Irmu vs NSOCKS
Irmu vs NSOCKS: score breakdown
Irmu scores 64/100 against 52/100 for NSOCKS, a 12-point gap. Irmu is ahead on Capability (17 vs 15), Ease of use (19 vs 15), Value (16 vs 14) and Delivery (12 vs 8). Each sub-score is out of 25.
Features and platforms
| Feature | Irmu | NSOCKS |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Freemium | Paid |
| Free plan | Yes | No |
| Platforms | Web, REST API, MCP server | Web, API |
| Best for | Solo developers and small teams building data pipelines who want one API key for scraping, rendering, and AI extraction. | Data engineers building AI training pipelines who need flexible, volume-priced proxy access. |
| Skip if | Teams needing multi-step browser automation or a standalone proxy endpoint today; those features are planned but not yet available. | Developers looking for an AI coding assistant or code generation tool. |
Cost and usage limits
Irmu has a free plan. NSOCKS has a free plan.
Prices from each vendor's pricing page. Irmu checked November 2026 · NSOCKS checked November 2026
Pros and cons
Irmu
- Single credit pool covers scraping, JavaScript rendering, screenshots, AI extraction, Google SERP, Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT answers, and Booking.com data, with no separate keys or quotas per API.
- Geotargeting by country, region, and city is free on every request and every plan, including the free tier, which is uncommon among comparable scraping APIs.
- MCP server with OAuth 2.1 or API key auth lets developers connect Irmu directly to Claude, Cursor, or ChatGPT without writing REST integration code.
- Both the Proxy API (standalone IP pool endpoint) and the Browser API (multi-step scripted sessions) are listed as planned features but are not part of the live product, making the product page misleading for developers who need those capabilities now.
- Premium residential IPs and AI extraction are locked behind the $90/month Standard plan; the $19 Starter and $40 Lite tiers only offer datacenter IPs, which limits their usefulness against sites with meaningful anti-bot protection.
- Scheduling and webhooks, essential for any recurring crawl job, only appear at the $200/month Pro tier, forcing teams with modest volume but recurring needs to pay for 3,000,000 credits per month whether they use them or not.
NSOCKS
- Pay-as-you-go pricing with no forced monthly subscription, and residential proxy entry rates around $0.90 per GB that undercut many premium competitors charging $3 to $15 per GB.
- Sub-accounts, traffic history monitoring, bulk proxy generation, and unlimited concurrent connections are included by default rather than reserved for higher tiers.
- Three distinct API products (Web Scraper API, SERP API, Video Downloader API) extend the offering beyond raw proxy access for teams building structured data pipelines.
- The tool is miscategorized as an AI coding tool: it is proxy and scraping infrastructure with no code generation, code completion, or developer IDE integration of any kind, which will mislead buyers browsing this directory.
- Pricing transparency is genuinely poor: the pay-as-you-go model means there are no fixed named tiers with predictable monthly costs, making it hard to budget for sustained workloads, and exact tier names and prices from the nsocks.com pricing page could not be confirmed via independent search.
- Mobile carrier coverage is limited to major US carriers only, which is a real constraint for teams that need mobile proxy IPs from specific non-US markets.
Our verdict
Irmu verdict
Irmu suits developers who want a single API key covering scraping, JavaScript rendering, screenshots, and AI extraction without stitching together separate services. The credit model is transparent and geotargeting is free at every tier, but residential IPs and AI extraction only enable at the $90/month Standard plan, putting real production features out of reach for the $19 and $40 tiers. Teams that need multi-step browser automation or a dedicated proxy endpoint should look elsewhere: both are listed on the roadmap but not yet shipped.
Read full Irmu review →NSOCKS verdict
NSOCKS suits developers and data engineers who need a flexible, pay-as-you-go proxy layer for AI training data collection or large-scale web scraping, without being locked into a monthly subscription. Its per-GB residential pricing and bundled enterprise features like sub-accounts and traffic monitoring compare favorably to providers charging $3 to $15 per GB, but the product sits squarely in the proxy infrastructure category rather than the AI coding tools category where it is listed. Teams that need an AI-native code editor or agentic coding workflow should look at Cursor or GitHub Copilot instead.
Read full NSOCKS review →