GeoSurf is no longer available, so what's next for geo-targeting and proxy services? Explore viable alternatives and find the best solutions for seamless browsing, data collection, and geo-specific testing after the shutdown of GeoSurf.
The unexpected closure of GeoSurf, a prominent proxy service provider, has left many businesses and individuals seeking viable alternatives to fulfil their residential and data centre proxy needs. The shutdown, stemming from a legal battle with Bright Data over patent infringement and trade secret theft allegations, marks a significant turning point in the proxy service industry.
This article aims to guide former GeoSurf users through available alternatives, offering insights into the top contenders catering to diverse proxy requirements. With GeoSurf directing its clientele to transition to Bright Data, the repercussions of this closure on competition dynamics, pricing structures, and user options within the proxy market remain uncertain.
This sudden shift underscores the importance of selecting a reliable and efficient proxy service provider while navigating the complicated legal landscape that characterizes the web data extraction industry. As GeoSurf bids farewell, businesses and individuals are now exploring alternative providers to meet their proxy needs effectively and securely.
Navigation of Contents
1. Proxy-Seller
Proxy-Seller, a Russian-based proxy provider, offers a comprehensive range of proxy services encompassing datacenter, residential, and mobile proxies. Their offerings cater to various needs, providing users with options like IPv4 or IPv6 for data centre proxies, high-rotating or static residential proxies, and dedicated mobile proxies.
Features
- Proxy Types. Proxy-Seller presents three primary types: datacenter proxies available in IPv4 or IPv6, residential proxies with high rotation or static options (ISP proxies), and dedicated mobile proxies.
- Setup and Management Service. Introducing a service where they assist in setting up and managing mobile proxies, providing users with a mini PC server, USB hub, and modem.
- Flexibility in Payment: Offering flexibility in the quantity of proxies purchased and the duration of rentals. Users can choose the number of proxies without being bound by a minimum threshold. Longer rental durations yield reduced prices, ranging from 1 week to 12 months. Various payment methods like Bitcoin, PayPal, and credit cards are supported.
- Acceptable Speed and Response Time: Proxy-Seller's speed is average, with no substantial lag observed in most cases during testing.
- Geographical Coverage: Extensive location coverage across different proxy types. Residential proxies span approximately 220 countries, allowing specific city and state selections. Datacenter proxies cover over 40 countries, while mobile proxies offer IP options in 20 countries.
- User-Friendly Interface: Proxy-Seller provides a minimalist dashboard for easy navigation, supporting authentication via username and password. Proxies are downloadable in TXT and CSV formats.
- Customer Support: Offers live chat support for real-time assistance and ticket support for offline inquiries, maintaining a presence across various social media platforms.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Allows users to customize proxy quantities and rental durations, offering reduced prices for longer commitments.
- Offers broad geographical coverage across residential, datacenter, and mobile proxies, enabling specific location choices.
- Simple registration process, easy payment, and minimalistic dashboard design for straightforward proxy management.
- Accessible live chat and ticket support, with a presence on social media platforms.
Cons:
- The pricing structure is deemed relatively expensive
- Proxy-Seller is not among the fastest proxy services available.
2. Soax
SOAX is a notable proxy service provider renowned for its residential, mobile, ISP, and datacenter proxies, catering specifically to businesses needing consistent and ethical internet access. Its commitment to offering premium proxies and support for SOCKS5 positions it as a compelling alternative to GeoSurf, particularly for professional users valuing uninterrupted connectivity while upholding ethical considerations.
Features
- Proxy Pool Size. SOAX boasts an extensive pool of over 190+ million IPs, ensuring an ample supply of fresh IPs for users' needs.
- Geographical Coverage: Offering proxies worldwide, SOAX enables traffic origination from any location, catering to diverse geo-targeting requirements.
- Pricing Plans: Starting at $99 for 15GB of residential traffic, SOAX's pricing equates to $6.60 per GB, offering flexible plans suitable for businesses of various sizes.
- Customizable Filtering Options: Users can filter proxies based on specific targeting parameters such as country, city, or ISP. Custom rotation times add further flexibility.
- High-Quality Proxies: SOAX offers reliable, fast, secure proxies across residential, mobile, ISP, and datacenter categories.
- Customer Support: Known for its exceptional customer service, SOAX provides prompt and helpful support through live chat, contact forms, and Soaxbot on Telegram.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Offers residential IPs in numerous countries globally, enabling precise geo-targeting for various online activities.
- It boasts over 8 million residential and mobile IPs, ensuring a wide selection and minimal scrutiny from websites.
- While not breaking records, the speed is deemed acceptable for residential proxies.
- Provides an intuitive, easy-to-use dashboard allowing IP authorization, copying data, and downloading proxy details.
- Offers various payment plans, including daily, weekly, and monthly subscriptions, catering to different user needs.
Cons:
- The pricing structure might be costly despite flexible payment options, especially for smaller marketers, with plans based on locations, ports, and bandwidth.
- It offers only a one-hour free trial, which might not be sufficient for users to assess the service entirely.
- Users have reported slow response times from customer support channels, which may impact problem resolution and assistance.
3. Smartproxy
Smartproxy is a top-tier proxy provider established in 2018, quickly gaining traction and earning a Trustpilot rating of 4.7. Boasting over 50 million rotating IP addresses across 195+ locations, it offers various proxies, including residential, backconnect, and datacenter options.
Features
- Proxy Types. It offers various types, including rotating, residential, backconnect, datacenter, and shared proxies.
- Starts at $4 per GB with a Pay-As-You-Go model, becoming more cost-efficient with larger bandwidth purchases.
- IP Pool: Boasts over 65+ million residential IPs and 10+ million mobile IPs across 195+ locations globally, supporting city, state, and country-level targeting.
- Scraping APIs: Provides scraping APIs for SERP, social media, eCommerce, and web scraping, ensuring 100% success rates and structured data retrieval.
- Ease of Use: Features a user-friendly dashboard, Chrome and Firefox extensions, and integration guides for various tools and software.
- Geo-Targeting: Offers broad country-level targeting but limited city-specific options, providing only eight cities to choose from.
- Session Control: Offers rotating proxies for web scraping and sticky proxies for social media automation, allowing customization of session durations.
- Customer Support: Provides 24/7 live chat support, FAQs, and email assistance, although some users note occasional delays in email responses.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Offers over 50 million rotating IP addresses from 195+ locations, providing users with a wide range of options.
- Offers relatively cheaper plans compared to other premium providers, with various bandwidth options catering to different user needs.
- Provides many residential IPs and supports targeting countries, states, and specific cities.
- User-friendly dashboard, integration documentation, and browser extensions enhance user experience.
- Displays acceptable response time and connection speeds suitable for residential proxies.
- 14-day money-back option.
Cons:
- Some users reported slow response times from the email support channel, impacting the overall support experience.
4. Bright Data
Bright Data, formerly known as Luminati Networks, is a notable player in the proxy service industry, offering a comprehensive range of proxy solutions, web scraping APIs, and datasets. Its standout features, vast proxy pool, and geographical coverage set it apart as a compelling alternative to Geosurf and other similar services.
Features
- Proxy Pool Diversity: Bright Data boasts an extensive proxy pool, including over 72 million residential proxies, 7 million mobile proxies, and ISP and datacenter proxies.
- Global Coverage: With a presence in 195 countries, Bright Data ensures users can access data from virtually any geographical location, enhancing data collection capabilities worldwide.
- Pricing Models: The service operates on a pay-as-you-go model, providing flexibility for businesses of all sizes.
- Proxy Types: Bright Data offers residential, datacenter, and mobile proxies, both static and rotating. It supports HTTP(S) and SOCKS5 protocols and targets options like city, ASN, and zip code levels.
- JavaScript Rendering: Capabilities for JavaScript rendering facilitate scraping from dynamic websites that rely on JavaScript for content delivery.
- Cloud-Based Scraping: It provides scheduled extraction and a cloud-based scraping service, streamlining data collection processes.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Offers a vast selection of over 72 million residential proxies and 7 million mobile proxies, accommodating diverse project needs.
- Spanning 195 countries, it provides extensive geographical coverage, ensuring access to data from various locations.
- Operates on a pay-as-you-go model, enabling scalability and adjustment of usage based on individual needs.
- Provides residential, datacenter, and mobile proxies, catering to user preferences and project requirements.
Cons:
- Compared to alternatives like Smartproxy, it can be relatively expensive, especially for users operating on a tighter budget.
- The web dashboard might be overwhelming for new users or those accustomed to simpler proxy service providers.
5. NetNut
NetNut is a residential, mobile, and data centre proxy service provider known for its extensive proxy pool and focuses on providing stable, efficient, and secure proxies. NetNut stands out for its utilization of the DiviNetworks infrastructure, a different approach than P2P residential proxy networks, offering increased stability and efficiency.
Features
- Proxy Pool: Boasts over 52 million residential IPs sourced directly from ISPs, ensuring high availability and minimizing inactive IPs.
- DiviNetworks Powered: Utilizes DiviNetworks, which collaborates with over 100 ISPs globally, providing stability and efficiency in proxy services without relying on end-users internet connections.
- Session Control: Offers 100% control over session management, allowing for static IPs and enabling users to control IP rotation intervals.
- Scraping Performance: Demonstrates acceptable scraping performance across popular sites despite occasional blocks, timeouts, and server errors.
- Speed and Latency: Provides high-speed proxies with relatively low latency, ensuring faster response times and efficient proxy connection speeds.
- Customer Support: Assigns an account manager upon subscription for personalized support via Skype chat and email. Additionally, it offers a detailed FAQ section.
- Free Trial: Provides a 7-day free trial with minimal restrictions, allowing users to experience the service before committing.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Offers a 7-day free trial with limited restrictions.
- Features a clean, minimalistic dashboard and straightforward integration instructions, simplifying the setup process and providing an accessible user interface.
- Offers a Chrome extension for easy proxy setup and a developer API for real-time proxy usage data retrieval.
- Assigns users an account manager and provides responsive support via Skype and email, ensuring professional assistance for queries or concerns.
Cons:
- Relatively high pricing starts at $300 for 20GB, making it a costly option compared to some competitors in the residential proxy market.
6. Nimbleway
Nimbleway is a promising proxy service with robust features catering to various data-gathering needs. It is a comprehensive solution offering scraping capabilities via Nimble API, browser automation with Nimble browser, and a reliable proxy network called Nimble IP—all bundled into a unified platform.
Features
- Nimble API for Data Gathering. The Nimble API simplifies data extraction by enabling users to set up pipelines without coding knowledge. It does the heavy lifting, leaving you to focus solely on utilizing the collected data.
- Nimble Browser. Designed as a lightweight mediator for the API, Nimble Browser aids the data-gathering process. It streamlines data collection with headers, cookies, and TLS fingerprints and seamlessly integrates with other automation frameworks.
- Nimble IP Proxies. Nimble IP ensures anonymity during data harvesting. The platform provides premium IP addresses, optimizing performance and allowing geo-targeting down to specific cities or countries when necessary.
- Pricing Plans. Nimbleway offers four pricing plans based on project size, ranging from $600 to $3600 monthly. Each plan offers varying features and pricing structures based on requests, IPs, or GB usage.
- Proxy Types. The service provides datacenter, residential, and 4G proxies in a single package, offering flexibility to choose based on your specific requirements.
- Geo-Targeting Options. Users can choose IPs from specific locations, allowing for precise geo-targeting. It offers country, state, and city-level granularity, although more granular choices might have fewer IPs.
- Free Trial and Usability. A 22GB free trial offers a glimpse into the service's capabilities. While Nimbleway is not the simplest to navigate, its dashboard is intuitive, providing necessary settings and information.
- Developer-Friendly. Nimbleway provides a developer API and comprehensive documentation, enabling programmers to integrate and interact with the service programmatically.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Offers a 22 GB free trial, enabling users to test the service before committing to a subscription.
- Datacenter proxies come with unlimited bandwidth, making it cost-effective for heavy users.
- It offers datacenter, residential, and 4G proxies, allowing users to choose based on their requirements.
- Provides various authentication methods like IP whitelist or username/password for flexibility.
- Offers a comprehensive solution for data gathering, including a scraping API, automation browser, and a proxy network.
Cons:
- The pricing structure might not cater to specific needs, lacking a custom package option for larger companies.
- Faces latency challenges, potentially affecting the speed and performance of proxies.
- Does not provide a detailed list of countries where IP addresses are available, offering only a broad coverage claim.
7. ProxyEmpire
ProxyEmpire has quickly risen in the realm of proxy providers since its launch in 2020. This service offers an extensive pool of over 25 million IPs spanning 147 countries, setting it apart from its competitors, including Geosurf. What makes ProxyEmpire a compelling choice for users is its range of features and functionalities.
Features
- Global Reach. Need to access or test content from various corners of the globe? ProxyEmpire's coverage across 147 countries makes it an ideal choice for businesses operating on an international scale.
- Flexible Pricing. Unlike fixed plans, ProxyEmpire operates on a pay-as-you-go model. Starting at $3/GB, this flexible structure suits businesses of all sizes.
- Good Geo-Targeting: ProxyEmpire facilitates specific IP selection, allowing users to choose countries, states, and even cities for their proxies, enabling precise geo-targeting.
- Unrestricted Usage: ProxyEmpire offers users control over proxy address usage, proxy rotation intervals, concurrency, and IP limitations, enabling a wide range of applications without strict constraints.
- Proxy Pool: The sheer scale of ProxyEmpire's IP pool ensures uninterrupted activities, mitigating IP bans or restrictions that could hinder your operations.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- ProxyEmpire offers proxies in over 150 countries, providing users with many location options.
- ProxyEmpire provides a speed range that remains within an acceptable limit for most activities.
- Offers a pay-as-you-go model with varied bandwidth packages.
- Its interface is designed for ease of use, catering to seasoned professionals and newcomers in the proxy landscape.
- ProxyEmpire does not limit users in terms of IP usage or restrict access to specific websites, providing control over IP rotation and concurrency.
Cons:
- The absence of a free trial or refund option might deter potential users who prefer testing services before committing financially.
- Lower-tier plans need more customer support access, potentially affecting assistance and response times.
8. InstantProxies
InstantProxies is a dedicated private proxy provider renowned for its cost-effectiveness and performance. It operates primarily from the United States and offers datacenter proxies tailored for various online activities, excluding sneaker bots. While focusing on affordability, it excels in functionalities such as scraping Amazon sites and managing social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.
Features
- Cheapest Datacenter Proxies. InstantProxies offers some of the most affordable proxies in the market, priced at $1 per proxy. They cater to various needs, from general browsing to specific platforms like Amazon and social media.
- Unlimited Bandwidth. These proxies come with unlimited bandwidth and support unlimited concurrent connections, making them versatile for various uses. However, replacements occur monthly if any proxy gets blocked.
- Excellent Refund Policy. InstantProxies offers a 7-day money-back guarantee. A complete refund is provided if their proxies do not suit your needs within this period.
- Decent Speed. While proxies inherently reduce browsing speed, InstantProxies maintains fast download and upload speeds, ensuring a relatively smooth experience.
- Test Proxies Before Buying. The service allows users to test proxies on their site before purchasing. Users receive detailed reports on response times for each proxy, although this does not affect the refund policy.
- Customer Support. The platform provides a FAQ page and live chat support for quick responses to queries. Support tickets are also addressed within a few hours.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Highly competitive pricing at $1 per proxy.
- Generous 7-day money-back guarantee.
- Responsive live chat and support ticket system
- Allows users to test proxies for performance.
Cons:
- It lacks a free trial option; testing is done on their website.
- Supports only IP authentication, limiting authentication options.
9. HydraProxy
HydraProxy is a high-quality proxy service that emphasizes providing affordable proxies while offering access to the internet without IP-based blocks or restrictions. It boasts a substantial IP pool from various worldwide locations, enabling users to maintain anonymity while bypassing geo-restrictions.
Features
- Sizable IP Pool from Worldwide Locations. With over 7 million residential IP addresses sourced globally, HydraProxy ensures a diverse user pool. It supports IPs from over 100 countries, allowing geo-targeting for accessing location-specific content.
- Affordable Pricing Based on Bandwidth. HydraProxy's pricing model is based on bandwidth usage rather than the number of IPs. Users are charged based on traffic, with plans ranging from $5 to $5 per GB, without monthly commitments or hidden charges.
- Acceptable Proxy Speed: While proxies can impact browsing speeds, HydraProxy provides good speed for various tasks, maintaining a balance between performance and proxy usage.
- Good IP Rotation System: The service offers high-rotating proxies that change IPs after each request and sticky proxies that maintain the same IP for a specific period (up to 30 minutes to one hour).
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Transparent pricing structure without hidden charges or minimum payment requirements.
- Provides users with a risk-free trial period for a day to test the service.
- Offers daily, 3-day, and 7-day plans, accommodating varying user needs and budgets.
- Allows users to select IPs from over 100 countries for geo-targeted access.
- Offers both high rotating and sticky proxies for different use cases.
Cons:
- It does not support state- or city-level targeting, limiting precision in location selection.
10. Proxy IPV4
Proxy-IPv4, despite its name, offers more than just private IPv4 proxies. It extends its services to include private IPv6 and mobile LTE proxies, focusing on expansive location coverage. The service prioritizes affordable options, allowing users to pay for the proxies they need without unnecessary commitments.
Features
- Diverse Proxy Markets. Proxy-IPv4 offers not just IPv4 proxies but also IPv6 and mobile LTE proxies, providing comprehensive coverage across various proxy markets.
- Good Location Coverage: The service supports multiple locations for its proxies, especially excelling in offering diversified areas for its private IPv4 proxies, spanning 20 countries worldwide.
- Flexible & Affordable Pricing: Proxy-IPv4's pricing structure is designed to be user-friendly, offering customization in the number of IPs, location, and duration. The service provides flexibility from 3-day to 90-day plans with competitive pricing based on quantity and time.
- Acceptable Proxy Speed Performance: Despite the usual trade-off in speed with proxies, Proxy-IPv4 showcases surprisingly fast speeds in performance tests, offering reliable and swift browsing experiences.
- Easy-to-Use Interface: The user dashboard is intuitive and user-friendly, allowing easy access to purchased proxies, enabling IP whitelisting, and providing convenient management options.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Offers live chat support and various communication channels.
- An intuitive and straightforward interface facilitates easy purchase, proxy access, and account management.
- Offers customizable plans allowing users to select the number of IPs, location, and duration, ensuring cost-effectiveness with options from 3 days to 90 days.
- Provides private IPv4, IPv6, and mobile LTE proxies, catering to different user needs across multiple markets.
Cons:
- Lacks a free trial option.
- A refund is only possible if a significant issue is attributable to the service.
Conclusion
After the sudden shutdown of GeoSurf, users have found themselves seeking viable alternatives to fill the void left by this service. Several options have emerged in the market, each offering its unique features and functionalities to cater to the diverse needs of users requiring reliable and efficient geo-targeting and proxy services.
However, the absence of GeoSurf has prompted users to explore and experiment with different platforms, ensuring they find the most suitable alternative that aligns with their specific requirements for browsing, data collection, or geo-specific testing purposes. As the landscape evolves, users adapt by integrating these alternatives into their workflows, leveraging their capabilities, and ensuring uninterrupted access to crucial geo-targeted data and services.