Socket Secure (SOCKS) is a network protocol like HTTP/S, TCP, etc., used to facilitate server connections. It uses a proxy server to route data packets between the user requesting information and the targeted server. This type of proxy server is a SOCKS proxy server that can route any kind of traffic created by any program or protocol.
SOCKS has two versions – SOCKS5 and SOCKS4. SOCKS5 supports different authentication methods and UDP proxies, while SOCKS4 doesn’t.
SOCKS5 proxies are more secure as they offer complete TCP connections and use SSH protocol and authentication mechanisms. Thus, every data packet in the transmission is validated, and only safe ones pass through to offer enhanced security and privacy.
SOCKS5 proxies are a practical option to browse the web with better security and performance while staying anonymous. When using the internet, there are many security and data privacy risks. In addition, you might have to face some restrictions.
Imagine you wish to visit a site for business purposes or just relax by watching the new show your friend recommended, but you simply can’t access it.
The reason could be geo-restriction. But what if you are determined to access that site?
It’s possible to use a proxy server like a SOCKS5 proxy with added security and privacy.
Below are the best SOCKS5 proxy servers based on security and reliability, customization options, performance, and speed.
- Bright Data
- Oxylabs
- IPRoyal
- Smartproxy
- Webshare
- Marsproxies
- Proxy-Seller
- PrivateProxy
- ProxySocks5
- ProxyGuys
- Limeproxies
- Show less
Bright Data
Get the most secure proxies with Bright Data and slow down your risk of exposure. It is one of the most secure proxies worldwide that allows you to collect data easily from any geolocation without being blocked or restricted.
Bright Data is known for its reliable proxies, with the highest success of 99.5% in the industry. With the help of its experts, you can tailor the products according to your business needs. Apart from this, if you need something specific, Bright Data can build it for you.
Sign up and take a FREE trial without paying any recurring amount.
Oxylabs
Get reliable and premium proxies with Oxylabs that are ideal for your traffic-intensive tasks. You will get to choose from over 2 million IPs from 188 countries. Its SOCKS5 proxies are from reliable resources that offer performance and speed that are suitable for your business needs.
Oxylabs‘ SOCKS5 proxy allows your business to monitor copyright infringements from illegal sources and ensures your content streaming is safe and legitimate. It facilitates UDP connection so that you can fulfill all your business needs with security.
If your business needs a UDP connection for traffic-intensive or more versatile data gathering, Oxylabs‘ SOCKS5 proxy is the solution. It makes traffic-intensive scraping, including live calls, video streaming, etc., much easier.
Use a simple cURL request and get your proxy list to start scraping. With Oxylabs, you don’t have to worry about the dead proxies. Instead, it gives access to new ones. Its easy and quick integration helps you access all the sources on a UDP connection to achieve most information-gathering jobs.
Furthermore, you can manage your account in a single dashboard and check detailed proxy usage statistics. In addition, you can whitelist your IPs. Oxylabs ensures no problem while scraping the web for the data you need.
Oxylabs make your scraping job enjoyable by giving you the freedom of unlimited targets. Its SOCKS5 proxies are amongst the most reliable and stable on the market, with a high uptime of 99.9%. Thus, you can scale your business faster than ever before with Oxylabs‘ SOCKS5 proxies.
IPRoyal
IPRoyal is one of the few providers who offer SOCKS5 support for almost all types of proxies in its lineup. This includes residential proxies, data center proxies, private proxies, and sneaker proxies. Along with SOCKS5 support, they all support HTTP/HTTPS connections.
What makes IPRoyal stand out is the global pool of ethically sourced residential proxies. With over 2 million true residential IPs and some of the most precise targeting options (country, state, and city-level where available), it’s a perfect provider for those who need reliable and accurate web scraping. You can also tweak every aspect of your proxies, like location, IP rotation, and more.
The rest of the lineup doesn’t fall behind, either. You can get fast SOCKS5 data center proxies with unlimited bandwidth and threads, sneaker proxies with instant delivery, as well as private proxies and static residential SOCKS5 proxies at excellent prices and massive bulk discounts.
IPRoyal’s dashboard is very easy to use, with enough options to tweak everything about your proxies. You can generate proxy lists and export them, use IPRoyal’s own browser plugins and proxy tester, and more. If you need SOCKS5 proxies for web scraping, SEO research, social media management, sneaker copping, gaming, streaming, or anything else – IPRoyal has you covered!
Smartproxy
Leave restrictions behind and access competitive business data from anywhere worldwide with Smartproxy’s SOCKS5 proxy. It will scale your operations and never get you banned from any site.
Smartproxy offers some free tools that sharpen your proxies, including an x browser, Chrome extension, Firefox browser add-on, address generator, and more. You no longer need to struggle between multiple profiles; you get a unique fingerprint and can easily use any browser without any hassle.
This solution is easy to use, set up, robust, and reliable. You can generate the user: pass lists instantly for your sticky sessions. In addition, you will get benefits like complete anonymity, speed, global coverage, rotating proxies, and 24/7 expert support. It will allow you to have 100% control over the proxy.
Smartproxy is available in various global locations, including Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, India, and the United States, so you can bypass website blocks and geo-restrictions.
Forget about IP restrictions and never compromise on personal data and security. Smartproxy will help you scale your business quickly by providing you with as many IPs as you want. It allows you to manage your account, analyze SEO, scale your marketing, scrape competitive information freely, and more.
Get the best starter kit for your business with Smartproxy‘s documentation and public API.
Webshare provides many benefits a user might expect from a reliable and high-quality proxy provider, such as security and ethically gathered proxies while giving you even more. Try their permanent free plan, which gives you access to 10 free premium proxies, and test them out yourself to see their effectiveness.
If speed is your concern, Webshare has one of the fastest proxies in the market, which ensures Webshare’s solutions can easily tackle your most demanding business needs.
Their SOCKS5 proxies retain the speed and reliability Webshare is known for, yet implement numerous other valuable advantages. Chiefly among them are:
- Their availability for Residential Proxies.
- Protocol options that, if needed, use the same proxy servers, both SOCKS5 or HTTP proxies.
- Foolproof anonymity, meaning advanced proxies secure your real IP address, ensuring no DNS or header leaks and open port scans happen.
- Compatibility with any application, so your online anonymity is boosted.
- The unparalleled speed and reliability.
With the proxy features shown above and many more, categories like heavy-traffic scraping, video streaming, and gaming are all enhanced when Webshare’s SOCKS5 proxies are applied.
Marsproxies
MarsProxies is one of the few proxy providers offering SOCKS5 support for all of its products, including residential, datacenter, and ISP proxies. Though it focuses on sneakerheads and online shoppers, its SOCKS5 proxies suit many other use cases.
Besides being SOCKS5 supported, all proxy servers are private, so you won’t share them with anyone else. This makes them even more reliable and secure.
The company’s SOCKS5 residential proxies are ethically sourced and packed with valuable features like sticky sessions, dual authentication, and non-expiring traffic.
The SOCKS5 datacenter and ISP proxies come with unlimited bandwidth, 99.99% uptime, and great speeds of up to 10 Gbps, ensuring a fast and seamless connection.
The provider has a daily plan for its data center proxy servers and one of the most competitive prices in the industry. This makes it a pocket-friendly option not just for sneakerheads or online shoppers but for anyone looking for reliable and affordable SOCKS5 proxies.
Proxy-Seller
Buy private SOCKS5 proxies with Proxy-Seller for your business needs, like scraping for SEO, social networks, online games, internet surfing, and more. You will get a speed of 1 Gb/s while scraping over the internet for gathering data.
You can select proxies from 900 subnets and over 350 networks, including Cyprus, Indonesia, Russia, Austria, Australia, Japan, Germany, US, France, Italy, Lithuania, Bulgaria, India, and many more. Proxy-Seller guarantees an uptime of 99 % and will replace a proxy during unforeseen circumstances.
Proxy-Seller’s dedicated proxies are ideal for promotions on social networks, placing ads on platforms like CraigsList and Sneakers cop, for registrations, multiple accounts, search engines, mass posting, and other purposes. It will never slow down and offer you the best-performing SOCKS5 proxies.
With Proxy-Seller’s premium proxies, you will get expert help, a multifunctional user control panel, regular promotional events, combined discounts, full access to data, 350 networks with 900 subnets, and much more.
Choose from IPv4 and IPv6, your country, and your rental period, and enter the number of proxies you want. Get the pricing according to your selection and start using SOCKS5 proxies for your business.
PrivateProxy
If you are looking for a secure SOCKS5 proxy, consider buying it from PrivateProxy. It will help you quickly access any websites anywhere across the globe without getting banned or restricted and accomplish your parsing missions and online scraping.
Bypass internet filters and other network restrictions, unblock geo-restricted content, set up remote connections, and complete extensive data scraping missions, everything from a single place. PrivateProxy’s SOCKS5 proxies are your best option if you need extra security and faster response,
Moreover, PrivateProxy’s SOCKS5 proxies offer data center static and residential static proxy services for unlimited connections, unmetered bandwidth, multiple locations, faster response, and more. You can easily select a private SOCKS5 proxy from the pool of proxies.
Give PrivateProxy a FREE trial and get 100% clean proxies for your different use cases, such as bots, research, social media marketing, data scraping, ad verification, and more.
ProxySocks5
Buy high-quality SOCKS5 proxies with ProxySocks5, including static IP proxies that contain residential SOCKS5, dedicated SOCKS5, shared SOCKS5, ShadowSocks, and residential ShadowSocks.
ProxySocks5’s unique infrastructure is available 24/7 and provides an uptime of 99%. You can choose any product and start gathering traffic-intensive data worldwide. It is optimized for better performance and a network speed of 1 Gb/s.
Multiple payment methods are available, so you can instantly buy the proxies according to your business requirements. ProxySocks5 offers highly secure SOCKS5 proxies that are not bandwidth-limited. So, you can use the proxies as much as possible without any hassle or concern.
Furthermore, ProxySocks5 offers you a monthly IP address refresh option where you can remove your old SOCK5 proxy from the account and add a new proxy without any intervention. To use the SOCKS5 proxy in your browser, add your IP address from the right sidebar of your product.
ProxySocks provides an easy-to-use and intuitive dashboard, so you do not struggle to get things done. It will help you effortlessly manage everything, from gathering data to getting detailed statistics in a single place.
With this solution, you can get over 300 servers in 100+ cities. So, buy your premium and total anonymous SOCKS5 proxies now.
ProxyGuys
Get premium USA 5G mobile proxies with ProxyGuys for 50 different cities. In addition to the premium features that can suit your business needs, you will get unlimited bandwidth and IPs, location changes, and more.
ProxyGuys utilizes dedicated 5G modems from AT&T and Verizon Wireless to offer genuine IP addresses of the highest security with the fastest proxy speeds. It ensures 100% uptime, reliable speeds, high quality, and consistency.
Along with the SOCKS5 proxy protocol, it also supports L2TP w/PSK VPN, which works with every operating system, tool, or bot. It will also ensure that you will never encounter any virus that can infect or hack your computers.
Limeproxies
Limeproxies‘ SOCKS5 proxies are built with battle-tested, unique, and carefully monitored infrastructure. You will get over 1 million data center proxy IPs, zero traffic-intensive tasks, over 2 million IPs from more than 80 countries, and 99.99% uptime.
With the SOCKS5 proxy, you can facilitate a UDP connection. It works for traffic-intensive scrapings, such as live calls, video streaming, etc. If you want traffic-intensive and more versatile data gathering with a perfect UDP connection, then SOCKS5 proxies are for you.
You will get an all-in-one handy service dashboard, unmatched proxy speeds, high-performance metrics, and a lot more with the SOCKS5 proxy of your choice.
Now that we’ve gone through the best SOCKS5 proxies let’s understand how the SOCKS5 proxy works.
How Does a SOCKS5 Proxy Work?
A SOCKS5 proxy server establishes a TCP connection to other servers behind the firewall on behalf of the user. Next, it exchanges data packets between the actual server and the user, acting as a midway between them so that no personal information is visible to the targeted web page.
In the OSI model, SOCKS sits at layer 5, i.e., between TCP/UDP at layer four and SSL at layer 7. Therefore, it can handle various requests, including HTTPS, HTTP, SMTP, FTP, and POP3. It also supports different authentication methods, such as:
- Null authentication: It requires no authentication while connecting to a proxy server
- GSS-API authentication: The user and the target server utilize authentication methods at the OS level for identity verification.
- Username and password authentication: It requires you to enter your login credentials to verify your identity and make a secure connection to a proxy
Thus, a SOCKS5 proxy server wouldn’t let attackers perform scanning via tools like Nmap based on a half-open connection since it works at layer 5. This is why SOCKS5 is used for safe web browsing, sending emails, transferring files, and peer-to-peer sharing.
Why Should You Use SOCKS5 Proxy Servers?
Here are the reasons why using SOCKS5 is beneficial to individuals and businesses alike:
- Better performance: SOCKS5 doesn’t rewrite packets, unlike other proxies. Instead, it relays the web traffic between the systems. Hence, it involves fewer errors and leads to better performance.
- Higher security: It offers better security than other proxies as it supports various authentication methods for verifying identity.
- Privacy: Apart from security, it is better to conceal your personal information or device identity to keep you anonymous while using the web.
Conclusion
Security and privacy are essential when you use the internet. Using the SOCKS5 proxy server mentioned above, you can freely surf the web with better security, privacy, and performance. Hence, you can easily accomplish your tasks, whether it’s web scraping or watching your favorite show, without facing restrictions.
Compared to traditional proxies, SOCKS5 offers an enhanced level of security by shielding the traffic originating from specific sources, such as individual applications.
Several websites Like Webshare and Proxyscape offer free proxy lists. You can aso get them from several forums and sub-reddits.
You can bind your SOCKS proxy to a list of specific IP addresses or use 0.0.0.0 to listen on all. You can also configure multiple instances with different settings for each or using a proxychain program.
More on Proxies
- Beginner’s Guide to Top Scraping with Residential Proxies
- Best Proxies to Manage Instagram Accounts
- Best Proxy Managers for Managing Multiple Proxies
- Best Proxies to Use for Getting Sneakers
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