ScrapingAnt Free Plan
ScrapingAnt is a Web Scraping API for extracting data from websites. It handles the rotating proxies, CAPTCHA, Cloudflare and headless browsers.
5 out of 5 stars | 8 reviews
Find the best free proxies for your web scraping use case and budget.
ScrapingAnt is a Web Scraping API for extracting data from websites. It handles the rotating proxies, CAPTCHA, Cloudflare and headless browsers.
5 out of 5 stars | 8 reviews
Free requests/month
The ScrapeOps Proxy API Aggregator is an All-In-One Proxy API that allows you to use the best free 20+ proxy providers from a single API.
Free requests/month
Scraper API is a web scraping API that handles proxy rotation, browsers, and CAPTCHAs so developers can scrape any page with a single API call.
4.7 out of 5 stars | 55 reviews
Free requests/month
Tired of getting blocked while scraping the web? ScrapingBee API handles headless browsers and rotates proxies for you.
5 out of 5 stars | 28 reviews
Free requests/month
ZenRows is a next-generation Web Scraping API & Data Extraction tool that automatically turns HTMLs into structured data.
4.9 out of 5 stars | 13 reviews
Free requests/month
Scrape the web at scale at an unparalleled speed and enjoy advanced features like proxies, concurrent API requests, CAPTCHA solving, browser support and JS rendering.
Free requests/month
This proxy comparison tool is designed to make it easier for you to compare and find the best free proxy plans for your particular use case.
It allows you to compare the plan, features, reviews of each free proxy plan in one place before making your decision.
You can compare the 4 major types of proxies (datacenter, residential, ISP, and mobile proxies) along with other criteria like:
All of these can be important factors when making a decision about which free proxy plan you would like to integrate with.
Free proxies typically come in 2 types:
Each of which has its own pros and cons, which we will go through in detail.
The best type of free proxies you can use are free plans offered by paid proxy providers.
These free proxy plans are very good as usually the proxy quality is very high and the proxy provider takes care of proxy rotation, header optimization and anti-bot bypassing for you.
With these free proxies you can usually scrape the data you need without much hassle.
Obviously, the proxy providers goal is to get you to upgrade to a paid plan, however, if you web scraping project is small or you are just learning about web scraping then oftentimes their free plan will be big enough for you.
And there is nothing stopping you from signing up to a free proxy plans from a couple proxy providers and use them all together.
The other type of free proxies are lists of freely accessible proxy IPs.
In theory, these free proxies sound great. Some good hearted developer has made a list of proxies publically available and you can use them for free.
However, with most things in life things if it looks too good to be true.
Although, these free proxy lists can work they have a number of problems:
Poor Performance: If the proxy list is publically available and you can find it, then anti-bot companies can find them too. And when they do find these free proxy lists they usually just ban every IP address on the list. So these free proxies rarely work well with protected websites.
Bad Actors: Unfortunately, some bad people share free proxies because it allows them to infect the users computer with malware, viruses and other bad things. They can edit the websites responses to include other files and executables that once they reach your local machine they infect it with malware and trojan horses.
So more often than not, you are better off not using these free proxy lists you find on the internet. As they rarely work for the websites you really want to scrape and when they do, you run the risk of infecting your computer with malware.
Free proxies can typically be integrated in three ways:
Each of which require a slightly different integration method:
With smart proxies like ScrapeOps (Free 1,000 requests) you simple need to send the URL of the page you want to scrape to their HTTP endpoint in the url query parameter and it will deal with managing the proxies on its end.
import requests
payload = {'api_key': 'APIKEY', 'url': 'https://httpbin.org/ip'}
r = requests.get('https://proxy.scrapeops.io/v1/', params=payload)
print r.text
A single rotating proxy endpoint will look something like ScraperAPI's:
http://scraperapi:APIKEY@proxy-server.scraperapi.com:8001
Integrating this proxy endpoint into your web scrapers is very easy, as it normally is just a parameter you add to the request. No need to worry about rotating proxies or managing bans, etc.
Here is a simple example using Python:
import requests
proxies = {
'http': 'http://scraperapi:APIKEY@proxy-server.scraperapi.com:8001',
}
url = 'http://example.com/'
response = requests.get(url, proxies=proxies, auth=('USERNAME', 'PASSWORD'))
When you use a list of free proxy IP addresses, you will find a set of IP addresses that will look something like this:
'http://Username:Password@IP1:20000',
'http://Username:Password@IP2:20000',
'http://Username:Password@IP3:20000',
'http://Username:Password@IP4:20000',
To integrate them into our scrapers we need to configure our code to pick a new proxy from this list everytime we make a request.
In Python we could do it using code like this:
import requests
from itertools import cycle
list_proxy = ['http://Username:Password@IP1:20000',
'http://Username:Password@IP2:20000',
'http://Username:Password@IP3:20000',
'http://Username:Password@IP4:20000',
]
proxy_cycle = cycle(list_proxy)
# Prime the pump
proxy = next(proxy_cycle)
for i in range(1, 10):
proxy = next(proxy_cycle)
print(proxy)
proxies = {
"http": proxy,
"https":proxy
}
r = requests.get(url='https://example.com/', proxies=proxies)
print(r.text)
This is a simplistic example, as when scraping at scale we would also need to build a mechanism to monitor the performance of each individual IP address and remove it from the proxy rotation if it got banned or blocked.