Bright Data (Formerly Luminati Networks) is a market leader in the industry that is the most advanced proxy provider in the world. To learn more about it, please read this article with me and find out if Bright Data suit you.
- 72+ million IPs over the world
- Offer ASN/Cities/Countries Geo-targeting
- Excellent scraping performance
- IP rotation is 100% Self-control
Typically there are hundreds or thousands of proxies companies in the market. Some companies cater to the residential, mobile, datacenter, and ISP proxies, while others offer private, shared, sneakers, or Shopify proxies. But, if you want quality proxy providers that consolidate all these proxies’ categories in one basket, then choose the likes of Bright Data.
Bright Data owes its origin to Israel, but it has since become the most popular proxy network in the world because it has vast IPs across the globe. It also has rotating proxies that help you switch easily from Bright Data's residential, datacenter, and mobile proxies. The following are some of the Bright Data attributes that you will like.
Bright Data's Pros and Cons
Before we venture more about Bright Data specifications, testing, and other information, we would like to tell you why we like it and why we don't. Either way, let's start with its pros,
Why We Like it
- It's a web data giant: They effortlessly convert unstructured data into structured data, resulting in complete, accurate, and enriched datasets.
- Offers a free proxy’s control: With its variety of rotating IPs and bot technology, web crawling and scraping are made easier.
- Convenient with chrome extension: Chrome supports or integrates with Bright Data, where you do not have to configure it as you could do with Bright Data Proxy Manager (LPM) or super proxy.
- Detailed Geo-targeting: Bright Data's wide coverage across the globe makes it access most geo-blocked sites or censored sneaker sites
- 100% Legal: First, Bright Data is licensed in many countries. Even with your awareness, Bright Data connects to the residential IPs of your gadget.
- Has a free test: Bright Data offers a seven-day free test.
- Quality internet connection: Bright Data has quality servers that enable fast browsing, unlimited threads, and 100% uptime.
Why We Don't Like it
Have a complicated dashboard: starters may find it complicated to use dashboard features like zones, proxy manager, API integration, or various proxy types.
A bit expensive but worth: With the least payment being $500 monthly. But they added a “pay as you go” plan that makes it available to more people.
Bright Data Overview
Bearing in mind that Bright Data is wider scope, it is classified according to its proxy types. First, there are residential proxy IPs given to residents by their ISP (Internet Service Provider.) Bright Data proxies are one of the greatest offerings over 72 million IPs. They also have mobile proxies and datacenter proxies that emanate from mobile providers and ISP providers, respectively.
We have it on good authority that their annual turnover exceeds $100 million. And now, they are pivoting more towards the sourcing of datasets, which is a cost-effective way, so they have gone from strength to strength.
Some features make a product outstanding in any product or program. That is the same case with Bright Data proxy features, where the following are some attributes that make it exceptional.Bright Data Types
As we have said earlier, there are various Bright Data proxy categories. These categories depend on the source of the provider. The most common Luminosity types include datacenter proxies, mobile proxies, and residential proxies.
First, the residential proxies represent its greatest offering with over 72 million IPs. You can either have Bright Data's static residential proxies or rotation proxies. With static, you possess fixed IPs in multiple countries. For the rotating proxies, they can change and acquire new IPs.
Then there are the datacenter proxies with over 770,000 proxies. Datacenters proxies have no ISP tag as residential ones, but their servers come from cloud platforms or other remote servers. Typically, you share the datacenter proxies when using the same cloud source.
If your concern is about a mobile proxy that supports a SIM's 3G, 4G, or the new 5G, Bright Data's mobile proxy is your answer. Bright Data's mobile proxy contains around seven million IPs and optimizes ASN and carrier targeting.
Bright Data Pricing
Bright Data offers different pricing rates that you should consider before buying their package. Typically, Bright Data proxies are expensive for personal use, but as you know, ‘quality comes at a cost.' For instance, $300 or $1000 monthly can be the cheapest value in Bright Data proxy, which can go up to $30000 per month on an enterprise basis. And now they have added a “pay as you go” plan, that makes it available to more people.
The Bright Data pricing depends on the proxy type you choose and the bandwidth for each plan. The bandwidth is scaled in terms of gigabytes or GB. The higher the bandwidth, the more expensive a proxy IP costs.
When it comes to residential, datacenter, mobile, or static residential proxies, they have different rates. Of those categories, datacenter proxies are the cheapest as they cost less than a dollar, while mobile proxies are expensive at $18/Gb.
Regarding the Bright Data offer period, you would expect a yearly plan to be more expensive than a monthly or ‘pay as you go’ offer. Suppose you don't have money when a premium period expires, you can still use the proxy by changing it to a ‘pay as you go' offer.
Bright Data Authentication
You cannot solely depend on Bright Data’s encrypted HTTPS, SOCKS5, and other Bright Data's in-house technology for data security. Some hackers or trackers can get past these secure protocols, but they cannot bypass your Bright Data username and passwords.
When you register to your Bright Data account, the system will ask you for your preferred password and username. Usually, Bright Data requires you to provide a strong password of lengthy characters and mixed letters. In other cases, the system can autogenerate for you a password.
There is also IP whitelisting, which is another authentication protocol in Bright Data. IP whitelisting means filtering IPs and remaining with IP types connected to a trusted website.
Bright Data Protocols
Thanks to HTTPS, HTTP, and SOCKS5 protocols, Bright Data is one of the world's most secure proxies. Most importantly, the SOCKS5 Bright Data's protocol is more secure because it has an advanced authentication level. Still, this proxy is lightweight and utilizes a tunneling method for HTTP and FTP support; no wonder it is used in Bright Data Proxy Manager.
On the other hand, there are HTTP and HTTPS Bright Data proxies. Both of these protocols work in generating leads for Bright Data residential proxies. If you wonder how Bright Data accelerates, compresses, or manages its vast IPs, it is because of its HTTPS and HTTP protocols.
Additionally, you do not configure proxies’ protocols when using Bright Data Proxy Manager (LPM). That is, every port in Bright Data identifies SOCK5, HTTP, and HTTPS. When you create a SOCKS5 connection, it automatically changes to HTTP or HTTPS.
Testing Bright Data
One thing that we love about Bright Data is that the site gives you a seven-day free test. Try to do that test now and your results could be close to our outcome when we tested this proxy.
In our case, we used Bright Data proxy to examine variables like data scraping, social platforms, sneaker sites, and speed. Out of a hundred, we rated these sites according to how the Bright Data residential proxy performed. Below are our recordings.
| Tested for | Data scraping | Social platform | Sneaker sites | Speed test |
| Rating | 96/100 | 86/100 | 82/100 | 96/100 |
As you can see from the table above, the data scraping scored highly. That is because Bright Data has a super bot technology for web scraping. With the other three sites, we also loved their performance. We further took a test on every sample individually. Check them out in the table below.
For Data Scraping Performance
It would help to notice that the data scraping performance of 96 (in the first table) is the average of the six shopping sites ratings we experimented with.
Average success rate on E-commerce websites - 96%
As you see in this table, Amazon and eBay have the lowest scores while Aliexpress has the highest. For Amazon, it is understandable because Amazon is one of the hardest sites to scrape. When we started testing Amazon (for example), we tried it with a different proxy which was hectic. The response was slow due to low internet speed. It was also hard to bypass Amazon's anti-scraping measures with that proxy where Amazon blocked us.
When we changed to Bright Data proxies, we realized that it could bypass Amazon restrictions at a faster rate. Not only did we do this test on Amazon, but also we did a similar test on the other five sites. We also appreciate that our requests when using Bright Data were unnoticeable.
Secondly, we loved the speed to which Bright Data connected to these sites, especially Amazon and eBay. For this case, we understood that Bright Data has bot technology and quality servers that produced speedy browsing. For example, we could access sites like Walmart, Target, or Aliexpress at a blazing speed and with 100% uptime.
Test on Social Websites
Social media have become part of life for most people, but the problem is that they are restricted in most countries. For that case, we used Bright Data proxies for the above social media sites. We also browsed those sites with other proxies and noted the difference.
Average success rate on social websites- 86%
We loved how sites like Reddit, Twitch, Twitter, and Instagram performed. Because of how Lomita connected fast to these sites and scraped data anonymously, we gave them an 85% and above rating. Since Facebook and Youtube have many customers, we thought they would perform low, but their results were fair.
Some of us opened multiple users' accounts to see if these social media sites would block them. Unfortunately, those who used a different proxy had their accounts suspended. On the other hand, when we used Bright Data, we could open several accounts without the social media operators detecting them.
Moreover, issues to do with social media IP tracking are rare when you are connected to Bright Data. When we tried to track our colleague who was connected to Bright Data, it was impossible.
Test on Sneaker Sites
Sneakers are ever-changing and sell at a fast rate. As a result, most sneaker companies have blocked the sneaker purchasing bots and limit your purchase to only one pair.
Average success rate on sneaker sites- 82%
For that case, we took a study on five sneaker sites and learned how these sites block buyers. We realized that Nike and Adidas are the most notorious sites for doing that. They have advanced technology to track people who cop multiple sneaker pairs.
We, therefore, used a sneaker Bright Data proxy on those sneaker sites. Companies like supreme, footlocker, and finish line had better scores. Adidas and Nike scored lowly, where Adidas even never made eighty percent. We realized that Bright Data's quality proxy technology made it possible to bypass the censored sneaker sites. Not to mention, you can use Bright Data proxies to open multiple accounts that enable you to buy more sneaker pairs.
Speed Test
| Bright Data Residential Proxy | Ping (ms) | Download (Mbps) | Upload (Mbps) |
| Bright Data Proxy 1 | 31 | 87.16 | 35.52 |
| Bright Data Proxy 2 | 12 | 171.58 | 209.35 |
| Bright Data Proxy 3 | 86 | 105.49 | 31.58 |
| Bright Data Proxy 4 | 53 | 92.67 | 45.56 |
| Bright Data Proxy 5 | 45 | 142.72 | 59.76 |
Rating, 96/100
When testing the speed of a proxy, you might consider carrying a stopwatch with you. In our situation, we used a stopwatch and five different Bright Data proxies to download and upload files or access a browser.
When it comes to variables of research, we used ping (ms), Download (Mbps), or upload (Mbps). We had to install or upload a geo-blocked file with Bright Data proxy, and it was fast. We also measured the ping or latency time required for the network to load our web requests.
We realized that the shorter the ping time, the higher the download or upload size and vice versa. Less ping time compresses large bandwidth files and web pages when downloading or uploading.
Bright Data Customer Support
We also loved Bright Data's support team, which is professional and responsive. You can therefore find them anytime, 24/7. For instance, we had some challenges with the system when accessing social media sites. There were some HTTP errors where the system showed us 502 Bad Gateway.
We informed the Bright Data support team (through their ‘ help and support menu.') to help us with that issue. They were quick to respond and guided us on how we would rotate the IPs and change the network we were using. Luckily, their guidance resolved our problem.
The Editors Verdict
Whether you choose datacenter, mobile, or residential proxies, Bright Data has the best in its category. If you are a starter, you may find it hard to use their LPM, account settings, API integration, and other features. However, it would help if you interacted with their support team to guide you in setting a proxy server.
We also know that Bright Data is good value for money. So, don't be left out, try Bright Data now, and you will acquire sweet fruits.
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Are Bright Data proxies good for social media?
In fact, they are the best around for this task. They bypass the CAPTCHA, have a social media crawler technology, and achieve greater anonymity in social media.
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Are Bright Data proxies good for sneaker sites?
Yes, Bright Data offers advanced proxy technology to scrape sneaker sites. You can also use their exclusive IPs for sneaker site targeting.
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Why Bright Data proxies good for web scraping?
Bright Data proxy is a pro in this area because of its advanced technology. Their rotating residential proxies navigate on all web data without them being known. They also use SOCKS5 and HTTPS which mask your browsing history and copping sneakers.
Bright Data Alternatives
Well, if you feel that Bright Data is not in your reach, you could try other proxies like smartproxy, Soax, or shifter. Smartproxy is the best pricing alternative to Bright Data. If you can not afford their proxies and Shifterthe unlimited bandwidth choice. Also, Soax is the best city Geo-targeting alternative to Bright Data.
Last Updated on December 12, 2023
