The 6 Best mobile and 4G proxy providers for web scraping

In this article, we will look at the six best mobile and 4G proxy providers for web scraping. We will not only look at the different features they offer but also perform a real-world test that includes the performance, speed, and success and error rate on some of the most popular websites: Instagram, Google, Amazon and the top 1,000 Alexa rank (the list of the most visited domains in the world).

You can use many types of proxies for web scraping. Depending on the website you are extracting data from, it can be interesting or even mandatory to use mobile or 4G proxies.

What's a proxy?

If you read our other article on datacenter proxies , you probably have a good understanding of what a proxy is, but let's nonetheless quickly recap: in a network context, a proxy is a service, which acts as a middleman between a client and a server. What this essentially means is that your HTTP client (e.g. a browser) will not talk directly to a web server, but will use the proxy as intermediary and your HTTP client will only connect to the proxy, who then in turn connects to the actual web server, to forward the request (please see Wikipedia for more technical details).

While proxies are typically used in large organizations to secure and monitor network activity, they are also a common technology in the world of web scraping, as their inherent nature of "substituting" the client address allows for a global distribution of your requests and avoid rate-limiters or geofence restrictions.

What are mobile/4G/5G proxies?

Mobile proxies provide the very same service, but run off traditional mobile phone providers (e.g. AT&T, Vodafone) and their 3G, 4G, and 5G networks. Any requests sent via them appear as if they were sent from a regular mobile phone. 📱

As phone providers typically focus on end-users, their IP blocks generally enjoy an excellent address reputation, which will minimize the risk of your scraper getting blocked or being prompted for CAPTCHAs when you extract data from the web and, in particular, social media or mobile-first websites.

There are lots of players in the mobile and 4G proxy field, and it can be hard to choose one, so let's take a look at our top six providers. For our selection, we primarily focused on the following criteria:

• Price
• Performance (speed and reliability)
• Success rate on different websites

The six best 4G and 5G mobile proxy providers

1. ScrapingBee
2. AirProxy
3. Bright Data
4. The Social Proxy
5. Proxy LTE
6. LimeProxies

1) ScrapingBee

Yes, we know it may sound like an ad, and if you read our previous blog article on free proxies it may even sound like a déjà vu, but we really tried to be as unbiased as possible and let the numbers speak for themselves - ScrapingBee really gives you the best bang for the buck

ScrapingBee is a SaaS platform specialized in data extraction and web scraping. It provides a lightweight REST API to run your data extraction jobs and allows you to distribute them across more than 240 countries with its built-in support for residential and mobile proxies. Enabling proxy routing is quite easy, all you need to do is switch a boolean flag to true .

On top of the API, ScrapingBee also support a native proxy mode , which provides standard proxy and SOCKS network interfaces and returns the same structured data.

By using proxies, you can really minimize the risk of getting blocked when scraping the web, and in addition to that, ScrapingBee also manages the proxy management and headless browsers.

Pricing starts at USD 49 a month and, for larger scraping volumes, we also offer Enterprise plans with custom pricing.

💡 Free trial

ScrapingBee offers a completely free trial with 1,000 requests included .

Results ( full benchmark & methodology )

2) AirProxy

AirProxy is one of the interesting providers on our list, as they are particularly transparent on how they run their network and where they get their connectivity from. Check out the following video for more details:

Basically, they run an array of modems with SIM cards from Italian mobile carriers and let you use them. The authentication is user/password based, which is great when you are deploying your scrapers on cloud providers without a fixed IP address. The pricing is rather at the higher end with EUR 87 a month, however traffic is unlimited. The great thing about them is that you can request an IP change every 15 minutes.

While these proxies are great for social media scraping and automation, they're not that great for other use cases. For example, these proxies are blocked by default on everything that isn't social media or Google.

On Google the rate limits are a big problem. In my test, the IP was blocked after a few thousands requests. Though, apart from the issue with Google, we found their proxies reliable and the speed is awesome.

Results ( full benchmark )

1,000 requests were sent for each website:

3) Bright Data (formerly Luminati)

Bright Data is one of the biggest player in the proxy industry and offers a variety of different proxy types -- data center, residential, and - of course - mobile proxies. Their approach to get the necessary connectivity is rather unique and different from many other providers:

Bright Data offers an SDK (Software development kit) for mobile developers to monetize their apps. Instead of running the usual ads, users share a small part of their bandwidth, which Bright Data uses to support their network. They claim to have access to 72 million mobile IP addresses around the world.

With that approach, they have access to a wide variety of different setups and their connectivity options are quite impressive:

• Country-level targeting
• City-level targeting
• Carrier (AT&T, Verizon...)

Bright Data provides a comprehensive service with a powerful dashboard and great documentation, however that all comes at a rather hefty price of USD 40 per gigabyte of traffic.

While larger volumes can come at a discount, one can still quickly run through a gigabyte these days and a 40 bucks package might last you only for about 500 pages (with the average page weighing about two megabytes in 2022 ).

Overall the results were good, but we didn't expect so many errors on Amazon. We suspect that they don't assign the same IP pools on every website.

Results ( full benchmark )

1,000 requests were sent for each website:

4) The Social Proxy

The name, of course, already somewhat alludes to it. The Social Proxy markets itself with a heavy focus on scraping and analyzing social media sites.

As one of the few providers on our list, they exclusively specialize in mobile proxies and do not offer other proxy types (e.g. in datacenters or regular residential ISPs). They currently offer proxies in the following countries: the United States, Austria, Israel, the United Kingdom and Germany

They offer a stable service and particularly their 5G plan is interesting, due to the higher bandwidth rate, however, starting at EUR 90 a month, it certainly is on the pricier side and the response times were a bit on the slower end, though none of our requests were blocked.

Results ( full benchmark )

1,000 requests were sent for each website:

5) Proxy LTE

Despite the name, ProxyLTE actually does not exclusively focus on 4G ( LTE ) connectivity, but also provides access to regular residential ISP connections. For our test, though, we only used their 4G mobile proxies.

Depending on your use case, there may be a limitation worth mentioning: Proxy LTE currently only has US proxies in its portfolio. Should you want or need proxies from other locations, that would immediately rule them out, however in a US context they provide a rather granular location level, down to individual US states.

From a technical point of view, they do not only provide HTTPS proxies, but one can also pick a SOCKS option, if desired. As far as subscription lengths are concerned, they are quite flexible and even offer one-day access, with prices starting at USD 2 a day. Downside, they currently only accept digital currencies (i.e. Bitcoin and Litecoin).

Apart from one blocked request on Instagram, they performed all right with the response times around average.

Results ( full benchmark )

1,000 requests were sent for each website:

6) LimeProxies

As many providers, LimeProxies does not only offer mobile proxies but also has classic datacenter and residential proxies in its portfolio. On the mobile said, they claim to have more than two million IP addresses from a total of 17 countries with a strong focus on Europe (e.g. France, Austria, Ireland, and Italy) but also in Canada, Australia, and Brazil.

They are a bit on the pricier side, with the smallest plan starting at USD 75 a month and including 5 GB of traffic. Should you need more traffic, then you will quickly enter the realm of three, or maybe even four, digits a month.

Our benchmark showed a similar performance as The Social Proxy with a slightly higher error rate, though.

Results ( full benchmark )

1,000 requests were sent for each website:

Benchmark

Now that we have our list of mobile and 4G proxy providers, it's time to benchmark against real websites. Generally, mobile proxies are great for extracting data from social media, because our requests appear to come from a regular end-user who is browsing the site. For that reason, we have also included Instagram in the benchmark and we used a few Instagram profiles from well-known celebrities. We also tested Google, Amazon, and the top 1,000 Alexa rank.

For the benchmark itself, we created a small Python script that reads the URLs in question from the provided input file and calls request_with_proxy() 1,000 times for each URL to run the actual HTTP request (via the proxy of course) and handle the response it received.

While an HTTP 200 code usually indicates a successful request, we still need to have a few content checks in place as well, to make sure we actually got the right data. Amazon, for example, sends a 200 even when they blocked a request but prompts for a CAPTCHA to be solved instead. Instagram, on the other hand, redirects to their login page when they blocked a request.

You can find the entire script, along with the data files, at ScrapingBee's open source respository at https://github.com/ScrapingBee/freeproxylist-blogpost .

Instagram

Google

*Using ScrapingBee Google API

Amazon

Top 1,000 Alexa Rank

Analysis

This was a quick benchmark of the major mobile providers on the market.

One of the difficult things when choosing a mobile proxy provider is that many are built for social media automation and not web scraping.

When you scrape the web, you want as many clean IP addresses as possible plus a reasonable per-GB traffic price.

With social media automation/bots, 4G proxy providers tend to offer only one IP address which you cannot necessarily change/rotate. This will quickly get blocked on websites with IP rate-limit restrictions like Google or Amazon. That's why you need to be careful when choosing a provider. The first 1,000 requests can work but then you start getting blocked.

The other big issue is price. Some providers, such as Bright Data, charge hefty fees for traffic and larger scraping projects can quickly reach three, or even four, digit amounts a month. Although they typically have quite a few connection options to choose from and often come with a certain flexibility (particularly Bright Data), the price can often be still simply prohibitve.

As you can see in the benchmark, there are significant differences between those providers, especially regarding the success rate, error rate, speed, and price. These are all of the things you will need to consider before making a decision.

Happy Scrapping :)