The Best free Proxies for Web Scraping Compared

Guide to Finding The Best Free Proxies For Web Scraping?

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:

• Free Plan Size: How many free requests can you put through each free plan.
• Integration: What integration options do each proxy provider provide.
• Advanced Functionality: Does the proxy provider offer more advanced functionality like in-built Javascript rendering, country geotargeting, sticky sessions, etc.

All of these can be important factors when making a decision about which free proxy plan you would like to integrate with.

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Types of Free Proxy Solutions

Free proxies typically come in 2 types:

• Paid proxy providers who offer small free plans
• Free proxy IP lists

Each of which has its own pros and cons, which we will go through in detail.

Free Proxy Plans From Paid Proxy Providers

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.

Free Proxy IP Lists

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.

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How To Integrate Free Proxies

Free proxies can typically be integrated in three ways:

1. Smart proxy API endpoints
2. Single rotating proxy endpoints
3. List of datacenter IP addresses that you send your requests to.

Each of which require a slightly different integration method:

Smart proxy API endpoints

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

Single Endpoint Rotating Proxy

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'))

Proxy List Integration

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.