There are many proxy providers in the market that offers residential proxies – and these numerous options will confuse you. In many cases, they offer the same features and appeal to the same audience. However, if you look into them deeply, there are differences between them that matter and could shape your buying decision for the best.
The top providers in the proxy service market are SmartProxy and MobileHop. These providers are on top of the list of proxy recommendations. If you are in a dilemma on which to choose, this article has been written for you.
In this article, we would be comparing SmartProxy and MobileHop in many aspects such as IP pool size, location coverage, and geo-targeting, performance in terms of speed, stability, reliability, and scalability.
We will also look into what they offer in terms of free trials, refunds, IP rotation systems, KYC requirements, and extra tools provided. Before going into the details, look at the table below to see an overview of SmartProxy and MobileHop.
Summary
SmartProxy and MobileHop are both excellent choices. Their proxy networks are large, full of features, and exhibit similar market-leading performance. In addition, you can get multiple proxy-based products to simplify your web scraping.
Overall, choosing MobileHop would give you the same or better performance, proxy pool, and lower price. Going with SmartProxy would give you more customizability and access to services that MobileHop doesn’t have.
The providers mainly sell proxy networks. But for these past few years, SmartProxy have been giving increasing attention to proxy-based web scraping tools, such as APIs.
Oxylabs targets mid to large businesses and is very clear about this. It is not good for individula customers. On the other hand, MobileHop pricing is affordable for individual customers.
Both providers show great care to their business practices – they screen customers and have mechanisms to ensure ethical proxy acquisition and use.
Whose Proxies Have More Features?
As premium providers, SmartProxy and MobileHop are very generous in the feature department. With either option, you’ll be able to:
- Use proxies in any country or city in world.
- Target individual countries, cities, and sometimes internet service providers (ASNs).
- Rotate each proxy type on every connection request or create sticky sessions.
- Establish as many parallel connection requests as you like.
- Use the HTTP(S) or SOCKS5 protocols.
Of course, you won’t always have access to all these features at once – it depends on the service. For example, SmartProxy only allows using SOCKS5 with its static proxy networks, and some of its services don’t support city or ASN-level filtering. Overall, MobileHop makes more of the functionality consistently available, so it takes a slight edge.
Winner: MobileHop
Which Provider Performs Better?
Both are excellent and rarely fail. That said, MobileHop’ proxies run faster.
We mostly benchmarked the providers’ residential and mobile proxies. When connecting to Cloudflare’s server (small size, low distance, no blocks), over 97% of the requests completed successfully. This shows that the providers have excellent infrastructure that rarely fails.
The response time was also great with both competitors. MobileHop was particularly fast – its proxies. SmartProxy was slightly slower but also among the fastest providers we’ve tested.
One area where MobileHop took a clear lead was mobile proxy response time. There, its proxy servers connected nearly twice as fast as SmartProxy.
Which Has Better Management Tools?
MobileHop is simpler to use, though it does lack quality-of-life features and SmartProxy’s unified approach.
We’re comparing premium providers and market leaders, so it’s safe to assume they’ve invested into tooling. And the assumption is generally true.
Winner: MobileHop
And the Customer Service?
Both providers will treat you well.
MobileHop has a live chat that works 24/7 and responds to all enquiries. Whenever we tried it, we received replies within several minutes with generally competent answers.
The help materials are excellent as well.
SmartProxy has no live chat, though it does offer a ticket system which usually ensures under-hour replies. Naturally, there’s an account manager too to help during business hours. But we haven’t experienced issues ourselves.
SmartProxy’s help docs are also very comprehensive, with answers and instructions both in text and video formats. You can find an FAQ, webinars, integration instructions, and video tutorials covering various topics.
What about the Price?
SmartProxy is more expensive, especially if you enable premium features (that other providers offer out of the box).
Let’s not kid ourselves: these are premium providers. So whichever choice you make, the privilege will cost you.
The providers charge for their services either by IP address, traffic, or requests. The static proxy networks are priced by IP, the rotating proxy networks use traffic, and the APIs base their pricing on successful requests.
The rates of MobileHop are generally very affordable. You can go for hourly, daily, weekly and monthly plans.
However, while MobileHop’s pricing structure is straightforward, SmartProxy is deceptively complex. For example, its static datacenter proxies have limited bandwidth out of the box and are able to access only one domain. In the same vein, enabling city or ASN targeting for the residential addresses doubles the price. The silver lining is that you can disable unnecessary features to make the pricing relatively palatable (but still expensive).
