IPRoyal Review: Is It the Best Budget-Friendly Proxy Provider?

IPRoyal is a budget-friendly proxy services provider catering primarily to individuals and small or mid-sized businesses. Despite its lower pricing, it offers multiple proxy types, such as Residential, Mobile, ISP, and Datacenter proxies. These proxies can be utilized for price monitoring, web scraping, ad verification, and SERP scraping.

In this review, we’ve tested IPRoyal’s various products to determine if they’re worth the purchase in 2024. We’ll discuss the pros and cons, pricing, features, and alternative options.

What is IPRoyal?

IPRoyal is a popular proxy provider that offers various proxy services at affordable prices. It was founded in 2020, and since then, the platform has been providing services to more than 10,000 customers around the world. IPRoyal’s products and services can be integrated with 650 tools or software.

Karolis Toleikis is the CEO and co-founder of IPRoyal. The provider consists of 70 team members and 3 different offices worldwide, including their headquarters in Ajman, United Arab Emirates, a New York office, and an office in Lithuania.

IPRoyal Features

IPRoyal offers 8 main features for its users, which are discussed below.

Unrestricted Usage

There are no limitations on the sessions users can initiate or the number of requests they can send with IPRoyal’s data center, ISP, and Mobile proxies. So, the proxies can be used without a bandwidth cap. This feature is especially useful for data-intensive tasks, such as constant web scraping and monitoring. However, rotating residential proxies are traffic-limited, and users pay based on every GB of data they use. The static residential proxies offer unlimited traffic.

Easy and Quick Setup

IPRoyal’s services are easy to understand and set up for beginners. Manually setting up proxies is challenging for many users, so IPRoyal offers a specialized proxy manager that you can download for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome and install as an extension on your browser. With that, you can easily change your proxies and their settings.

Overall, working with IPRoyal’s features doesn’t require much technical skill. Users simply choose the proxy type, location, and settings, and then use it with their preferred software. Moreover, IPRoyal’s blog provides documentation, such as guides, on setting up various proxy services from IPRoyal.

IP Pools

With an overall 34M proxy pool, IPRoyal offers a diverse IP pool to its customers. The platform provides more than 32 million unique residential IPs in 195 countries. IPRoyal states that these proxies are ethically sourced. Moreover, there are 500,000 IPs available for the ISP Proxy service with a claimed 99.9% uptime.

The IP pool for mobile proxies includes over 2.5 million IPs. While the number of IPs is not as significant as some of the other large-scale proxy providers, it is enough to switch between them and avoid encountering repetitive IPs.

Performance Monitoring

Tracking and analyzing the performance of the proxies can help users control different parameters, such as data usage and connection speeds. With these tools, users identify any issues and make necessary adjustments to improve the stability and efficiency of their proxies. For monitoring, the IPRoyal user dashboard tracks the amount of data used, the active sessions, and other performance metrics.

Users can utilize the online proxy checker, which lets them test the connection quality of proxies from their browsers. Moreover, performance alerts can be activated. These alerts notify users when bandwidth usage reaches a certain point and proxy performance drops to avoid crossing the bandwidth limit. Furthermore, IPRoyal offers API access so that more advanced users can use their own systems to track the performance of the services.

SOCKS5 Support

IPRoyal provides SOCKS5 proxies to its users. SOCKS5 is the most advanced socket secure protocol and offers optimal security features. SOCKS5 proxies let users bypass internet blocks with a better success rate and avoid geo-restrictions. These proxies can handle various types of traffic, such as HTTPS, FTP, and SMTP. Additionally, users can set up these proxies per app, instead of basing it on their entire traffic.

Mixed Subnets

A subnet is a network inside a network. Typically, when an IP gets blocked, the other IPs from the same subnet will also be blocked. That’s why IPRoyal offers mixed subnets. This means that while using rotating proxies, the following IP will be from a different subnet than the one before.

As a result, the chance of detection by protected websites and getting IP blocked will be significantly reduced. This feature is especially beneficial when you must stay anonymous during data collection with your proxy service.

Ethical Proxy Network

Providers with ethical proxies ensure their users don’t face legal trouble when using their services. Since residential IPs are assigned to real people by the internet service provider, obtaining them ethically is essential.

IPRoyal reassures customers that all of its residential IPs are ethical. This means that the sources of residential IPs are real people who willingly allow the provider to offer their IPs as proxies.

Rotating and Sticky Sessions

IPRoyal offers residential proxies with two settings. With sticky sessions and static residential IPs, you can maintain the same IP address for up to 7 days. This is useful for tasks sensitive to IP and location change, such as using certain websites or creating accounts.

Moreover, if you use rotating residential proxies, the proxy server will assign a new IP for every connection and request you send. For example, if you launch a code that sends 5000 requests to various websites, you’ll get 5000 different IPs, and each request can be fulfilled with a different IP.

Types of Proxy Services Offered by IPRoyal

IPRoyal provides 6 different proxy services based on a user’s requirements. These include Rotating Residential proxies, ISP proxies, Datacenter proxies, Sneaker DC proxies, Mobile proxies, and Enterprise proxies, as discussed below.

Rotating Residential Proxies

Among all the proxy services IPRoyal offers, Residential proxies are the most popular type. Residential proxies provide IP addresses assigned by ISPs to real residential homes. That’s why websites can’t easily recognize these IPs as proxies, and these proxies minimize the chance of getting flagged or IP blocked by websites.

IPRoyal’s residential proxy service gives access to 32 million ethically sourced unique IPs. These IPs are from 195 countries worldwide, and users can utilize geo-targeting capabilities to target specific countries, states, or cities. These proxies have an approximately 99.7% success rate and unlimited concurrent sessions.

With dedicated rotating residential proxies, your proxy IP will change with every request. This proxy’s pricing is based on the GB of data you consume. You can buy bundles of 1 to 10,000 GB of traffic. 1GB of data costs $7, and you’ll have to talk to sales for a custom quote if you want bundles of 10,000GB of traffic.

ISP Proxies

ISP proxies offer the anonymity of residential proxies combined with the stability and speed of Datacenter IPs. These are essentially dedicated residential proxies sourced from reputable and reliable internet service providers. After registering on the IPRoyal website, you can find these proxies under “Static Residential Proxies”. Most users utilize these proxies for tasks that require consistent IP addresses, as the IP won’t change unless you do it manually.

The IP pool of ISP proxies consists of 500,000 unique IPs from 31 countries. Moreover, the 99.9% uptime of these proxies sets it apart from ISP proxies of other providers.

Unlike rotating residential proxies, ISP proxies are available with unlimited traffic. As a result, the pricing is based on days of access. It starts from $1.80/proxy for 1 day to $2.70/proxy for 30 days, $2.55/proxy/month for the 60-day plan, and $2.40/proxy/month for 90 days of usage.

Datacenter Proxies

Datacenter proxies are hosted in data centers and, unlike residential and ISP proxies, are not sourced from ISPs or residential homes. Instead, they are sourced from cloud service providers. Due to their fast and stable nature, users often employ datacenter proxies for tasks that require high speed and volume, such as large-scale web scraping.

However, websites can quite easily detect these proxies and rate limit or block them. So, datacenter proxies are not ideal for anonymous tasks and visiting highly protected websites.

Like ISP proxies, datacenter proxies offer 99.9% uptime and unlimited traffic. With the constant IP addresses of datacenter proxies, you can easily create accounts on websites and use a single identity without changing your IP for every request. Due to their fast connection, datacenter proxies are also great for price monitoring.

The pricing structure is similar to ISP proxies, as it’s based on the amount of time you want to use the proxy. The 30-day plan is available for $1.57/proxy, the 60-day plan for $1.48/proxy, and the 90-day plan for $1.39/proxy. If you want a long-term proxy for more than 90 days, you can contact IPRoyal’s customer support and get a special deal.

Sneaker DC Proxies

Many users exclusively use proxies to buy limited-edition products from online sneaker stores. IPRoyal offers a specialized proxy service for automatically purchasing these limited items. Although these are part of the datacenter proxy category, IPRoyal optimized the proxies for sneaker websites. Sneaker DC proxies offer a private and unique IP pool from 30 countries without traffic or session limits.

The pricing is flexible, with daily and monthly plans available. For instance, users can purchase 1 proxy for 1 day for $1. Monthly prices start at $1.80/proxy for 30 days, $1.70/proxy for 60 days, and $1.60/proxy for 90 days.

Mobile Proxies

Mobile proxies benefit from the IPs sourced by mobile carriers and are based on 3G, 4G, 5G, and LTE networks. When using these proxies, users appear as mobile users, and the chance of being detected by websites’ anti-proxy measures significantly drops. For this reason, many users take advantage of mobile proxies for tasks that require anonymity.

This service offers over 2.5 million IPs from real mobile devices. Users can instantly change mobile IPs using auto-rotation options. Mobile proxies’ bandwidth and sessions are unlimited. The IP locations are from 7 different countries. The mobile carriers providing the proxies include T Mobile, Verizon, Orange, Vodafone, and Telia, among others.

Mobile proxies are generally more expensive than other proxy types. Nonetheless, IPRoyal’s pricing structure is flexible. Users can buy a 1-day mobile proxy for $10.11. The 1-month fee is $130.00. Lastly, the 90-day plan is available at $117/month.

Enterprise Proxies

Enterprise Proxies are a decent option if your business has large-scale proxy operations. These proxy services offer a combination of datacenter, residential, ISP, and mobile proxies. IPRoyal works closely with enterprise customers to design the best proxy solution for their needs.

Companies can use enterprise proxies for web scraping, price monitoring, and cybersecurity. The pricing depends on the specific parameters of the tailor-made proxy service. You can talk to the IPRoyal’s sales team and negotiate the plan.

IPRoyal Pricing

The table below compares IPRoyal’s main proxy types based on the starting price, monthly plan, and the plan with the most discount.

IPRoyal provides a flexible pricing structure for its services. Residential proxies are priced based on traffic, while other services are based on days and are offered per proxy. There is no free trial to test the services, which disadvantages new potential users. However, the starting plans are cheap enough to try out most services.

If you run a business and need large amounts of data for a long-term plan, you can contact IPRoyal’s sales team and get a specialized discounted deal.

Performance and Reliability

Although IPRoyal is one of the most affordable proxy providers available, it doesn’t disappoint in terms of performance and reliability. With a 99.7% success rate for residential proxies and 99.9% uptime for datacenter and ISP proxies, IPRoyal is among the most reliable proxy providers.

Its IP pool is not as large as the biggest players in the game, such as Bright Data, but the 34M IPs in more than 195 countries are more than enough for a varied proxy rotation experience.

Proxyway conducted a performance and speed test on IPRoyal proxies with interesting results. The download speed dropped from 17.49 MB/s to 5.41 MB/s, which is significant, but the resulting download speed is enough for most basic tasks.

In the proxy tests, the average success rate was more than 99%, and the average response time was around 1 second. However, there were instances, such as the Amazon server test, that the success rate and response time were lower than average.

Customer Support

IPRoyal offers 24/7 customer support through its website’s live chat feature. In our experience, getting a response from the customer support team in the live chat took less than a minute. Additionally, you can use email support to explain complex issues and questions in more detail.

There’s also a dedicated IPRoyal help center where you can find your answers. It is accessible through the home page of the IPRoyal dashboard. Moreover, you can check out IPRoyal’s social media, such as X, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn, for news and video guides. IPRoyal’s team is also active on Discord, and you can join the community and ask for help.

Use Cases

IPRoyal’s proxy services can be used for various cases, such as ad verification, market research, and price monitoring, as discussed below.

• Ad Verification: Businesses and ad platforms can use proxies to see how users from different locations view their ads. IPRoyal’s residential proxies are perfect for this use case since they offer the most diverse IP locations, and users can easily geo-target and verify the ads.
• Brand Protection: Brand owners often utilize proxies to monitor websites and social media platforms. This helps to identify counterfeit products and check for brand impersonations. Mobile and residential proxies are the best choice for this use case as they offer more anonymity so users can protect their brands without getting blocked.
• Market Research: Gathering consumer data from different regions, finding new trends, and analyzing competitors is made easier with proxies. IPRoyal’s residential proxies offer great geographic coverage, allowing you to gather information from many countries around the world.
• Review Monitoring: Proxies can help users gather and analyze reviews from various websites. Due to the high speed of IPRoyal’s datacenter proxies, users can collect large amounts of data in less time.
• Stock Market Data Collection: Datacenter proxies can help users access real-time financial data such as stock prices. These proxies offer fast and consistent performance and help users extract the data quickly, which is essential as the stock market prices change rapidly.
• Travel Fare Aggregation: Many travel agencies regularly collect travel data and prices to analyze them and create a strategy to offer more attractive services. IPRoyal’s Residential proxies help in this case as they provide more locations to find varied prices.
• Price Monitoring Proxies: Businesses need reliable and fast proxies to monitor the price of their products and services. IPRoyal’s ISP proxies provide both of these qualities and are ideal for price monitoring.
• Proxies to Unblock Restricted Website: To unblock restricted content from protected websites, you need proxies that can handle anti-proxy measures and provide anonymity. IPRoyal’s Mobile and Residential proxies are helpful in this case.
• Web Scraping Proxies: Web scraping is the act of collecting data from websites using tools and automatic bots. Modern websites usually block web scraping bots, so users need to utilize Residential proxies to bypass the anti-scraping measures. However, if the website lacks modern anti-scraping solutions, using datacenter proxies can speed up the process.
• SEO Proxies for SERP Scraping: Proxies are often used for different SEO tasks. Web scraping SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) is a common task that benefits from proxies. Since scraping these pages requires IP diversity and high anonymity, IPRoyal’s Residential proxies are helpful in this case.

IPRoyal provides multiple beneficial tools to keep proxy services manageable and easy for its customers, as shown below.

• Google Chrome Proxy Manager: This proxy manager helps users quickly change proxies, set them for each protocol, and create custom profiles. You can download it from the Google Chrome web store and install it on the browser.
• Firefox Proxy Add-on: This is the same proxy manager but for Firefox browser users. You can download it from the Firefox web store and install it as an add-on to manage your proxies.
• Proxy Tester: IPRoyal users can download and install the Proxy Tester app to test sticky or rotating proxies and export a proxy list of the ones that work well with their target website. This app benefits anyone who is not sure which proxy to choose.
• Online Proxy Checker: With this tool, users can check if their proxies are active and anonymous. If the proxy is banned or blocked by websites, you can find out about it with the Online Proxy Checker. Other than the status of proxies, this tool also shows the location of the proxy and the proxy type.
• IP Address Lookup: This is a simple tool for checking the location of your proxy. The tool will provide the location details, such as country, city, ISP, and domain, alongside a map view of the proxy location.

IPRoyal Pros and Cons

IPRoyal’s advantages and disadvantages are provided in this section, and will help you make an informed choice when committing to a proxy service.

IPRoyal Advantages

There are 5 main advantages of using IPRoyal, as shown below.

• Diverse Proxy Services: IPRoyal offers 5 different proxy services for various use cases. If that’s not enough, businesses can contact IPRoyal for a tailor-made enterprise proxy service just for their needs.
• Affordable pricing: Compared to other providers, IPRoyal can be considered a budget option for many users. The pricing plans are flexible, and users can buy the cheapest plans to test the proxies.
• High Uptime: With 99.9% uptime for datacenter and ISP proxies, IPRoyal’s services are very stable. As a result, the chance of encountering interruptions during long web scraping sessions and other tasks is slim.
• Unlimited Traffic: Except for Residential proxies, all other IPRoyal proxy services benefit from unlimited traffic. That means you can use them as long as you have a subscription.
• 24/7 Customer Support: IPRoyal’s customer support is available 24/7, and using the live chat option on the website, you can get a response in a few minutes.

IPRoyal Disadvantages

No free trial and unbalanced performance are the 2 main drawbacks of using IPRoyal’s services, as discussed below.

• No Free Trial: Unfortunately, IPRoyal services don’t offer a free trial for new customers, while many other proxy providers offer a demo or free trial for users to test their products.
• Unbalanced Performance: Based on the tests conducted by various sources, such as Proxyway, the response time and success rate of IPRoyal’s proxies are not consistent and, in some cases, drop below the average.

IPv6 Subnets

IPRoyal provides a leasing service for IPV6 subnets. Customers can rent and lease IPv6 addresses on any network and use them for data centers, VPNs, marketing, hosting, and more. To access IPv6 subnets, users should fill out the order form for the leasing service.

Once the platform verifies the information in the form, it will lease the IP addresses to users, and they can test the proxies for a few days. After that, a monthly payment will be requested, and the user can freely utilize the service with the guidance of a personal manager.

Compared to IPv4, IPv6 subnets offer enhanced privacy and security capabilities, larger address space for more unique IPs, and affordable prices for large-scale operations. Leasing bulk IPv6 addresses from IPRoyal is suitable for web scraping large amounts of data, SEO monitoring, and bypassing anti-bot measures for large projects.

Proxy Location

Geo-targeting capability is one of the most important aspects of IPRoyal services. IPRoyal proxy services support more than 195 countries across Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceania, and South America. Top locations for residential proxies include:

• United States – 1,450,886 IPs
• Brazil – 908,824 IPs
• Spain – 781,766 IPs
• Philippines – 545,729 IPs
• Japan – 487,067 IPs

For Datacenter, ISP, Sneaker DC, and Mobile proxies, users can easily select the location of their proxy or set it as random.

IPRoyal Alternatives

Bright Data, Oxylabs, and Smartproxy are some of the alternatives to IPRoyal, as discussed below.

1. Bright Data

If you are looking for a provider that offers the best web scraping tools alongside diverse proxies, Bright Data is an attractive option. However, its services are much more expensive than those of IPRoyal.

Try Bright Data

2. Oxylabs

Oxylabs is a premium option that provides versatile services and great performance. Its IP Pool (100M ) is the largest among all other providers. However, Oxylabs’ monthly plans are much more expensive than IPRoyal’s.

Try Oxylabs

3. Smartproxy

If you need a balance between cost and features, Smartproxy is a suitable option. It offers reliable and user-friendly proxy services with a 40M IP Pool. The pricing is higher than IPRoyal but less than Bright Data and Oxylabs.

Try Smartproxy

IPRoyal Verdict

Overall, IPRoyal is one of the most affordable proxy service providers available. It doesn’t offer the largest IP Pool or the most comprehensive data scraping tools. However, it satisfies its customers with diverse proxy services, great customer support, and near-perfect uptime.

IPRoyal receives the Geekflare Value Award for its versatile, user-friendly proxy service at lower budgets. Due to its affordable offerings, it is an excellent fit for individuals and small- or medium-sized businesses. Its wide range of proxy types and easy-to-use features benefit users in multiple scenarios, such as market research, price monitoring, and ad verification.