Home / Proxy reviews / Geonode Review
Read this extensive Geonode review and discover what the proxy provider offers and how it compares with its competitors.
Geonode is a medium-sized company based in Singapore that seeks to compete in the premium segment of the proxy industry. According to LinkedIn, the company has about 20 employees, mostly from the Philippines. Its headquarters is located in Asia, on Singapore’s Eu Tong Sen Street.
Its proxy server offerings focus on residential proxies. It has also recently added mobile and datacenter proxy servers, with ISP proxies on the way. Use cases for their proxies include web scraping and SERP monitoring, but not bypassing geographic restrictions on streaming services.
The provider’s target audience seems to be primarily individuals and, to some extent, small businesses. That is clear from their pay-as-you-go plans with very affordable prices. Plans for larger companies are not that competitive compared to other providers.
Geonode is transparent about how it obtains and manages its residential IPs, which comes from partnerships with Zenshield and Repocket. It is not as transparent in stating how many of these IPs are residential, mobile, and datacenter.
👍 Pros:
– Residential, mobile, and datacenter proxies – Both shared and private proxies – Dedicated residential proxies – Affordable prices for residential proxies – Mixed proxies offer – 24/7 high-quality customer support – Scraping API – 190+ countries – Lower price guarantee – Many free services
👎 Cons:
– No free trial – Currently no ISP proxies – Many discrepancies on the official site and even some typos – Not clear how many IPs there are in the residential, datacenter, and mobile proxy pools, respectively – Slow response times – Limited threads
Residential proxies are what Geonode’s offerings focus on. This is clear considering that the provider has three different plans dedicated to them:
Geonode does not officially disclose how large its residential proxy network is. The official website does not mention the specific number of residential or other types of proxy IPs controlled by the provider. This is rather concerning, especially considering that all the other top proxy providers are quite open about that. The SERP description on Google defined by Geonode mentions “up to 30 million country-targeting IPs.
Still, no specific information on how many of those IPs are residential.
When it comes to location, Geonode offers residential proxies in more than 160 countries (even if the “About” page above says otherwise). The list of locations includes all the countries you would expect from a reliable proxy provider. Proxies are available through the HTTP, HTTPs, and SOCKS protocols. This is quite good, but do not expect the same availability and global coverage guaranteed by superior providers such as Oxylabs or Smartproxy.
Geonode’s residential proxies are ethically sourced through Repocket and Zenshield, two popular services for sharing unused Internet connections. Thus, the proxy provider does not manage and get proxy servers directly. This may be why the average response time is quite high and the success rate is not always as good as you would expect from a premium service. In addition, you may experience unexpected downtime and errors.
The good news is that the provider supports both automatic IP rotation and flexible sticky IP sessions. You can configure that behavior directly in the Geonode online dashboard, giving you the ability to control the proxy connections as you need.
As mentioned before, there are different plans to gain access to residential proxies. The most basic one is the “Premium Residential Proxies” plan.
There is a pay-as-you-go plan where you pay a fixed amount per GB based on the number of GBs you need. The entry price is $4 per GB is pretty impressive and way cheaper than the market average. Prices also drop as the number of GBs increases, becoming very affordable. That is where Geonode truly shines. However, there is no free trial.
The “Unlimited Residential Proxies” plan is quite different. In this case, you pay a fixed monthly amount for an unlimited number of GBs but a limited number of threads.
The price of $99 per month makes it clear that this plan is intended for businesses. Not surprisingly, users who purchase this plan also receive personal customer support. Access to more threads for more concurrent requests comes with a fee.
Again, there is no free trial, but you can test the proxies for 3 days for the price of $6. Or at least, that is the price listed on the plan’s webpage, while the home page mentions a price of $9. These differences are somewhat confusing.
Lastly, the “Dedicated Residential Proxies” plan provides access to private residential proxies whose IP remain static for at least 24 hours.
This time, the price is $59 a month for unlimited traffic. Not all providers offer dedicated residential proxies, and these are a great alternative to ISP proxies. Nevertheless, it is not clear whether the trial is a 1-day trial for $6 as mentioned on the plan page or a 3-day free trial for $10 as stated on the home page.
The datacenter proxies offering is comprehensive and involves both shared and dedicated servers. Compared to residential proxies, the proxy network is wider, with servers in more than 190 countries. Unfortunately, there is no official information on the number of datacenter IPs available.
Geonode’s shared datacenter proxies come with a pay-as-you-go plan. $1 for 1 GB of datacenter traffic is quite high, and far above the prices guaranteed by the best providers such as Bright Data.
Dedicated datacenter proxies have a different plan with a fixed monthly amount of $59 for real unlimited traffic.
The fact that these proxies cost the same as dedicated residential proxies and provide the exact same features raises some doubt as to whether these IPs come from datacenter servers, or vice versa for residential servers.
The information on mobile mobile proxies is rather limited. There is no clear indication of how many IPs are available and in which country.
What is sure is that Geonode offers a pay-as-you-go plan for 4G or 5G IPs. The entry price of $9.99 per GB is quite attractive and competitive. Only Smartproxy, among the top proxy providers, has lower prices.
A special plan designed by Geonode to give users random access to either datacenter or residential IPs. This is a great idea for building a cost-effective scraping operation. The plan guarantees unlimited traffic for $49 per month with no free or paid trial.
Features and Other Important Aspects
The main features and aspects that characterizes the Geonode offerings and plans are:
Geonode is one of the few providers—along with NetNut and Bright Data— to state how many customers and which companies it works with. This is pretty transparent and rather useful to users or companies interested in buying its services.
Right now, Geonode serves more than 1,000 companies in over 120 countries. While the number of business customers is not as impressive as that of other larger providers, it is still quite a solid number. Plus, the fact that companies around the world have chosen their services is great news for potential new users.
Among these 1,000 companies are ScraperAPI, Plurral, Sea, Naturlife, Imomomy, and others. Apart from ScraperAPI and Sea, none of the other companies are well known. Anyway, knowing that so many companies have chosen Geonode for their proxy needs is reassuring.
Geonode’s customer support is supportive and can be contacted even if you are not a customer. That is helpful to get some more extra information about the plans you are interested in purchasing.
The support team is available 24/7 via email, phone, or through a ticketing system. When you send an inquiry via email, customer service should respond within a few days. Companies with unlimited plans also have access to dedicated personal support.
Once you are a customer, you can also contact the service team to get a customized invoice. For example, you can ask them to add your company details or VAT number so that the next invoices meet your state’s requirements. This is great for companies that need to comply with local regulations.
Other users have also been impressed with Geonode’s customer service. On Trustpilot, the provider has 97 reviews and an average rating of 4.8 stars out of 5.
The surprising finding is that Geonode is not registered on G2.com or other similar user review sites. That may be because the company wants to focus all efforts on user feedback on Trustpilot.
Creating a new account for Geonode is straightforward and requires basic information like your name, phone, and email address. There is no mandatory KYC procedure users must go through. This may raise some concerns about the kind of users the provider wants to attract.
However, as pointed out in the proxy documentation, any kind of illegal activity is strictly prohibited. In particular, you cannot use Geonode’s services for:
We do not know if this is enough to keep malicious users and bots away. That depends on how carefully Geonode monitors its network and how quickly it takes action when a user commits fraudulent activity.
As for data regulations, Geonode manages user data under GDPR norms. In particular, users residing in the European Economic Area have access to additional data protection rights.
Geonode also aims to ensure the lowest prices without compromising quality or service.
Geonode is primarily a proxy provider, but it also provides additional products built upon its proxy network. The scope of these additional tools is rather limited compared to other providers, but it is still an excellent addition. What makes Geonode stand above the others is instead its rich offering of free services.
Site Unlocker is a web scraping API to scrape data from any public site. It provides a special endpoint that integrates with HTTP clients and web scraping libraries.
Site Unlocker can simulate user interaction and automatically bypass CAPTCHAs or any other anti-bot measures. Its goal is to return the unblocked HTML of the target page. In other words, it guarantees that the web scraping operation will have high effectiveness.
Other providers that offer a scraping API typically have plans based on credits, where each API call costs a certain number of credits. In the case of Geonode, the price of the scraping API depends instead on the number of GB of traffic generated. 1 GB costs $4. That price is great because it is cheaper than residential proxies. Developers who need to create a scraping script may consider this technology as what they have been looking for.
Free proxies are unreliable and should never be used in production. Yet, they can be useful for learning purposes or when developing locally. On the Geonode site, you can download a list of free proxies backed by the provider.
Specifically, you can generate a pool of free proxy servers based on:
Note that this tool is publicly available for free to all visitors.
A free webpage on the Geonode site to display:
This is useful to verify that the configured proxy works as desired and offers an IP in the selected country.
A free tool on the Geonode site to check the quality, availability, and location of a proxy server. That is a useful tool for verifying anonymity and functionality of any online proxy server.
Geonode is a decent service provider, with different types of proxy servers, and in most countries. It has some features of a top premium provider, such as responsive customer service, but it has not yet reached that level of service.
There are many concerns, such as the lack of KYC procedures to restrict malicious users from entering the network, and many discrepancies on their official website. In addition, it does not have any outstanding features or additional products that make it superior to its competitors.
At the same time, the affordable prices for residential proxies and the scraping API can easily convince most individual users. What is truly impressive is how much Goenode has improved over the years. User reviews have gotten better, too. So, while the provider is not the industry leader and might never become it, it is promising enough to be among the top proxy providers.
Final verdict: 6.8/10