Zyte Proxy Review
The Zyte Smart Proxy Manager is formerly known as Crawlera when Zyte was still under the Scrapinghub brand before rebranding into Zyte. The Zyte Smart Proxy Manager is a proxy API that is designed to help you manage proxy lists, so you do not have to deal with proxies directly. It is especially useful for websites that have effective anti-bot systems in place.
Pioneer Proxy API for Web Scraping
- Simple dashboard and easy to use
- Automatic and efficient rotating proxy systems
- Anti-ban system for evading anti-bot systems of websites
- Support for geo-targeting
- Support for both residential and datacenter proxies
- Browser profile configuration support
- Cookies and headless browser support
- 14 days free trial with 10K requests
The Zyte Smart Proxy Manager has been designed to make scraping easier by helping you manage proxies and evade anti-bot systems of websites so that you do not have to. All you need to do is configure the proxy endpoint provided by the Zyte Smart Proxy Manager, and you will get access to the web content you want. With this service, your focus will be on how to process downloaded web pages and not accessing them in the first place. One thing you will come to like about this service is that pricing is by the number of requests, and you only have to pay for successful requests.
Zyte is one of the best and foremost proxy managers. It was the success of this service that led to other proxy APIs being developed. This service boost of one of the highest success rates in the market as it depends on that to make money – remember, pricing is based on successful requests. While you can potentially use this on your browser, the service has been developed for web data extraction and nothing more. It is battle-tested, result-oriented, and super scalable that handles over 11 billion requests monthly.
Is Zyte worth it? That’s what we’ll discuss in this review.
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Expert Review & Guides
The Zyte Smart Proxy Manager Solution
The Zyte Smart Proxy Manager offers developers a proxy management solution that takes care of proxy lists and IP rotation. It does not only rotate IP addresses; it also has other features that make web scraping easier, which include anti-ban management, universal HTTP proxy interface, web browser simulation, and even residential IPs for custom plans. Being a developer-focused proxy management system, the service has support for popular programming languages including Python, Java, C#, and Node.JS, among others.
The service integrates well with web scraping libraries such as Scrapy (developed by Zyte) and Selenium, among other web scraping tools. One thing you need to know about this service is that it has one downside that limits its usage as a scraper API. The Zyte Smart Proxy Manager does not handle JavaScript, and as such, websites that depend on JavaScript to render their content cannot be scraped using the Zyte Smart Proxy Manager alone – you will need to use either Selenium or the Zyte owned Splash. Other scraper APIs, including Scraper API and ScrapingBee, have support for JavaScript rendering and execution provided via their headless browser support.
So for the Zyte Smart Proxy Manager to function on modern websites, you will need to use it with either Selenium or Splash. The Zyte Smart Proxy Manager can be used for a good number of web scraping and crawling tasks, including price monitoring, ads verification, site testing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), marketing, and social research, among others.
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How the Zyte Smart Proxy Manager Works
Zyte proxy service makes the whole process of using proxies, rotating IPs, and preventing IP ban easy on the surface, but it does a lot under the hood to make this possible for you. The Zyte Smart Proxy Manager works like just regular proxy services – you get to use a proxy address and a proxy port – with your license key for the authentication method. When using this service, your web requests do not go to the websites they are intended for – Zyte proxy server acts as a front for you and takes care of all the proxy management tasks on your behalf.
If you send a web request, it goes to the Zyte proxy server. The proxy server would then send the request to the intended web server, requesting for the page. It would rotate the IP address it assigns to you, evades detection as a proxy, avoids IP ban, bypasses Captcha, and even retry a request if it wasn’t successful. If it was able to successfully retrieve the content you want, it sends it for you and minus it from your remaining request balance. Else, it gives you an error message letting you know the request was unsuccessful – and you won’t be charged. Regular proxy services would not do that for you – they only provide you IPs and rotate them – avoiding bans is up to you.
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Pricing and Features
The pricing model of Zyte Smart Proxy Manager favors the customers and puts the burden on Zyte to ensure customers’ requests are successful in other to earn money. The pricing is based on successful requests – customers can enjoy as many IPs as Zyte can provide and also as much bandwidth as they want, but the number of requests is limited depending on the package you subscribe to. Generally, Zyte has 4 packages differentiated by the number of requests and concurrency allowed – most other features remain the same.
If you look at the above, you will see the smallest package is the starter package sold for $29 and comes with 50K requests – you could buy additional 10K requests for $10. The largest package is the enterprise and starts from $999 monthly. One thing you need to know is that for the starter, basic and advanced plan, the IPs provided are datacenter IPs – only the Enterprise users get residential proxies. As a first-time user, you get access to the service free of charge. They have got a free trial plan with 10K requests valid for 10 days. But you will need to add a payment method – and will be charged when the free trial elapses – you can cancel anytime, though.
Features of Zyte Smart Proxy Manager
- They have got a proxy pool with hundreds of thousands of IPs. The exact number of IPs is not provided, and they claim to have reserves should you need more.
- Support for automatic IP rotation and accessing geo-targeted content via their support for geo-location targeting.
- Good support for cookie management, session management, and browser profile configuration.
- Residential IP support is provided as an add-on for enterprise users.
- Support popular programming languages including Java, Python, PHP, C#, and NodeJS
- Integrates well with Splash, Selenium, Scrapy, and other web scraping tools.
- Automatic request retry support, and you only get charged for successful requests.
- Anti-ban system that increasesthe success rate of requests and makes your work easier.
- Free trial support for first-time users – but you need to add a payment method to avoid abuse.
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How to Use the Zyte Smart Proxy Manager
The Zyte proxy service is a paid tool, and as such, you will need to pay into it to make use of their service. If you do not want to make a monetary commitment, you can go ahead and signup for their free trial option – but you will need to add a payment method and cancel it afterward before exhausting the free trial plan to avoid getting charged. The process of signing up is simple; all you need is your email address and password. You will need to verify your email then sign in to activate the free trial.
Two methods of payment are supported – card and PayPal. You should go to the Smart Proxy Manager section and get your API KEY. You will be using the API key for authentication. This is quite different from regular proxies in that you either use a username and password for authentication or simply whitelisting your IP address. You can use the Zyte Smart Proxy Manager with most of the popular programming languages and web scraping tools, and as such, providing you a single guide in this article might not work. We would only be providing you a simple Python code that shows how to make use of the service with the Python requests module.
Python Requests Integration
import requests
url = "http://httpbin.org/ip"
proxy_host = "proxy.zyte.com"
proxy_port = "8011"
proxy_auth = ":" # Make sure to include ':' at the end
proxies = {"https": "https://{}@{}:{}/".format(proxy_auth, proxy_host, proxy_port),
"http": "http://{}@{}:{}/".format(proxy_auth, proxy_host, proxy_port)}
r = requests.get(url, proxies=proxies,
verify=False)
For guides on how to use this service with Scrapy, Java, NodeJS, Ruby, C#, Scrapy cloud, headless browsers, and more, visit read the Zyte Smart Proxy Manager Documentation here.
Authentication
The method of authentication is via API key. The service does not support both username and password authentication as well as IP whitelisting. Because it is a paid tool, you should know that the tool would only work if you have an active subscription.
Geo-Targeting
For geo-location, Zyte supports the country-level targeting and has support for a few popular countries. It does not have support for state and city level targeting as most datacenter proxies do not support that too.
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ISP Testing – Residential Or Not?
If you have been reading most of our reviews, you will see that we usually include this section to let our users know the type of IPs a particular provider offers regardless of what they claim to offer. In the case of Zyte, we do not need to carry out any form of test. This is because even though they offer both residential and datacenter proxies, you will most likely not get access to IPs in their residential pool.
Even for the enterprise plan, it is not available by default; it is included as an add-on which would mean you paying extra. So if you know you do not have up to $999 to spend on proxies, then don’t bother to think of getting residential proxies from this provider as you would not get them – residential proxies are for premium customers here. As a reviewer, we do not have $999 to spend, and as such, we can’t provide you any ISP result testing if you are a premium customer. As far as we are concerned, their proxies are essentially datacenter proxies.
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Our Verdict
Just like every other provider out there,TheSocialProxy has its strengths as well as weaknesses. It is a new provider, and not many proxy users know of it, and their proxies have not been put to rigorous security tests by many cybersecurity agencies. However, as far as we are concerned, their proxies work not only for social media automation but for a good number of other use cases. Their proxies are fast, undetectable, and reliable. For this reason, we are recommending their proxies. They are on our recommendation list.
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