Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Bright Data VS Shodan

Compare Bright Data VS Shodan and see what are their differences

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Bright Data logo Bright Data

World's largest proxy service with a residential proxy network of 72M IPs worldwide and proxy management interface for zero coding.

Shodan logo Shodan

Shodan is the world's first search engine for Internet-connected devices.
  • Bright Data Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-05-12
  • Shodan Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-16

Bright Data features and specs

  • Extensive Proxy Network
    Bright Data offers a vast and diverse network of over 72 million IPs, ensuring high availability and reliability for users.
  • Wide Range of Services
    Provides various proxy solutions including data center, residential, mobile, and ISP proxies, catering to different user needs.
  • Geographical Targeting
    Allows users to target proxies based on specific countries, cities, and even ASN, which is beneficial for localized data scraping.
  • Advanced Tools and APIs
    Offers sophisticated tools and APIs for automation, data extraction, and optimized proxy management.
  • Customer Support
    Provides round-the-clock customer support and numerous resources such as detailed documentation and integration guides.

Possible disadvantages of Bright Data

  • Cost
    Bright Data's services are priced at a premium, which might be expensive for small businesses or individual users.
  • Complexity
    The extensive range of options and settings can be overwhelming and may require a steep learning curve for new users.
  • Ethical Concerns
    The use of residential and mobile proxies can raise ethical questions regarding user consent and data privacy.
  • Account Approval
    New accounts are subject to approval which can delay immediate access to the service.
  • Occasional IP Blocks
    Despite the large IP pool, users may still experience occasional blocks and captchas when accessing certain websites.

Shodan features and specs

  • Comprehensive Data Collection
    Shodan extensively scans the internet, collecting data from a wide range of devices and services, which provides users with a thorough overview of their network exposure.
  • Security Awareness
    It helps organizations identify and address security vulnerabilities by revealing exposed devices and services that might otherwise go unnoticed.
  • Automation Capabilities
    The platform offers an API that allows users to automate searches and integrate Shodan data into their own tools and workflows.
  • Detailed Search Filters
    Shodan provides advanced search filters that allow users to narrow down results based on specific criteria such as geographic location, device type, or operating system.
  • Real-Time Monitoring
    Users can set up real-time alerts to monitor for new exposures, ensuring timely response to potential threats.

Possible disadvantages of Shodan

  • Ethical and Legal Concerns
    Shodan can be used by malicious actors to identify and exploit vulnerabilities, raising ethical and legal questions about its use and data collection practices.
  • Complex UI
    The user interface can be overwhelming for beginners due to its complexity and the vast amount of data available, making it difficult to navigate without prior experience.
  • Subscription Costs
    While Shodan offers a free tier, accessing advanced features and extensive search capabilities requires a subscription, which might be costly for some users.
  • Potential for False Positives
    The data collected by Shodan might include false positives, where benign devices are flagged as vulnerabilities, thus requiring users to manually verify each finding.
  • Privacy Concerns
    Since Shodan indexes devices connected to the internet, this can include personal and residential hardware, leading to privacy concerns for individuals whose devices are inadvertently exposed.

Analysis of Bright Data

Overall verdict

  • Bright Data is generally considered a good choice for businesses and professionals who require reliable and scalable proxy services. It excels in offering a comprehensive set of features and a vast IP pool, although it might be considered expensive for individual or small-scale users.

Why this product is good

  • Bright Data, formerly known as Luminati Networks, is a well-regarded proxy service provider known for its vast network of IP addresses and wide range of proxy types. It offers residential, data center, and mobile proxies with a focus on reliability and scalability. The service is often praised for its high uptime, excellent customer support, and robust infrastructure, making it a popular choice for businesses needing large-scale data collection and web scraping solutions.

Recommended for

  • Large enterprises needing mass data collection
  • Businesses engaged in web scraping and analysis
  • Companies requiring high uptime and reliability
  • Professionals interested in diverse proxy options, including residential and mobile

Analysis of Shodan

Overall verdict

  • Shodan can be a valuable tool when used appropriately. It is particularly beneficial for cybersecurity experts seeking to analyze and secure networked devices. However, it can also be used for malicious purposes if accessed by individuals with harmful intent. Therefore, ethical considerations and legal compliance must guide its use.

Why this product is good

  • Shodan is often considered useful because it acts as a search engine for Internet-connected devices. It allows cybersecurity professionals to discover and assess the exposure of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and networks. Shodan's extensive database enables users to gather information on devices' IP addresses, operating systems, open ports, and potential vulnerabilities. This data can be instrumental in cybersecurity research and in developing strategies to protect against potential threats.

Recommended for

  • Cybersecurity professionals
  • Network administrators
  • Security researchers
  • IoT developers seeking to understand device exposure
  • Organizations conducting security audits

Bright Data videos

Rotating Residential Network | Proxy Network Types | Bright Data (Formerly Luminati Networks)

Shodan videos

Searching the Internet with Shodan (Seen in Mr. Robot)

More videos:

  • Review - Bestech Shodan Unboxing & First Impressions
  • Review - Bestech Shodan FULL Review

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Bright Data and Shodan)
Proxy
100 100%
0% 0
Security
0 0%
100% 100
Residential Proxies
100 100%
0% 0
Monitoring Tools
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Bright Data and Shodan

Bright Data Reviews

  1. Sam Mitchell
    · Owner at KittenProperties ·
    Mixed feelings

    We used their DC proxies and Residential proxies. Resi proxies were having quite low success rate. We had to use resi solution from other proxy providers. Unblocker didn't work well either also it was way too expensive.

    🏁 Competitors: Smartproxy, NetNut.io
    👍 Pros:    Cheap dc proxies
    👎 Cons:    Quite expensive|Residential proxies are worse than competitiors

Top 10 Alternatives to Bright Data (formerly Luminati Proxy Networks)
Oxylabs remains the number aggressive competitor of Bright Data – they have even had a case to settle in the court in the past. If you wouldn’t want to use Bright Data proxies, then you might as well avoid Oxylabsas it is everything you hate in Bright Data and even worse. Aside from the pricing aspect, Oxylabs have been found to engage in some unethical practices and scam...
911.re Alternatives: 10 Best Proxies Smilar to 911 Proxy in 2023
The most exciting thing about Bright Data is that it comes with new daily feature releases so that you always have access to the latest features as soon as they are released. You also have access to 24/7 global support and dedicated account managers who will help you get started with Bright Data immediately!
17 BEST Residential Proxies to Buy in 2022 (Cheap & Premium)
Formerly known as Luminati Networks, Bright Data is the most popular premium residential proxy provider in the industry.
Source: earthweb.com
10 Best Free Online Proxy Server List of 2022 [VERIFIED]
Verdict: Bright Data Proxy Manager will help you with various use cases such as web data extraction, e-commerce, collecting stock market data, brand protection, etc. Bright Data has capabilities of data collection from eCommerce, Social Media, etc. It provides 24×7 global support and dedicated account managers.
How to choose the right proxy service for your bots and scraping (Residential vs. Backconnect vs. Datacenter, and Exclusive vs. Shared proxies)
To be specific, Luminati is literally an order of magnitude ahead of it’s next largest competitor and the pricing of all legally-compliant residential proxy networks (of which there are between 1 and 4, depending on your definition) is, unfortunately, nearly identical. If $500 per month seems like a lot to you, feel free to shop around. Nothing compares and nothing in the...

Shodan Reviews

We have no reviews of Shodan yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Shodan should be more popular than Bright Data. It has been mentiond 92 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Bright Data mentions (35)

  • Updated rate limits for unauthenticated requests
    Exactly that. It's an arms race between companies that offer a large number of residential IPs as proxies and companies that run unauthenticated web services trying not to die from denial of service. https://brightdata.com/. - Source: Hacker News / 22 days ago
  • Reddit Recap: Audio summaries of subreddits powered by BrightData
    Reddit Recap is an application that scrapes subreddits using BrightData and generates concise summaries every two hours. These summaries are then converted into audio briefings, all accessible through a beautiful web app, allowing users to effortlessly stay informed about their favorite communities. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • State of the Art Automated Web Scraper using Bright Data
    Make sure to sign up on BrightData. Also complete the steps for the initial setup for Proxies & Scraping Infrastructure and Web Scraping API. Please make a note on the WSS Browser Credential, Webscraper Api Token. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Make Cursor Composer Smarter with Bright Web Scraping Capabilities
    So my goal here is creating a web scraper and web searcher using bright and gemini openai compatible model to make cursor composer more smarter with functionality like web search and web scrape. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • How to Use Proxies in Python
    Paid proxies: services like Bright Data or ScraperAPI provide reliable proxies with better performance and support, but you have to pay. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
View more

Shodan mentions (92)

  • Introducing OSINT Template Engine: An open source OSINT Tool.
    Transform OSINT sources such as shodan, bgpview & urlscan into templates which you can use to query & store any and each of the API endpoints they provide. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Some outgoing ports (e.g, port 22) are blocked
    I'm a little surprised you're asking this but as you don't know - if you set the rulebase correctly, you won't get hammered by "public". A lot of people (of course not people here) don't do that which is why shodan.io is full of servers with SSH exposed to the world. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Does anyone want to vet this job opportunity?
    Eh, request a full demo before signing anything. If they make you buy before you can try, move on. Just be advised that data they collect from your site may be used in a database that puts a target on your back. Similar to how shodan.io works. I would probe them on how they handle customer data and if data is shared, partitioned, or isolated to ensure safety from a platform leak. They want to be a security... Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Security issue or coincidence?
    My network is being hit by China and Russia many times per hour. Make sure your firewall is up-to-date and not have any services available on the Internet (WAN). Look at shodan.io which shows you _everything_ is searched on the Internet. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Onion sites crawling: Weird mass "HTTP/1.1 200 " HTTP status line returning?
    In the cases of nginx or apache, I suspect they may be acting as proxies to some backend that also chooses not to send a reason phrase back. Searching for "Reason Phrase" yields a number of bug reports/frameworks that may omit it, and shodan.io shows apache tomcat and a few other services/software that omit the code as well. Source: almost 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Bright Data and Shodan, you can also consider the following products

Oxylabs - A web intelligence collection platform and premium proxy provider, enabling companies of all sizes to utilize the power of big data.

Acunetix - Audit your website security and web applications for SQL injection, Cross site scripting and other...

Smartproxy - Smartproxy is perhaps the most user-friendly way to access local data anywhere. It has global coverage with 195 locations, offers more than 55M residential proxies worldwide and a great deal of scraping solutions.

Censys - Censys helps organizations, individuals, and researchers find and monitor every server on the Internet to reduce exposure and improve security.

NetNut.io - Residential proxy network with 52M+ IPs worldwide. SERP API, Website Unblocker, Professional Datasets.

Intruder - Intruder is a security monitoring platform for internet-facing systems.