Last Updated on January 19, 2024 by theadmin

Bright Data (previously Luminati) Proxies 

These are the biggest players in the residential proxy market, largely because of their business model.  They have been around for many years, and are largely believed to have the largest proxy network in the world.  They’re certainly the nearest you’ll get to unlimited proxies anywhere in the current market!  They also heavily market themselves as a legitimate proxy provider for large organisations and cultivate Fortune 500 links.   So if you’re looking at doing anything remotely dodgy over your proxies then it’s probably worth skipping Bright Data.

A Brief Bright Data Proxy Review

Now just for the record I’m not entirely comfortable with the way that Bright Data obtain their residential addresses but to be fair they have improved their transparency over the last few years.  If you don’t know they obtain their IP addresses by routing traffic through standard home users all over the world.

How do Bright Data do this?  It’s a unique setup as Bright Data provide a free for use VPN service called Hola which is extremely popular. Users are allowed to route through the Hola P2P network using their VPN software in exchange for allowing traffic from the network to use their bandwidth and idle processing time.  That’s right, you can use the VPN for free but you have to allow traffic to be routed through your own IP address and computer!  This is how Bright Data are able to supply millions of residential IP addresses all over the world, by routing them through Hola PCs.

Previously this agreement was hidden carefully in the terms and conditions, but at least now it’s displayed fairly prominently on their FAQ.    Yet still many Hola users are unaware that other people are using their bandwidth and processing power.  Personally I’d never use Hola because of this, but I do use Bright Data as it’s so reliable and safe.

• Anonymity –  there’s no doubt having the ability to route your connection through anyone of millions of IP addresses across the planet is going to provide a decent level of privacy.  This is supplemented by the many filters that the Bright Data dashboard has so you can control where your traffic is routed.
• Ultimate Residential Addresses – Bright Data’s weakness is in many ways it’s strength too. These are real people’s computers and IP addresses and such are virtually undetectable from almost all social platforms for example.  If appearing to be from a residential address is your number one priority then Luminati is the best option.
• Support – Bright Data support is fast and efficient, and also their dashboard allows you to configure most options yourself.  There are a host of filters which can tailor how your proxies operate and which IP addresses are used.
• Geographical Scope – residential addresses can be hard to obtain especially in certain countries.  Bright Data has by far the widest distribution of residential addresses, so if you need a wide variety of countries this is probably your best option.
• Costs – Bright Data has the reputation of being the best but very expensive.  This high cost reputation is not entirely fair as their prices have fallen over the years although it does cost more than most.  The power of the dashboard and the various filter options also means you can limit the number of proxies that you actually need to use at any one time.  It’s not the cheapest option though.