Data Solutions & Practices
Data is the fundamental resource that powers business operations and drives strategic decisions. We cover modern data practices and the tools, platforms, and approaches organizations use to manage, transform, and get value from their data.
Explore Data Solutions & Practices
Shared Proxies: Benchmark Results & Providers
Shared proxies are the entry point for most scraping operations; they’re cheap enough to test with and abundant enough to scale. That trade-off plays out differently depending on which proxy type you’re buying. In our benchmark across residential, datacenter, and mobile shared proxy networks, the performance spread between providers was wide in some categories and…
Top Spotify Proxy Servers & Proxy Settings
Spotify’s proxy controls are available in the desktop app. The desktop client supports HTTP, SOCKS4, and SOCKS5 proxies, plus an autodetect option that inherits your operating system’s proxy settings and a no-proxy default. There is no in-app proxy field on iOS or Android; mobile routing is handled at the OS or VPN level, which is…
Best Video Proxies: Benchmark Results
High latency, bandwidth bottlenecks, and aggressive IP blocking make video data extraction one of the most challenging tasks. A standard proxy setup often can’t keep up with the advanced anti-bot measures used to protect streaming content. If you want to watch a blocked or geo-restricted video, use a free web proxy tool rather than a…
Unlimited Residential & Datacenter Bandwidth
Most providers advertise unlimited proxies, but almost none are truly unlimited. In practice, unlimited means governed by a fair-use policy (FUP): you can send traffic without a stated cap until you hit a hidden GB or concurrency threshold. Quick take by policy type: Compare the bandwidth policies behind unlimited claims across residential, ISP, datacenter, and…
The Most Common Web Scraping Challenges
Web scraping has become more difficult in recent years. Since 2025, AI-related scraping has raised significant legal concerns. Platforms and infrastructure providers have adopted new methods to control AI crawlers and manage data collection. There are many technical challenges that web scrapers face due to the barriers set by data owners or website owners to…
Web Scraping for Recruiters: Top Tools & Techniques
Recruiters rely on web data to build talent pools, monitor hiring demand, and benchmark compensation. But how you collect that data matters. Many automation tools use cookie/session-based scraping (higher risk of bans), while proxy-based scraping APIs and managed scrapers are built for scale and reliability. Dedicated scrapers and site-specific APIs are the right option when…
Best YouTube Datasets: Bright Data & Oxylabs
YouTube has become a primary source for training advanced multimodal AI and large language models (LLMs). However, obtaining YouTube data at scale remains difficult due to anti-bot measures and bandwidth requirements. This review examines key companies in the YouTube data sector: Bright Data, Oxylabs, Decodo, and Grepsr. Each targets a specific market segment, ranging from…
Best Enterprise Proxy Servers
We tested the best enterprise proxy service providers with 30 million requests, across 100,000 parallel requests, to identify the most reliable options for large-scale operations. See the top performance leaders based on our benchmark. Detailed reviews for all providers are included below. All benchmarked providers delivered a high success rate (at least ~80%) and fast…
We Compared the Best Web Scraping Tools
We cover 13+ of the top web scraping tools, split into two categories: We tested leading web scraping APIs across thousands of URLs. Use the table below to compare their site coverage, request success rate, metadata richness, and average latency: These are managed “send a URL, get data back” services. You don’t manage proxies, rotate…
The Best E-Commerce Dataset Providers
Paid dataset providers offer up-to-date, large-scale e-commerce data with defined coverage and regular updates, supporting applications like competitor price and stock-level tracking. In contrast, free e-commerce datasets are usually static and outdated, limiting their value for real-time decision-making, including dynamic repricing. Bright Data is one of the largest providers by publicly stated dataset volume. It…