Come in now to discover why Bright Data (Formerly Luminati) is regarded as one of the best residential proxy service providers in the world. Learn from our reviews and know their pros and cons.
Are you planning to give Bright Data Formerly Luminati proxy service a try? Then you have to read this Luminati review to know whether you can use it for what you intend to use proxies for.
No doubt, Luminati proxies are some of the best, but there are more features you need to look out for before you choose a proxy.
I will be discussing the pros and cons of Luminati proxies. Before that, let take a look at a brief overview of Bright Data (Formerly Luminati).
Bright Data (Formerly Luminati) Overview
- Win Best Proxy Overall with Excellent Scraping Performance As #1 Business Choice of Best Proxy Service 2022!
They have proxies in all countries of the world and have been found to be ethical, secure, reliable, and get the job done. Little wonder Fortune 500 companies make use of them. They are mostly used for web scraping and crawling, SEO auditing, brand protection, and ads verification, among others.
| Parameter | Feature |
|---|---|
| IP Type | Residential/ Datacenter |
| Price Charged | Bandwidth |
| Price Sample | $10.50/GB (Pay As You Go) |
| Pool Of IPs | 72+ Million |
| Proxy Protocol | HTTP(S) and Socks5 |
| IP Rotation |
|
| Filtering/Targeting | ASN/Cites/Countries |
| Authentication |
|
| Speed | Excellent |
| Free Trial | 7 days |
| Refund Policy | No |
| Support | Live Support, Contact Form, and Detailed FAQ |
| Jurisdiction Location | Israel |
Bright Data (Luminati) Pros
Without much ado, let move straight into discussing the strengths of Bright Data (Luminati). No doubt, it has where it excels and where it flops. Our focus in this section is the pros.
The Largest IP Network in the World
The greatest strength of Luminati proxy network is its share number of proxies – it is incredibly huge and the largest in the industry. This earned them the title of the largest proxy service. Luminati’s proxy network has over 72 million residential IP addresses in its pool. Aside from this, it has about 2 million mobile proxies and a good number of datacenter proxies.
They claim to have:
- 4.6M+ US proxy IPs
- 1.6M+ UK proxy IPs
- And so on for other countries.
One thing you will come to love about Bright Data (Luminati) is the fact that it has proxies in all countries of the world and in many cities, making their residential proxies perfect for ads verification, web crawling and scraping, and social media automation among others.
Read more: The Basics of using Residential Proxy Network for Internet Marketing
It has over 4 million proxies in India, over 2 million proxies in the United States, 1+ million each in Great Britain and Brazil, and a sizable number in Canada, Germany, France, and South Korea among all other countries in the world.
Geo-Targeting
Geo-targeting is one of the unique features of Luminati residential proxies. I already stated earlier that Luminati has proxies in all countries and major cities in the world. To further provide you better service, you are given the option to choose the locations of the proxies you want. This comes in handy for sneaker sites and websites that place geo-restrictions on their website contents.
When it comes to their geo-targeting options, there are 3 in number. You can either choose country proxies or city proxies. Interestingly, Bright Data (Luminati) also has support for ASN targeting. Autonomous System Number (ASN) provides more granular control than targeting a country or city.
Secured and 100% Legal
One thing you will come to love about Bright Data (Luminati) proxies is that they are 100 percent legal. It is no news that some residential proxy service providers use malicious means to get access to residential IP addresses of peoples’ devices without their consent.
In fact, if you visit the websites of many residential proxies, you’ll discover that how they get access to their residential IP addresses is hidden. However, this is not the case with Bright Data (Luminati) as they have legal rights over the IP addresses they use – thanks to their Hola VPN. This VPN service is free to use. However, you must allow Luminati to use your IP address and internet connection.
As regarding security, Luminati proxies are encrypted, and they advise their users to make sure they are making use of HTTPS.
With this combo, you do not need to worry as no one will be able to sniff your data as it passes through the Internet. Interestingly, it is quite reliable, and users of this service enjoy up to a 99 percent uptime. Because of the reliability, security, and ethical nature, they have become the residential proxy service provider of choice among Fortune 500 companies.
Excellent Scaping Performance
Web scraping and crawling is one of the key areas residential proxies are used. This is as a result of the smart security features placed by websites to prevent their data from being stolen by data aggregators.
To test how Bright Data (Luminati) performs in terms of scraping data from popular websites, I sent an average of 11,206 requests each to Aliexpress, Amazon, Booking, Facebook, Google, Instagram, Linkedin, and other popular websites. Below is the result.
| Performance on 300 Concurrent connections | ||||
| Test | Success Rate (%) | Error (%) | TimeOut (%) | Block (%) |
| Amazon | 95 | 0 | 2 | 3 |
| Adidas | 97 | 0 | 2 | 1 |
| Booking | 98 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| Bing.com | 99 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| Craigslist | 98 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| 92 | 0 | 5 | 3 | |
| Nike | 98 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| 98 | 0 | 0 | 2 | |
| 76 | 1 | 3 | 20 | |
| Youtube | 86 | 0 | 2 | 12 |
| 93.7 | ||||
If you look at the average performance rating, you will see that, on average, 93.7 percent of requests sent through Luminati residential proxies were successful.
However, if you look closely, you will observe that Google and YouTube have the highest failure rate, and even at that, the rate is quite low to see this as a con.
Interestingly, from my findings, over 90 percent of this error is as a result of captchas, and as such, if you have a good captchas solver, you won’t have a problem scraping using Bright Data (Luminati).
- How to Scrape Data from Linkedin Using Proxies
- Use Chrome Headless and Dedicated Proxies to Scrape Any Website
Excellent Proxy Network Speed
Response Time Test
The response time of residential proxies are higher compared to datacenter proxies. This is because when requests are sent to the residential proxy server, it will have to connect you to a residential device.
This makes the ping/latency higher and those, more time required. For Luminati, the table below highlights our response time test data.
Average Response Time (s): 3.65
Proxy Connection Speed Test
No doubt, the connection speed of Luminati proxies is impressive considering the fact that it does not own the devices it routes requests to. Don’t take my word for it; you can use their free trial option to try it out yourself. I used the Speedtest tool to test the connection speed from Chicago and I got the result below.
- Average Ping: 76ms
- Average Download: 26.86 Mbps
- Average Upload: 13.09 Mbps
You can learn more speed tests from stupidproxy also.
Powerful Proxy Control Tools
If you subscribe to their proxies, you will be given access to some powerful tools that will make the use of their proxies easy for you. Let take a look at a few of these powerful poxy control tools.
- Chrome Extension: For beginners, setting up proxies and getting them to work is a difficult task. However, with the help of their Chrome extension, Bright Data (Luminati) proxies are integrated into Chrome without the need for unnecessary tweaking.
- API: If you are not a programmer, you might not need their APIs, but for developers, the most effective way to communicate with Bright Data (Luminati) proxies when building a system is using their APIs.
- Luminati Proxy Manager: Arguably, one of the best proxy managers out there, this tool will help you speed up development time and quite useful for web scraping.
Different IP Types
When it comes to diversity in IP types, only a few proxy providers can match Luminati in such regard. It has a proxy for you regardless of your use case. Bright Data (Luminati) has datacenter proxies, residential proxies, and mobile proxies. However, it is important I state here that their most popular proxies are the residential proxies. Let take a look at the different types of residential proxies they have.
- Shared IPs: As I already stated earlier, Luminati has a pool containing over 35 million residential IPs. If you go for their Shared IP plan, you will be given access to this pool of residential IPs. However, this then means that you will be sharing the IP will a good number of people.
- Exclusive IPs: For those that will not want to share proxies with others, Luminati Residential Exclusive IPs are the proxies of choice. This is because you will be assigned dedicated residential proxies that only you can use.
- Static Residential IPs: While in many proxy intensive works like web scraping, you will need proxies to be rotated; websites that require login will flag your account as suspicious if you keep changing IP. In this case, what you need is a static residential proxy that does not change. You can get this from Luminati, as well.
Good Customer Support
When it comes to providing support for customers, Luminati can be ranked as one of the best. Even though the usage of their dashboard might seem not intuitive at first, the extensive amount of support information available on their blog and FAQs page is second to none. They also have live support for customers to chat in real-time with their customer rep.
Their KYC Weed Out Malicious and Unserious Users
For you to register for an individual account on Bright Data (Luminati), you will have to take a photo and submit a government-issued ID for authentication.
This discourages many unserious users and as such, keeps their network clean compared to other providers. However, this their Know Your Customer (KYC) system can easily translate to a disadvantage because of the privacy issue involved.
Bright Data (Luminati) Cons
Looking at the above, one will be tempted to just go straight into paying for their proxies. However, before you do that, you need to be aware of the disadvantages associated with them.
They Are Expensive but Worth
Nothing gets people to run away from Bright Data (Luminati) more than it pricing. It’s incredibly expensive and usually out of the reach of marketers on a low budget. The smallest monthly monetary commitment you can make on Luminati residential proxies is $500, and even at that, just know that it’s limited. This amount will provide you with 56 GB ($8.92/GB, actually a good deal), after which you’ll have to pay to continue using their service.
To give their clients better value, Not only Bright Data have smaller plans, added “pay as you go” option as well! That no minimum bandwidth requirement, and no monthly charges! No penny will be wasted if you only have a small bandwidth requirement!
[Updated on Apr. 24th, 2022]
While this seems to be expensive, if you consider the fact that what you’ll be enjoying from them is premium and the chances of them failing is very slim, then you’ll come to the conclusion that it’s worth the money.
Dashboard is Complex for Newbie
Necessarily, one will expect that Bright Data (Luminati) being one of the best residential proxy providers in the market, should have made their dashboard easy to use. However, because of the variety of proxies they have and their numbers, it becomes complex, and this complexity becomes counterproductive – you’ll need to learn about their service before things become clear to you.
However, they provide a very detailed FAQ page that contains information about all you need to know about their proxies. One of the places you’ll find Luminati not friendly is in the area of searching for city-specific proxies – it needs a lot of familiarization for you to get used to it.
Email Support is Slow
There’s something I have come to realize about service provision. No matter how much you put in your best, users of your service will still run into problems using them and will need clarification. There are many ways to provide support for customers. For Bright Data, they have live chat support, an excellent FAQ page, and email support.
Usually, you will only need to make use of email support when there’s no rep online for you to chat with. In this case, be ready to wait longer because customers that have made use of their email support claimed that it was very slow.
Do I Recommend Bright Data (Luminati)?
Absolutely, I do. It remains one of the best residential proxy providers in the market. The large number of IPs in its pool and their geographical distribution comes handy.
They are also one of the most secure and reliable, and as such, if what you’re looking for is the proxy service that gets the job done, Bright Data is a very good option. However, you have to be mindful of its pricing and the slow nature of their email support.