Shifter Review 2026

Founded under the name reverseproxies.com and rebranded as Microleaves four years later, the proxy company has once again changed its brand name to Shifter. Thanks to the vast IP pool and affordable pricing, it has become one of the most popular proxy providers on the market.

It offers backconnect residential and datacenter proxies in both dedicated and shared variants. At the moment, it offers access to a whopping 31 million residential IP addresses and tens of thousands of datacenter proxies. The company claims it’s using the latest cloud services, thus offering a high level of stability.

The backconnect residential proxies are unmetered, so your internet connection won’t be cut off after using a specific amount of bandwidth. These proxies are spread across hundreds of countries and cities worldwide, while the dedicated and shared ones are based in the USA.

In our review, you’ll learn a lot more about Shifter’s services and proxies, but first, let’s see what types of proxies it offers.

Shifter offers the following types of premium proxies:

• Backconnect residential proxies – offering access to 100% residential IP addresses that are great for data mining, crawling, brand protection, sales intelligence, self-testing, ad verification, tickets, buying sneakers, playing Pokemon Go, talent sourcing, etc.

• Dedicated proxies – datacenter proxies that are ideal for small-time data scrapers and getting around Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook restrictions.

• Shared proxies – datacenter proxies that are good for light tasks or casual internet browsing.

Let’s learn more about each type of Shifter proxies before moving on to their pros and cons.

Shifter provides residential IP addresses that come from real home users and ISPs, making them a lot more anonymous than datacenter proxies and completely undetectable as proxies.

The backconnect residential proxies from this provider connect to its entire proxy pool consisting of 31 million residential IPs and get assigned a new IP address every rotation time, depending on the user’s settings. The IP rotation time ranges from 5 minutes to 60 minutes, which is great for data mining and crawling. Shifter also offers ISP and ASN targeting.

Its P2P network is completely based on P2P technology, guaranteeing high success rates. Shifter offers two types of backconnect proxies: basic and special backconnect proxies.

The basic backconnect proxies are cheaper than the special ones because they don’t have access to geo-targeting. They are created for general surfing and assign worldwide residential IPs randomly. These proxies only support HTTP(S) protocol and restrict access to high-demand sites.

The special backconnect proxies are the most expensive product of Shifter, but they allow geo-targeting and access to high-demand websites like MyWay, Outlook, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Gmail, Amazon, Youtube, Yandex, Skype, Instagram, Facebook, Inbox, Zoho, MyWay, AOL, Xtremetop, etc.

They are ideal for high-demand use cases. Unlike basic backconnect proxies, these support HTTP(S), SOCKS4, and SOCKS5 protocols.

Both dedicated and shared proxies from Shifter use US datacenter IP addresses from various subnets. In other words, these are datacenter proxies suitable for general browsing and small-time data scrapers who want to extract data faster and cheaper.

These proxies are dedicated, which means they are not shared with anyone else, making them more reliable and secure than shared proxies. On the other hand, shared proxies from Shifter can be shared with up to three users simultaneously, hence the low price.

Both dedicated and shared proxies come with unlimited bandwidth, support IP authentication and username/password authentication methods, and HTTP(S) protocol. You can use them to access Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms.

Shifter is a good proxy provider because it offers highly anonymous, secure, and affordable residential proxies and fast and reliable datacenter proxies. It has an extensive IP pool, great location coverage, and its proxies come with unlimited bandwidth and decent speed.

But, because of the connection errors, poor customer support, and no refund policy, it’s not the best provider on the market. In the end, it’s your decision, and we hope that we have made it easier for you.

Shifter Alternatives

Here are a few other proxy providers to consider as alternatives to Shifter:

• IPRoyal offers ethically-sourced IP addresses and excellent customer support, including live chat, discounts, and datacenter proxies that support SOCKS protocol.

• Brightdata offers access to 72 million IP addresses, a 7-day free trial, and good customer support.

• Smartproxy offers access to 72 million IP addresses, four different proxy types, and free proxy tools.

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