Home / Proxy reviews / Netnut Review
A fast, stable, and scalable proxy solution for large-scale web scraping.
While not as popular as Smartproxy or Bright Data, NetNut is still a well-known proxy provider predominantly among businesses. Traditionally, NetNut has mostly catered to enterprise users but after 2021, since the introduction of cheaper entry-level plans, this company can be considered as a viable option for regular users.
Currently, NetNut ranks #10 as per its G2 Score, which means it’s not too far from the leading providers and in a congested category, it still managed a spot in the top ten. On Trustpilot, NetNut boasts an impressive 4.8/5 rating, however, the low number of reviews it received on the platform, pretty much confirms that it’s not very well-known among regular users.
In this review, we’ll take a look at the services NetNut offers, their features, along with their pricing and performance, and see where it stands in the industry.
NetNut, founded in 2017, primarily focuses on enterprise users with large-scale scraping requirements, as reflected in its pricing plans and services it offers. However, at present it offers affordable entry level plans from as low as $15 per GB, possibly for attracting regular users.
While the company is not exactly affordable, it still scales pretty well with prices going as low as $3.6/GB if you choose the annual subscription for its 1TB plan.
As for products, NetNut offers residential, datacenter, and mobile proxies and two web scraping APIs.
While businesses form the majority of NetNut’s userbase, the company also targets resellers with its dedicated proxy pools, detailed usage statistics, a proxy management API, and sub-users – features which are generally locked for regular users.
Overall, NetNut is a decent provider and in the following sections, we’ll explore each product and learn about their features and pricing.
NetNut offers rotating residential proxies. With a pool of 52 million IPs covering over 150 countries, NetNut provides a wide range of geographical targets making it a great option for enterprises that operate globally. This provider also supports HTTP(S) and SOCKS5 protocols. The support for SOCKS5 protocol is especially important because it offers enhanced online privacy and IP protection, allows bypassing internet blocks, and delivers improved performance across various applications and devices. Besides, its ability to navigate firewalls with fewer issues makes it particularly useful for enterprise use cases, ensuring secure and efficient connectivity.
NetNut offers certain features like IP whitelisting, dedicated support, and request-based plans that businesses can leverage. Moreover, the company provides detailed reports, letting you get a deeper understanding of your usage patterns which could be an extra incentive for resellers.
However, it must be mentioned that while the company’s proxies are praised for their seamless integration into various systems, facilitating smooth and efficient operations, when it comes to targeting America, the company only provides ISP proxies. The service is also not very user-friendly, comes with a somewhat limited documentation, and compared to most competitors, NetNut’s proxy infrastructure encounters a lot of errors.
Pricing
NetNut’s residential proxies are on the pricier side – costing more than even Bright Data’s residential proxies. This provider offers monthly subscriptions tiered as per traffic. The rotating residential IPs have a starting price of $300 for 20GB traffic (at a rate of $15/GB).
The service gets cheaper as you scale up. For example, for rotating residential proxies the rates go down to as low as $4/GB for 1TB of data. As for static residential proxies, the rates drop to $5/GB for the 1TB plan.
Since the service gets cheaper as you scale up, it’s a great option for large-scale scraping projects.
Performance
Performance-wise NetNut has a decent success rate of nearly 93% which isn’t great considering all the top providers have over 99% success rate. Moreover, with an average response time of a little over 2s NetNut doesn’t really provide any competition to most of the top providers such as Bright Data, Oxylabs, and Smartproxy.
NetNut boasts over 1 million IPs spread across 30+ countries, forming one of the largest proxy pool for ISP proxies. These proxies come with rotation features that let you change IPs per request and you also get to set sticky sessions. NetNut also offers unlimited threads and SOCKS5 support.
While the company doesn’t offer ASN/ZIP targeting, it offers country, state, and city-level targeting.
Overall, the product isn’t extravagant but it covers all the bases and its large proxy pool makes it a decent option.
NetNut offers multiple traffic-based plans that start at a rate of $17.5/GB for monthly traffic of 20GB reducing to $5/GB as you scale up to a monthly traffic of 1TB.
All plans include features like city/state-level targeting and IP whitelisting, access to its API, and a dedicated account manager. Moreover, no matter which tier you subscribe to, you get access to the entire proxy network.
The model is pretty straightforward, you pay more for better rates and more traffic, but not much else in terms of features. All its features are available for every tier.
Performance-wise NetNut has a decent success rate of nearly 93% which isn’t ideal. Although it really has an impressive average response time of less than 1s.
Despite the low response time, NetNut has one major drawback – connection failure due to proxies timing out. This is one aspect that can prove to be a deterrent given its already steep entry-tier price.
NetNut has a network of 250,000+ mobile IPs covering 100+ countries in the world.
In terms of features, besides all the basic features, this proxy service also offers an accurate geo-targeting capability up to the city level and coupled with a 99.9% uptime, NetNut ensures a wide coverage and an unhindered connection for seamless and accurate data collection. In addition, you also get customizable rotation features.
NetNut also supports HTTP(S) and SOCKS5 protocols. This company also provides detailed usage reports even for sub-users that can be accessed via its dashboard, making the service ideal for resellers.
NetNut’s plans are subscription-based and tiered as per traffic. Its plan starts at $20 per GB ($400 for a total of 20GB of data) charged monthly with the rate going down as low as $8 per GB ($8000 for 1TB) for its Master tier.
This pricing is pretty standard and only slightly higher compared to Smartproxy.
Performance-wise NetNut has a decent success rate of nearly 95% which isn’t great but at least in a comparable range to top-tier mobile proxy providers. Moreover, with an average response time of a little over 2s NetNut doesn’t really provide any competition to most of the top providers such as Bright Data, Oxylabs, and Smartproxy.
Overall, NetNut is a decent mobile proxy service ideally suited for customers who generally have big-scale scraping requirements.
The NetNut Website Unblocker is an advanced tool that facilitates block-free web scraping, leveraging AI to bypass anti-blocking measures. It’s specifically designed to emulate real user behaviour – precisely configuring headers, cookies, and JavaScript settings to mimic actual users.
Its automated AI-powered block-bypassing mechanism, automated IP rotation, and retries make it a versatile tool for businesses needing to seamlessly access and analyze web data. Pricing The pricing plan of the website unblocker starts from $20 and you can opt for a free trial via a four-step process, first by entering your email, then your name, your usage range, and finally your social handle.
The Setup Process
NetNut’s registration process used to be lengthy, involving a form-fillup step and then waiting for them to contact you via Skype.
Now, however, this has become a lot simplified. There’s a 3-step registration process where you just need to enter your email address, full name, username and your use case.
As for KYC, NetNut imposes a KYC check only for users who opt for residential proxies where you need to fill up a form, state your usecase, and provide some additional information. This is done to prevent abuse and protect peers. For datacenter proxies, KYC isn’t required. You can start using them as soon as you sign up for a plan.
How to Manage Subscription and Usage
For the ease of its users, NetNut provides a dashboard using which you can easily manage proxies, subscriptions, track usage, access integration instructions, and contact support.
This dashboard is sometimes useful, sometimes not and sometimes some parts are either lacking or missing altogether. For instance, the proxy setup procedure is very complicated and not very user-friendly and although very important, a list of available cities is absent from the dashboard.
One area where NetNut has given the most attention is usage stats. You can access your detailed usage stats both visually and via an API. You can get a detailed proxy usage report filtered by sub-user, domain and country and even see the errors you encountered.
The dashboard also comes with instructions on setting up proxies, including basic configurations and some code samples for popular programming languages. However, the samples are all static and not very great.
As for proxy setup, NetNut proxies use a backconnect server, which means, instead of a list of proxies, you’ll get one address using which you’ll access the proxy pool with the IPs being automatically rotated in the back end. Also, there are special addresses for Google, Instagram, and sneaker sites.
To pinpoint a specific location, append a string to the username containing the country code. For sticky sessions, utilize a unique string to designate a session ID. Unfortunately, there is no feature available to choose gateways that automatically rotate IPs at predetermined intervals.
Documentation and Support
NetNut’s documentation is nothing to write home about, in fact, it’s quite inadequate. In some cases, like the Social Scraping API, documentation is extremely lacking.
This is not to say that NetNut doesn’t have info on proxy setup, integrations, etc. They do have these and also a lengthy FAQ section but certain information is withheld from the users. You won’t get to know if you’re able to create sub-users as a non-reseller, how you can target cities, how to rotate residential proxies on intervals, etc. For users who prefer self-service and like to learn things on their own instead of relying on customer support, this can be very off putting.
You can contact support via email or contact your account manager directly via Skype, Discord, WhatsApp, or Telegram. If you’re an active user, you’ll generally receive quick responses.
Responses are generally slower if you contact via email. Overall, this is one area where the product could do with some improvement.
NetNut is a good option if you’re looking for stable, reliable, and fast residential proxies, however, a lack of proper documentation, accessible information, and user-friendly interface, greatly hamper its potential.
Having said that, it’s a service that is constantly being worked upon. So you can expect a better product in the near future.
Besides stability, reliability, and speed, another aspect that works in favour of NetNut is its scalability. At its top tiers, the rates become way more affordable than at entry levels, making it a great choice for tasks such as social media automation, scraping, and market research which involve terabytes of data.
Overall, while NetNut isn’t quite at the level of top providers like Bright Data, Smartproxy, or Oxylabs, it’s very much on the right trajectory.