Thordata

Overview

The development of advanced AI systems, from training large language models to deploying real-time applications, depends critically on access to high-quality web data. As demand for training data grows, organizations face increasing challenges in reliably sourcing diverse datasets while navigating anti-scraping measures and geographic restrictions. Thordata is a Hong Kong-based proxy infrastructure provider founded in 2017 that addresses these data access challenges. The company offers global web data collection capabilities through residential, mobile, datacenter, and ISP proxy networks, combined with scraping APIs and ready-to-use datasets. While marketed with emphasis on AI use cases, Thordata’s infrastructure serves general web scraping, e-commerce intelligence, ad verification, and market research applications across industries.

Key Features

Residential Proxies: Access to a network of 60 million real IP addresses from actual residential users across 195+ countries, providing authentic user behavior patterns for data collection that reduces detection by anti-scraping systems.

Mobile Proxies: Utilize IP addresses from 4G and 5G mobile devices, essential for accessing mobile-first platforms and applications that implement mobile-specific content delivery or restrictions.

Datacenter Proxies: High-speed, cost-efficient proxy connections hosted in data centers, optimized for high-volume data scraping operations where speed and throughput take priority over residential authenticity.

ISP Static Proxies: Dedicated static IP addresses assigned through Internet Service Providers, combining the legitimacy of residential IPs with the consistency of static addresses for applications requiring persistent identity across sessions.

Unlimited Residential Proxies: Time-based pricing model offering bandwidth without metering, priced per day rather than per gigabyte, designed for intensive scraping operations with unpredictable bandwidth requirements.

Web Scraper API: Automated data extraction service with 120+ prebuilt scrapers for popular websites, plus custom scraper development, handling JavaScript rendering and anti-bot measures automatically.

SERP API: Structured search engine results from Google, Bing, and other search platforms, delivering parsed data in JSON or HTML format without manual scraping infrastructure.

Browser Automation API: Stealth browser environments for rendering JavaScript-heavy websites and automating complex user interactions while evading detection systems.

Global Geo-Targeting: Precise geographic targeting at country, state, city, and ASN (Autonomous System Number) levels, enabling location-specific data collection for regional market research and content verification.

Developer Integration: API support for Python, Node.js, PHP, cURL, Go, Java, and C#, with standard HTTP/HTTPS proxy protocols and straightforward authentication methods for integration into existing workflows.

Ready-to-Use Datasets: Pre-collected and structured datasets across various domains including e-commerce, social media, search engines, and vertical-specific data, reducing development time for common data needs.

How It Works

Thordata operates as an intermediary infrastructure layer between your data collection applications and target websites. The implementation process requires technical setup but follows standard proxy integration patterns.

After creating an account and purchasing proxy bandwidth or a specific number of IP addresses based on your requirements, Thordata provides endpoint information including gateway addresses and port numbers. You configure your web scraping tools, scripts, or applications to route traffic through these Thordata endpoints using standard proxy configuration methods.

When your application makes requests to target websites, those requests pass through Thordata’s proxy network. The service assigns an IP address from the appropriate proxy pool based on your configuration, making requests appear to originate from legitimate users in specified geographic locations rather than from centralized scraping infrastructure. This IP rotation and geographic distribution helps circumvent rate limiting, IP-based blocking, and regional access restrictions that commonly prevent large-scale data collection.

Thordata’s infrastructure handles session management, allowing you to maintain consistent IP addresses across multiple requests when needed, or rotate IPs with each request to distribute load and avoid pattern detection. The network’s claimed 99.9% uptime and 99.7% success rate aim to provide reliable access for continuous data collection operations.

For users requiring structured data rather than raw HTML, Thordata’s Scraper APIs handle the complete extraction process including page rendering, data parsing, and output formatting, abstracting away the technical complexity of building custom scrapers.

Use Cases

AI Training Data Collection: Organizations developing large language models, computer vision systems, or other AI applications can gather diverse training datasets from across the web, accessing content from multiple regions and sources to improve model coverage and reduce bias.

E-commerce Price Intelligence: Retailers and marketplace operators can monitor competitor pricing, track product availability across regions, analyze pricing strategies, and gather market intelligence at scale without manual monitoring across hundreds or thousands of product pages.

Advertising Verification: Marketing teams and ad operations can verify that advertising campaigns display correctly across different geographic markets, confirm ad placement accuracy, detect ad fraud, and ensure brand safety across programmatic advertising platforms.

Market Research and Competitive Intelligence: Business intelligence teams can collect public data from competitor websites, track product launches and strategic announcements, monitor customer reviews and sentiment, and analyze market trends across industries and regions.

Social Media Analysis: Research organizations can gather publicly available social media data for sentiment analysis, trend identification, influencer research, and audience understanding, though users must carefully navigate platform Terms of Service restrictions.

Content Availability Monitoring: Media companies and content distributors can verify that content appears correctly across different regions, detect geographic restrictions or censorship, and ensure consistent user experience globally.

Note that data collection legality and ethical considerations vary significantly by jurisdiction, target website, and intended use. Users are responsible for ensuring compliance with applicable laws, website Terms of Service, and data protection regulations including GDPR in Europe and similar frameworks globally.

Pros \& Cons

Advantages

Volume-Based Pricing Efficiency: At high data volumes (1,000GB+), Thordata’s pricing becomes highly competitive, with residential proxies reaching \$0.65/GB at the 5,000GB tier, offering strong value for enterprise-scale operations.

Comprehensive Proxy Portfolio: The availability of residential, mobile, datacenter, and ISP static proxies within a single platform provides flexibility to match proxy type to specific use case requirements without managing multiple vendor relationships.

Integrated Scraping Tools: The combination of proxy infrastructure with scraper APIs and ready-to-use datasets creates a more complete data access platform, potentially reducing development and integration complexity for teams building data pipelines.

Geographic Coverage: Access to IPs across 195+ countries enables comprehensive global data collection for organizations operating across multiple markets or conducting international research.

Free Trial Availability: The option to test the service without credit card commitment allows evaluation before financial investment.

Disadvantages

Technical Implementation Required: Thordata is infrastructure-layer technology, not a no-code solution. Effective use requires programming knowledge, understanding of proxy configuration, and technical capability to integrate with existing systems or build custom scraping tools.

Misleading Entry Pricing: The advertised \$0.65/GB starting price applies only to the highest volume tier requiring \$3,250 commitment (5,000GB). Entry-level pricing begins at \$3.00/GB (5GB plan for \$15), which may exceed competitor rates at small volumes.

Bandwidth-Based Cost Structure: Unlike unlimited plans or dedicated proxy models, most Thordata pricing scales directly with data usage, making costs unpredictable for variable-volume applications and potentially expensive for inefficient scraping implementations.

Limited Track Record Transparency: With a 3.2/5 Trustpilot rating based on only 15 customer reviews as of August 2025, Thordata has less public validation compared to established providers with thousands of reviews and multi-year operational histories.

Lower Performance Specifications: Claimed 99.9% uptime and 99.7% success rate trail industry leaders like Bright Data (99.99% uptime, 99.95% success rate) and Oxylabs (99.95% success rate), potentially impacting reliability for mission-critical applications.

Ethical Sourcing Verification: While Thordata claims “ethically sourced” proxies, no independent verification mechanism or transparency reports are publicly available to substantiate these ethical sourcing practices.

How Does It Compare?

Thordata operates in a competitive 2026 proxy infrastructure market alongside established providers with larger IP pools and longer track records. Rather than representing a fundamentally different technology category, Thordata positions standard proxy infrastructure with emphasis on AI use cases. Here’s how it stacks up against major alternatives:

Premium Enterprise Providers

Bright Data (formerly Luminati)

• IP Pool: 72M+ residential IPs (150M+ total network)
• Coverage: 195 countries with country, city, state, ZIP code, ASN, and coordinate targeting
• Performance: 99.99% uptime, 99.95% success rate, 0.7s average response time
• Protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS5 with UDP support
• Key Differentiators: Open-source Proxy Manager, Web Unblocker with ML-driven pool management, automated CAPTCHA solving, dedicated account managers, 24/7 support, extensive enterprise features
• Pricing: Premium tier, higher than Thordata; 7-day free trial for businesses; first deposit match up to \$500
• Best For: Enterprise organizations requiring highest reliability, mature platform with extensive features, companies prioritizing support quality
• vs. Thordata: Larger IP pool, better uptime/success rates, more established, higher pricing, superior enterprise support

Oxylabs

• IP Pool: 102M+ residential, 2M+ datacenter, 20M+ mobile proxies
• Coverage: 195 countries with granular city-level and carrier-level targeting
• Performance: 99.95% success rate, 0.6s average response time, unlimited concurrent sessions
• Protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS5 with UDP support
• Session Duration: Up to 24 hours (vs. typical 30-minute limits)
• Key Differentiators: Largest IP pool in industry, Web Unblocker with adaptive rotation, real-time monitoring, Scraper APIs for SERP/E-commerce/Real Estate, constant IP refresh
• Pricing: Residential \$8/GB, Mobile \$9/GB, ISP \$1.6/IP, Datacenter \$50/mo; 1-week free trial
• Best For: Large-scale data operations requiring maximum IP diversity, applications needing long session duration, enterprises with complex geographic targeting requirements
• vs. Thordata: Significantly larger IP pool (102M vs 60M), better performance metrics, longer session support, established market leader, higher pricing at entry levels but competitive at scale

Mid-Tier Value Providers

Smartproxy

• IP Pool: 40M+ rotating residential IPs, 100K+ datacenter IPs
• Coverage: 195+ locations worldwide
• Performance: Unlimited concurrent connections, 30-minute sticky sessions
• Protocols: HTTP(S), SOCKS5 support
• Key Differentiators: Chrome/Firefox browser extensions, No-Code Scraper interface, Smart Wallet payment management, comprehensive payment methods (credit cards, crypto, Alipay, Google/Apple Pay), SERP and E-commerce APIs
• Pricing: Residential \$8.5-13/GB, Datacenter \$30-50/month, Mobile \$50/GB; 3-day money-back guarantee (no free trial)
• Best For: Small to medium operations seeking balance between cost and features, users preferring browser extension interfaces, teams wanting flexible payment options
• vs. Thordata: Smaller IP pool (40M vs 60M), slightly higher entry pricing, easier interface options, better payment flexibility, no free trial but money-back guarantee, similar mid-market positioning

Specialized ISP Proxy Providers

NetNut

• IP Pool: 1M+ ISP proxies
• Performance: 99.99% uptime guarantee
• Key Differentiators: Focus on ISP (static residential) proxy specialty, enterprise-grade reliability
• Pricing: \$350/month starting tier (\$17.5/GB)
• Best For: Applications requiring static residential IPs with high trust scores, enterprises prioritizing uptime guarantees
• vs. Thordata: Much smaller pool, higher pricing, specialized focus, better uptime guarantee

Key Competitive Positioning

Thordata’s Actual Market Position:

Thordata occupies a mid-tier competitive position within the proxy infrastructure market. With 60M+ residential IPs, it maintains a respectable but not industry-leading pool size, falling between Smartproxy (40M) and the premium leaders Bright Data (72M+) and Oxylabs (102M+). The company’s strategic advantage emerges at high data volumes where per-gigabyte costs drop to \$0.65/GB, becoming genuinely competitive with premium providers. However, entry-level pricing at \$3.00/GB places Thordata above Oxylabs (\$8/GB base), Smartproxy (\$8.5/GB base), though pricing comparisons require careful attention to volume tiers and included features.

The marketing emphasis on “infrastructure for AI” represents positioning strategy rather than technical differentiation. All major proxy providers serve AI companies and support training data collection. The underlying infrastructure for residential proxies, IP rotation, and geographic targeting operates identically whether collecting data for AI model training, e-commerce price monitoring, or any other application. Thordata does not offer proprietary AI-specific technology that distinguishes it from general-purpose proxy networks.

Thordata’s Competitive Advantages:

• Aggressive high-volume pricing (\$0.65/GB at 5,000GB) competitive with premium providers
• Comprehensive product suite combining proxies, scraper APIs, and datasets in single platform
• Free trial without credit card requirement
• 195+ country coverage matching industry leaders
• Multiple proxy types (residential, mobile, datacenter, ISP) available from single vendor

Thordata’s Competitive Disadvantages:

• Smaller IP pool than Bright Data (72M+) and Oxylabs (102M+)
• Lower uptime (99.9% vs. 99.99%) and success rates (99.7% vs. 99.95%) than premium providers
• Limited public track record with only 15 Trustpilot reviews (3.2/5 rating)
• Less mature platform compared to established competitors with multi-year operational histories
• Fewer enterprise features and dedicated support compared to Bright Data
• Entry-level pricing not particularly competitive; value emerges only at scale

Best Fit for Thordata:

Organizations running continuous, high-volume data collection operations (1,000GB+ monthly) seeking cost efficiency at scale; teams with technical capability to implement proxy infrastructure independently; projects where mid-tier uptime (99.9%) suffices and premium reliability is not critical; users wanting integrated scraping APIs and datasets alongside proxy infrastructure.

Better Alternatives:

For enterprise reliability and support needs: Bright Data or Oxylabs; for small-scale projects prioritizing ease of use: Smartproxy with browser extensions; for maximum IP diversity: Oxylabs; for established track record and proven reliability: Bright Data or Oxylabs; for specialized ISP proxy requirements: NetNut.

Final Thoughts

Thordata provides functional proxy infrastructure suitable for web data collection across AI training, market research, competitive intelligence, and e-commerce applications. Organizations operating at significant scale (1,000GB+ monthly data collection) will find genuinely competitive value in Thordata’s volume-based pricing model, particularly when reaching the \$0.65/GB tier. The integrated offering of proxies, scraper APIs, and ready-to-use datasets creates operational convenience by consolidating data access tools within a single vendor relationship.

However, prospective users should carefully evaluate Thordata’s positioning against established alternatives. The “infrastructure for AI” marketing represents strategic positioning rather than technical innovation. All major proxy providers support AI data collection applications; the underlying technology does not differ from general web scraping infrastructure. Organizations prioritizing maximum reliability should note that Thordata’s 99.9% uptime and 99.7% success rate trail industry leaders claiming 99.99% uptime and 99.95% success rates, potentially impacting mission-critical applications.

The limited public track record presents evaluation challenges. With only 15 Trustpilot reviews yielding a 3.2/5 rating as of August 2025, Thordata lacks the extensive customer validation that providers like Bright Data and Oxylabs have accumulated over years of operation. For enterprise deployments where vendor stability and proven performance matter significantly, this limited track record warrants careful consideration.

Entry-level users should recognize that the advertised \$0.65/GB pricing applies only at the 5,000GB volume tier requiring \$3,250 commitment. Starting prices of \$3.00/GB for small volumes (5GB plan) exceed some competitors, making Thordata less compelling for small-scale testing or low-volume projects. The value proposition strengthens as volume increases, but organizations should model actual expected usage before assuming cost advantages.

Importantly, users must address legal and ethical dimensions independently. While Thordata claims “ethically sourced” proxies, no independent verification mechanism substantiates these claims. Data collection legality varies significantly by jurisdiction, target website policies, and intended use. Organizations collecting training data for AI models, scraping e-commerce pricing, or gathering social media content should conduct legal review to ensure compliance with applicable laws including GDPR, CCPA, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and similar data protection frameworks. Website Terms of Service restrictions may prohibit scraping regardless of technical capability to access data.

For technically capable teams running large-scale data operations and prioritizing cost efficiency over premium support and maximum uptime, Thordata merits evaluation alongside established alternatives. For organizations requiring proven reliability, extensive enterprise features, or operating at smaller scales, Bright Data, Oxylabs, or Smartproxy may offer superior value propositions depending on specific requirements.

Product Details:

• Company: Thordata
• Founded: 2017
• Location: Hong Kong
• Trustpilot Rating: 3.2/5 (15 reviews as of August 2025)
• Free Trial: Available (no credit card required)
• Pricing: Residential \$3.00/GB entry level, scales to \$0.65/GB at 5,000GB; Mobile from \$2.2/GB; Datacenter from \$0.75/IP; ISP Static from \$1.50/IP