IPRoyal Review 2023: In-Depth Performance Tested & Complete Guide to iproyal Proxies

Justin Shin
Are you looking to purchase residential proxies from the IPRoyal service but do not know much about their proxies in terms of real performance, proxy pool size, location coverage, and its other features? Then you are on the right page, as the review below will provide you with all of the details.

The IPRoyal proxy service appeals to small proxy users because of its low-cost pricing and the fact that its proxies do not expire. Away from these, there are some things you really need to be aware of before making use of proxies from them.

Things like their performance test, number of IPs in the pool, and location support distribution, among others. You need all of these details to know if their residential proxies are the best for you or not. In this IPRoyal review, I will take you through all of these and provide you with the results of my performance test with proxies from this provider.

Table Of Contents

IPRoyal — an Overview

The IPRoyal service is one of the smaller residential proxy networks in the market. While its main proxy offerings are residential proxies, IPRoyal does have other types of proxies, such as mobile and private proxies. This provider offers a low-cost entry to the proxy market. And to be frank with you, its “never expire” offering is one of its kind in the market. While this might look like an obvious lack of being covered by superficial features. I have tested their proxies and can categorically tell you their proxies work.

It might not have one of the largest pools in the market, nor will it take the position of the fastest provider or the one with the best response time. But when it comes to getting the work done for you, you can rely on this provider. Its proxy pool is small, though, but for small to mid-scale users, this is not much of a problem. This provider is generally not complex, and you do not need any guide to learn how to use their network. The proxies are rotating proxies, and as such, you get an endpoint to access the whole IPs in the pool.

What is IPRoyal？

IPRoyal is a proxy service provider that offers a range of proxy solutions, including residential, datacenter, 4G mobile, and sneaker proxies. It is one of the cheapest proxy services available and offers short-term deals that let you purchase a small amount of data.

Pros Cons
Affordable prices Some IP addresses may be blocked by websites
Large pool of IP addresses Not as fast as some other proxy providers
Good uptime and performance Customer support can be slow to respond
Support for multiple protocols  
Variety of proxy solutions  
Transparency Report member

Is IPRoyal a legitimate proxy provider?

IPRoyal has been in business since 2016 and has a good reputation among users. They are also a Transparency Report member, which means that they publish information about their data collection and usage practices, IPRoyal claims that their IPs are ethically sourced, such as the Pawns app. They state on their website that they do not use any data mining or scraping techniques to collect IP addresses. Instead, they collect IP addresses from a variety of sources, including:


Where is IPRoyal located?

IPRoyal is a proxy provider based in Al Ajman, Ajman, United Arab Emirates. They offer a variety of proxy solutions, including residential proxies, datacenter proxies, and sneaker proxies. 

Proxy Pool Size

Residential proxy services with big proxy pools are proud of it as it means their network can be used for big projects. This makes having a huge proxy pool a flex for a residential proxy network. And the bigger the pool, the higher the number of unique IPs one can get when web scraping or carrying out other forms of botting. IPRoyal does have over 2 million residential IPs, which to me, isn’t big compared to other providers.

Oxylabs has over 100 million IPs, Bright Data controls over 72 million IPs, and Smartproxy has over 40 million IPs. Even among small providers, both Proxy-cheap and Hydraproxy have over 5 million IPs. Looking at this number, you can tell the 2 million IP pool of IPRoyal is not groundbreaking. However, except you need unique IPs in the millions for your task, you need not worry. This will not get your bot blocked for most users as the network smartly rotates IPs in the most efficient way to ensure you do not get blocked.

It is important you know that IPRoyal do not own the IPs in their pool — and none of the other residential proxy networks mentioned above either. Residential proxy networks get the IPs in their pool via P2P networks.

Location Coverage

With the size of the IPRoyal residential proxy pool, one will expect the location coverage will be small. But it is far from being modest; its location coverage is excellent. This is because there is hardly any country in the world you can’t get IPs from, as there are over 195 countries supported by this provider. This good location spread is one of the flex of this provider. And it does have support for a granular geo-targeting feature. With this feature, you can choose the specific country, state, and city you need IPs.

This makes IPRoyal the perfect proxy network for scraping and accessing geo-targeted web content, as it does allow you to set IP location. However, it is important for you to know that when you geo-target, the number of IPs available to you reduces drastically as you are keeping IPs from other regions out of the pool of IPs to be assigned to you. For a provider with a small proxy pool like IPRoyal, I will recommend you only use the geo-targeting feature if your task has a geo-location requirement to it so you can have as many IPs as you can.

There are some countries where the number of IPs available might not be enough for your task. I recommend you speak to the IPRoyal customer agent and ask them how many IPs they have in your country of target before purchasing their proxies to avoid wasting your money.

IPRoyal Speed & Performance Test

The moment you decide to make use of residential proxies, you should know you aren’t getting the speed you get without using one. This is because the extra routing and rerouting involved, as well as the low-powered nature of the nodes connected to, will eventually slow things down. However, there is still a benchmark that can be used based on the average speed of residential proxies to see whether a network is fast or not. In this section, I will be using such a benchmark, which is 15+ Mbps, to check whether IPRoyal is fast or not. I tested it against 5 popular websites so the test. Does not look like a generic test. Below is the result of the test carried out.

Website Download Speed (Mbps) Upload Speed (Mbps) Ping
Amazon 7.39 11.94 345
Instagram 6.42 8.93 284
YouTube 7.05 10.98 198
Google Search 9.01 11.08 302
Booking 6.63 9.05 165

Looking at the above, you can tell the download speed is way below the average speed you will term fast. The truth is, IPRoyal has one of the slowest speeds in the residential proxies I have tested so far. It is not just the speed that is terrible, the ping rate is also not one of the best you will get in the market. I tried using the proxies in a browser, and you can hardly notice the difference.

But if speed really matters to you, I wouldn’t recommend IPRoyal to you as it is one of the slowest in the market. For fast-rotating residential proxies, I recommend Bright Data or Smartproxy, as they are the fastest you can get in the market right now.

Proxy Rotation and Session Management Reviews

IPRoyal residential proxy network, for the most part, is a rotating residential proxy service. This means that the IPs are not static but change. However, there is some form of orderliness in the way the IP changes. First, unlike the likes of Bright Data and Smartproxy, which offer high rotating proxies that change IP after every request, IPRoyal does not do that. IP change for this service is either based on a specified period of time as configured by you or when the node you are connected to goes offline.

Generally, when it comes to the rotation interval, you have the option of setting it to 1, 10, and 30 minutes. To force an IP change, you can either do that from the user dashboard or via their developer API, and an IP change is enforced instantly. According to the information on their website, you can maintain a session for up to 24 hours via their sticky proxy ports. This is nothing more than just marketing gimmicks. While it is possible in principle, you can hardly get that in practice. I suggest you keep all sessions less than 30 minutes and below.

For session management, just know that there is no separate session management system from the proxy rotation system. Once your IP changes, your session ends, and a new one is started.

Scraping Success Rate and Response Speed Test

The IPRoyal residential proxy network poses as one of the best for web scraping. But how good is it in this regard? I tested their proxies for scraping 5 popular websites to see how they perform. Why I chose to test for scraping performance is far beyond testing for scraping efficiency. It was done to check how it performs when sending too many web requests and well it performs when many IP addresses are required. I used an in-house script to carry out the test. Generally, the proxies offered by IPRoyal are undetectable to the 5 website targets I used. Below is the actual performance result.

Site Success Rate (%) Avg. Response Rate (sec)
Amazon 95.97 5.07
Instagram 93.25 5.99
YouTube 93.89 4.69
Google Search 94.87 5.96
Booking 93.28 6.06

Looking at the result above, you can tell that IPRoyal though it performs well in terms of success rate, does not do well in terms of response speed. This is expected if you take a look at the performance test result for the speed test. The response rate is also slow.

This further buttresses the point above where I stated that if you are looking for a residential proxy network that is fast, then IPRoyal is not the service for you. You should only use it if you can deal with the slow speed, which is OK for smaller scraping projects. The reason you might want to consider this provider is because of its pricing.

Plans and Pricing Compare And Recommendations

Here is the pricing information for IPRoyal's residential proxies:

Here are the details for the Static Residential Proxies Pricing from IPRoyal.com:

  1. 1 Day

    • Price: From $1.80 per proxy
    • Features: Unlimited traffic, 99.9% uptime, Premium ISP providers, Not shared, SOCKS5 supported

  2. 30 Days

    • Price: From $2.70 per proxy
    • Features: Unlimited traffic, 99.9% uptime, Premium ISP providers, Not shared, SOCKS5 supported

  3. 60 Days

    • Price: From $2.55 per proxy
    • Features: Unlimited traffic, 99.9% uptime, Premium ISP providers, Not shared, SOCKS5 supported

  4. 90 Days

    • Price: From $2.40 per proxy
    • Features: Unlimited traffic, 99.9% uptime, Premium ISP providers, Not shared, SOCKS5 supported

Here are the pricing details for IPRoyal's datacenter proxies:

  1. 30 days plan

    • Starting from $1.56 per proxy
    • Features: Unlimited traffic, 99.9% uptime, Premium ISP providers, Not shared, SOCKS5 supported

  2. 60 days plan

    • Starting from $1.48 per proxy
    • Features: Unlimited traffic, 99.9% uptime, Premium ISP providers, Not shared, SOCKS5 supported

  3. 90 days plan

    • Starting from $1.39 per proxy
    • Features: Unlimited traffic, 99.9% uptime, Premium ISP providers, Not shared, SOCKS5 supported

One of the perks of using IPRoyal is actually it pricing. The pricing for its rotating residential proxies is based on bandwidth usage and can be said to be one of the cheapest in the market. However, this is not the reason I see the pricing as a perk. I see it as a perk because its bandwidth never expires. Yes, for the rest of the providers, the bandwidth has a one-month expiry date. But for IPRoyal, your bandwidth never expires except exhausted by you. This makes it especially friendly to small proxy users that use proxies on seasonal bases, as they are not forced to finish their bandwidth before it expires.

For the pricing per GB, it starts from $7 per GB, and there is no minimum commitment. However, the more bandwidth you purchase, the cheaper the price per GB becomes. Take, for instance, if you purchase 10GB, the price per GB will become $5.25, which is a 25 percent discount. In terms of payment method support, IPRoyal does support popular payment methods, including PayPal, card payment, and even cryptocurrency. This provider does not offer a refund except in the case of a bug, which must be from their end. There is also no free trial option for you to try out. So you really need to speak to their agent if you have any unique use case to avoid wasting your money.

Customer Support

Customer support is one thing you shouldn’t joke with. This is because when you hit any wall, support is what will see you through. IPRoyal understands this well and had put together a team of professionals that are always ready to see your queries. I have used the live chat support of IPRoyal, and the response was swift. In fact, there is a queuing system in place that lets you know the number of customers ahead of you in the queue. But because they have more than one agent, you will only have to wait for a few minutes at most before getting connected to an agent. The agents demonstrated some level of advanced knowledge at the times I contacted them, and they were responsive and polite in their communications.

However, just know that they are not always online. In this case, you will have to make use of email communication. This one is a little slow as you will have to wait for a few hours before getting a response. You can also give them a shoutout on social media as they are Discord, Facebook, and Twitter. You can find the links to their social media pages at the bottom of their website pages.

Ease of Use

Generally, when it comes to ease of use, only a few providers flop, and this has to do with the complexity of the provider. IPRoyal is one of the small providers out there. Regardless of the numerous proxy types it offers, it is not an advanced provider, and that is reflected in its simplicity. The only major problem you will have to deal with is the issue of KYC. If you are a user of their rotating residential proxies, then you will have to do a KYC by providing an identification document. This is something I am not comfortable with, even though most big providers ask for it.

This aside, the other workflows are fluidless, and you even get a browser extension for both Chrome and Firefox. With either of these extensions, you are able to switch IPs and use the geotargeting feature without leaving the browser. One thing you will also come to appreciate is the library of guides provided. This provider offers a guide on how to use their proxies with some of the popular client software in the market.

Developer Support

Not all proxies are friendly to developers, even though developers can use all of them. IPRoyal is one of those providers. There is a developer API in place, but that developer API is not meant for all of their customers. The developer API is actually meant for resellers, not regular users of their proxies. While this reseller API can be adapted for use by regular users, that is not its intended usage. Also important is the fact that this API is not available by default. You will need to purchase a plan of $200 and above rot activate this API.

This makes it not developer-friendly when compared to the other providers that offer an API without these kinds of requirements. Aside from this obvious issue, the developer API can be said to be a good one as it has many endpoints to serve your need as a developer. The documentation for the API is quite comprehensive and exhaustive, making it easier for its users to grasp it quickly.

Verdict: Is IPRoyal Good Enough?

The IPRoyal service is a small proxy provider with features that appeal to small proxy users. While I wouldn’t recommend them for large projects because of their small pool size, which negatively affects their geo-targeting capabilities, the network is good enough for many small to mid-scale usage.

It even has the advantage of offering proxy bandwidth that never expires. This means small proxy users can purchase once and use it when they want to use it without being in a hurry.

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