Apify Proxy Review
The Apify proxy service is a proxy service developed and managed by Apify, an automation bot service that was developed to help you automate all of your web tasks.
The proxy service is a standalone service that, even though it works well with the Apify platform, can be used for other custom bots. We would be reviewing this proxy service in this article.
Premium Proxy API for Automation
- Intelligent IP rotation system
- High performing proxies that work with most websites
- Combination of both datacenter and residential proxies
- Free proxies for hobbyists with no budget
- Integrates well with the Apify platform
- Simple and easy to use setup flow
- Both rotating proxies and session proxies supported
At first glance, this service is a regular provider, but if you look deep into it, you will discover it is one of the premium providers out there. The Apify proxy service has both datacenter and residential proxies in their proxy pool. You can choose to use either of them or get the service to rotate smartly between the two for you.
With the rotation between the 2, you get to find the right balance between performance and running cost as you crawl and scrape data from the web. It is important you know that the Apify proxy service only offers HTTPS proxies – SOCKS5 proxies are not supported.
One thing you will come to like about this proxy service is that it has a health monitoring system that constantly checks the proxy pool to find dead IPs and remove them. This is required as they source their IPs via Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks and, as such, do not have control over the network – with the monitoring system, they discover IPs no longer active and useable and remove them from their pool.
This makes sure that only good IPs remain in the pool, and you will experience fewer connection errors while using their proxies. Their proxies can be said to be high performers, fast, and compatible with most websites. Aside from serving as a proxy API, you can use their proxies as a standalone proxy service.
Is the service worth its salt? That’s what we’ll discuss in this review.
Expert Review & Guides
The Apify Proxy Solution
The Apify proxy service, even though is a proxy API, does not behave as such, it appears to users as regular proxies, and as such, you can use it for use cases you can use regular proxies.
As stated earlier, the proxies perform quite excellently, and as such, you do not have a problem with detection or ban except if you abuse them or you use the wrong proxies from them for your project. The Apify proxy service offers 3 types of proxies; each has what you should use them for.
Shared Datacenter Proxies
This service offers shared proxies to users for free, but you can also buy them if you need more. As with other shared datacenter proxies, you shouldn’t expect any form of good performance from this as you will be sharing it with other users – If anything, expect a slow connection. Their shared proxies are useful for tasks on web services that do not have an effective anti-spam system that detects and block proxies.
Dedicated Datacenter Proxies
The Apify dedicated datacenter proxies are the datacenter proxies we recommend. This is not unconnected to the fact that that they are super-fast and provide the best performance you can expect from datacenter proxies. You can use this for scraping some social media platforms, including Twitter and many other sites.
Residential Proxies
Their residential proxies are the best even though they can be seen as expensive compared to the others. Unlike the other 2 above that make use of datacenter IPs, this one uses IPs assigned to real Internet users by ISP.
For this reason, they are undetectable and, as such, could be used on all websites and for most proxy use cases. If you want to automate your actions on e-commerce stores like Amazon or social media platforms like Facebook, then residential proxies are the best. The residential proxy service rotates the IP address it assigns to you. It also has support for session IPs.
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How the Apify Proxy Service Work
The working mechanism of the Apify proxy service is the same as the other proxy services in the market. All it does is that it sits between your device and web servers on the Internet. When you have them configured on your device, your web requests do not go to the web servers you send directly.
Instead, they are being routed through the Apifynetwork, which then sends the request again to the intended server. Because the request gets to the server through an Apify proxy server or its associated peer device, your IP address is hidden, and that of the device that served as the front is seen as the IP address attached to the request. This is the basics of the working of all proxies.
However, there is more to being a proxy server than just rerouting requests. The Apify proxy service is a high anonymous proxy service, and as such, aside from helping you to hide your IP address, it also hides the fact that it is acting as a proxy server.
With its IP rotation system for residential proxies, it smartly changes your IP address so that you do not exceed requests limits that would reveal you as a bot while carrying out automation. The IP rotation is based on time and done every 1 minute.
If you want to maintain a session for more than 1 minute, then you will need to send a request every 20 seconds – this will help you maintain the same IP address for a long period of time. I mentioned above that they had got a system that removes dead IPs. However, banned IPs are not removed since bans are site-specific and are removed after a while in most cases.
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Pricing & Features
The Apify proxy service can be said to be a premium service, and as such, you shouldn’t expect their proxies to be cheap. If you have used the Apify platform in the past, you will see that you are offered 30 shared proxies to use for your tasks for free – and that’s where the freebies and cheap things end.
If you are serious about using proxies from this provider, you must pay more than the average pricing for their datacenter proxies and the average for their residential proxies. Take, for instance, for their shared datacenter proxies, the price per IP address is $1 – this is quite expensive as it is the price other providers offer for their dedicated IPs.
What about the Apify dedicated datacenter proxies? You will need to pay $7 for an IP address if you need up to 100 IPs. For more IPs, you can get them at a discount as generally, the price per IP address decreases for bulk purchases.
One thing you will come to like about their datacenter proxies is that validity is for a month, and you can enjoy unlimited bandwidth usage. Their dedicated datacenter proxies are very fast with excellent uptime.
The residential proxies offered by the Apify proxy service are quality ones and priced based on bandwidth usage. The price per GB for Apify residential proxies starts from $12.50 – and it reduces as you pay for more bandwidth. Unlike in the case of dedicated datacenter proxies, residential proxies are at a disadvantage in terms of speed. Fortunately, what they lack in terms of speed, they have got in terms of reliability and compatibility with sites as they are undetectable.
Currently, the service does not offer a free trial for their residential proxies and dedicated datacenter proxies. To make things worse, they do not also offer a refund once the license has been provided to you. This means that you should start with smaller plans before upgrading to a more expensive plan as you are not getting your money back if their proxies do not work for you.
Features of Apify Proxies
- Combines both residential and datacenter proxies to provide you a balance between cost and performance. If you want, you can buy either of the 2 (datacenter or residential proxies) separately.
- It has an intelligent proxy rotation system that provides you IPs after every 1 minute and allows you to maintain sessions for more than 1 minute, provided you sent a request every 20 seconds.
- Regular check its proxy pool to remove bad IPs that are no longer active. While inactive and dead IPs are removed, banned IPs are not. This is not unconnected to the fact that IP bans are site-specific and removed after a while. For this reason, there is no need to remove it while it would be useful later on.
- It has support for geo-targeting and allows you to choose IPs from specific locations (countries) around the world. Currently, it does not have support for city-level geo-targeting.
- Easy to use proxies either as a standalone service or integrated with the Apify platform. Endpoints are provided instead of a bunch of IPs and ports.
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How to use Apify Proxies?
As stated earlier, the Apify proxy service has been developed for the Apify platform, even though you can use it as a standalone service. We do not advise users to use the service if all they wanted is a regular proxy service as they are considered expensive when compared to regular proxies.
For this reason, we assume our readers are those looking forward to using the proxy service as a proxy API and not regular proxies. The Apify proxy service is not easy if you are a new user. This is because it has its own procedure for configuration and setting up, which is different from others.
The Apify platform is a NodeJS platform, and as such, the guide on how to use the service is available in NodeJS. Unlike in the case of other proxy service reviews that we provide you a step-by-step guide on how to make use of their proxies, Apify is different.
We won’t be doing that for you. Instead, we would be pointing you towards the Apify proxy documentation. From this documentation, you will learn how to use the Apify SDK to configure proxies – both datacenter and residential proxies. Click here to read the Apify proxy documentation. It is detailed and straightforward. Below is a sneak peek at how this service can be integrated into NodeJS application.
const Apify = require(“apify”);
Apify.main(async () => {
const requestList = await Apify.openRequestList(
“my-list”, [“http://proxy.apify.com/?format=json”]
);
const proxyConfiguration = await Apify.createProxyConfiguration();
const crawler = new Apify.PuppeteerCrawler({
requestList,
proxyConfiguration,
handlePageFunction: async ({ page, request, proxyInfo }) => {
console.log(await page.content())
},
});
await crawler.run();
});
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Are Apify IPs Residential or Not?
The Apify proxy service offers both residential proxies and their datacenter counterparts. If you read the content on their website, you will see that the service use the combination of both services when rotating IP address for you. This has the advantage of reducing costs for you while maintaining optimum performance.
This does not mean you cannot get each proxy type separated. You can buy each of the proxy types separately, and it will work just fine. If you want the residential proxy types only, you can buy them. However, from the pricing section of the article, they are expensive but have the advantage of being undetectable and do not easily get banned.
Our Verdict
Looking at the above, you can see that the Apify proxy service is a proxy service that works. Just like every other proxy in the market, the proxies have their strengths and weaknesses. Having weaknesses does not make us drop service from our recommendation list.
In the case of this service, we would like to say we recommend them, especially if you are using automation bots on the APify platform as it integrates well with it. However, I will advise you to go through the documentation page and see for yourself if you will like to go through the process or use other different proxy APIs such as ScraperAPI, Scrapingbee, and Proxcrawl with simpler usage procedures.
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