo also holds frequent webinars to help users learn the ins and outs of this platform and general trends in the proxy software market.

The Competition

There’s no shortage of competition in the proxy software sector. Decodo has robust competitors like IPRoyal, OxyLabs, and WebShare. It outshines many competitors by providing a broader range of global IP addresses and complementary features like the X Browser and scraping APIs. However, our main issue is with Decodo’s pricing– it’s significantly more expensive than many rivals, especially for low-volume users.

If you’re a bulk user needing hundreds of proxy IPs, Decodo is an ideal tool. However, it’s too costly for individuals or small enterprises needing a few dozen IPs at most.

Final verdict

Decodo is one of the best proxy tools in the business, and for many good reasons, the most significant being its unmatched speed, uptime, and reliability. Aside from those, Decodo’s products are easy to use and provide access to a wide range of IPs. They also include complementary features to help you scrape various kinds of websites and platforms and counter anti-bot measures.

However, its tools are primarily intended for large businesses and enterprises with a large number of users. Small enterprises and individuals, on the other hand, might find it overly pricey.

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