Comparison of the Top 5 Popular Bulk IP Geolocation Services
Let’s take a look at the 5 best bulk IP lookup services on the market today. We’ll be looking their features, price, user reviews, and the pros and cons of each service.
1. IPLocation
IPLocation is a well-known website providing quick and easy free IP location lookup. Their primary tool is a “What’s My IP?” web page where users can easily see information about their current IP address displayed on the screen without having to do anything more than navigate to iplocation.net/myip.
In addition, the site offers a separate page at iplocation.net/bulk-ip-lookup, where you can enter up to 10 addresses into a text box and get information for all of them. IPLocation also offers an API, but it does not handle bulk requests.
Pros
- Quick and easy
- No login required
Cons
- Only works in the browser
User Reviews
There are no user reviews available for this product, but they are given a high trust rating by ScamAdviser and TrustRadius.
Pricing
The tool and API are free to use.
2. IPStack
IPStack is a paid IP geolocation service used by big-name companies like AirBnb, Samsung, and Microsoft. Their platform is clear and easy to use, offering both one-time and bulk IP address lookup via a secure API.
The bulk endpoint offers the ability to request data for up to 50 IPv4 or IPv6 addresses. You can also send domains to have IPStack resolve the domains to their underlying addresses. Requests must be sent as a list of comma-separated values.
Pros
- Clean, intuitive user interface
- Free to start and use up to 1000 requests per month (each IP address in a bulk request counts as one request)
Cons
- Pricey if you need more usage
User Reviews
"I've been using ipstack for over 6 years on a couple of different websites, and I'm really happy with what we're getting. We needed a simple geolocation service that's easy to integrate into our systems and provides accurate results for user's country, language, and currency."
“...my only suggestion for ipstack is to consider adding an option to exclude robots and crawlers from consuming your credit requests.”
Pricing
The API is free to use up to 1000 lookups per month. After that, plans start at $11.99 for 50,000 requests per month, up to $79.99 for 2,000,000 requests per month. They also offer custom pricing for higher volumes.
3. MaxMind
MaxMind is one of the leading IP lookup services around today, and boast coverage of over 99.9999% of IP addresses in use with 99.98% web service uptime since 2002. They offer fraud protection and advanced analysis, including the ability to detect IP addresses from potential scammers in high-risk countries. Their geolocation tool is called GeoIP.
They also offer a free version of their API called GeoIPLite. The free version of the API is not able to do a bulk lookup, but the GeoIP accepts a list of IP addresses as comma-separated values.
Pros
- Leading name in IP Geolocation lookup
- Fraud protection services
Cons
- Pricey
- Difficult to get started for non-technical people
User Reviews
“I used it with our pfSense firewall for enhanced Geo IP blocking (blocking IP addresses from accessing our internal networks). This is a great tool.Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.”
“Detects IP addresses correctly and provides accurate details”
Pricing
A free trial of $5 worth of lookups is available to test the product. Pricing is extremely difficult to find online, even after you sign up for a free trial. Contact the company for pricing information.
4. AbstractAPI
AbstractAPI’s Free Geolocation API offers a quick and easy way to do IP address Geolocation via a secure API. They offer integrations with major tools like Salesforce, Zapier, AWS, and Shopify, and it’s extremely easy to create a free account and get started with the tool.
Abstract doesn’t exactly offer bulk IP lookup, but their endpoint can handle up to 400 requests per second on the top plan, so theoretically you could send multiple requests to get information about multiple addresses very quickly.
Pros
- Quick and easy to get started
- Intuitive interface
- Free-for-life plan
- Competitive pricing for other plans
Cons
- No bulk lookup
User Reviews
"All the best. Looking forward to more lookup APIs. 👍"
"We are hitting our limits and have no way to upgrade due to a bug in their own code."
5. IPGeoLocation.io
IPGeoLocation.io is a reasonably-priced service offering three APIs: IP Location, Astronomy, and Time Zone. Their IP Location API has a batch IP checker that can handle up to 50 IPv6 or IPv4 addresses at once. They also offer responses in multiple languages.
IPGeoLocation.io is less well-known than some other names on this list, but their performance was solid when we tested the API. They don’t boast the same impressive uptime or speed as MaxMind, but are reliable.
Pros
- Slightly cheaper than other options on the list
- Reliable service, easy to use
Cons
- Not a recognized or trusted name
Summary: Comparison of the Best Bulk IP Geolocation Services
Let’s take a quick look at a side-by-side comparison of these services.
Why Bulk IP Lookup?
For solo developers and small businesses, bulk IP lookup may not be a necessity. If your site has limited traffic, or your mailing list is quite small, you can probably get away with only looking up a single address at a time.
For larger corporations and those with large email lists, however, bulk IP lookup saves both time and money. It can also prevent you from hitting rate limits, which almost every plan will have.
Choosing a Bulk IP Geolocation Service
Determining the best bulk service for you will come down to your own needs and requirements. Beyond price, you should consider things like customer service and ease of integration into your application. Do you have a dedicated engineer who can be tasked with hooking up the API? Or will you require a dedicated customer support specialist?
You should also consider
Common Applications of Bulk IP Geolocation
IP geolocation has many uses beyond simply determining where your users are in the world. Let’s take a look at the top reasons you may want to incorporate IP geolocation into your app.
Geofencing
Geofencing is common for services like streaming platforms and other media providers who need to do digital rights protection. You may not want to serve certain content to all locales, for copyright or other legal reasons. Being able to detect where your users are in the world can help you figure out how to geofence certain content and prevent it from serving.
Cybersecurity
Bulk IP geolocation can also be used to improve cybersecurity on your site. Using geolocation, you can identify anonymous traffic sources, known attackers, suspicious devices, and tor nodes to prevent online fraud, trial abusers, forum spams, and botnet attackers.
Marketing and Advertising
Knowing your users’ locales allows you to more precisely target ads and marketing campaigns. Content can be served in users’ native language, and prices can be shown in their native currency. You can advertise deals in certain regions, or
Network Management
IP geolocation can help you allocate network resources more effectively so that servers don’t get overloaded during peak times.
Conclusion
Bulk IP geolocation is a powerful tool for improving the security and user experience of your apps and websites, as well as your marketing targeting and resource allocation. It is more cost effective than one-off IP lookup, and a good way for large and enterprise businesses to process massive datasets.
FAQs
What is bulk IP geolocation lookup?
Bulk IP lookup, or batch lookup, is the process of geolocating multiple IP addresses in a single request. Geolocation is the process of retrieving geographical data about an IP address, including time zone, city, state, country, and often DNS, ISP, and ASN information.
How does IP geolocation work?
Typically, an IP geolocation API relies on an IP-to-location database of IP addresses to look up the range of IP addresses a given address falls into. Once that has been determined, it looks at the geographic region the range of IP addresses is used in, and returns information about that region.
What is GPS vs IP geolocation?
While IP geolocation relies on a device’s IP address to determine geographic location, GPS uses satellites to triangulate a device’s position based on signals the device emits. GPS geolocation is more accurate than IP geolocation, as IP geolocation can only tell you a geographic region associated with an IP address range.
